francesca

The interesting thing here is people equate pop culture with being trendy. I think it's entirely possible for a pop culture of programming to exist, but I think in general what this discussion on this thread proves is that there are multiple cultures existing within developer communities, and a lot of devs exist within many of these circles. What's more, the "pop culture" element of programming does not necessarily contribute to the rate of change! The communication mechanisms within programming (Hacker News, Twitter, Reditt, mailing lists, forums etc, that is what accelerates the rate of change within the developer community. Pop culture is actually NOT that fast. People need to spend time performing it before something becomes pop (i.e. the idea that Hipsters start all fads, because they find them first and that is how they spread)

I would say The Active Contributors--The people contribute to open source projects mailing lists etc. These people help promote certain "styles" of programming over others. They contribute to make the things that work even better. These things they create are then consumed by other members of the community.

back up http://www.businessinsider.com/gmail-down-2012-10

I think they stated the main point really well: “I don’t think this is about putting universities out of business. Educating millions of individuals, to me that’s a radical idea, but a positive radical idea.”

Most people taking these courses are not college-aged students. Universities continue to be valuable, but it's important to constantly renew your skill set and make this knowledge and resources accessible to as many people as possible.

I'm thrilled to see VC funding go into this. I've taken 1 Udacity and 1 Stanford course and both have been a great experience (although I prefer udacity). It might not help me get my next job, but the structure is excellent and definitely promotes more hands-on learning than I have seen in the classroom.

As long as you have a venue, Hackathons are not terribly expensive. They typically cost anywhere from $500-$2,000 most of which can be financed by sponsorships. PennApps does have the luxury of being housed at Penn, and the organizers have subsidized use of the rooms there. Given the community that has formed in various tech cities around the world, it shouldn't be hard to find a venue for free or a reasonably if you look around.

Here's a breakdown of other costs:

--food ----< 50 people >>> (3 Meals at $6 pp) = $300 (sandwiches, pizza, bagel breakfast) >>> (3 meals at $10 pp) = $500 (with this you can get a well-priced taco buffet, pizza, snacks, bagel breakfast)

--drinks ----< 50 people >>>> $3 pp = $150 ....bubble tea would be much more pricey, but also much more awesome.

Also note that gummy bears can be purchased in 5 lbs. packs for $16 http://www.amazon.com/Haribo-Gummi-Candy-Gold-Bears-5-Pound/....

+1 That's good info. It's hard when you first plan a hackathon, because you don't know why your hackathon audience is valuable!

This course will be different due to browser-based MongoDB shells for completing exercises like testing queries and spinning up replica sets. You can walk through a lot of the material on your on due to the 10gen presentations and MongoDB Docs, but it's even better when you're guided through the concepts in the shell.

the structure is very similar to udacity's online courses http://www.udacity.com/

It's very similar to Udacity's courses which are about 12 hours each http://www.udacity.com/

What's more--bad software marketing is SOOOO bad! Think of all that "cloud" marketing that is full of empty lies. Developers don't want to see that. It's such a frustration. I agree with the sentiment-- if you're a marketer, try to code something --or better yet, just download your product you're trying to sell. You need to empathize with your customers a bit to understand how they can get to your product.

If anything, innovation on their product is going to speed up with the funding, then slow down because they hire a ton of engineers who need to be ramped. Then they will plateau.

With funding comes expectations. Github has never had to answer to anyone but their community and customers (and their board, but the board had no real monetary stake in the company outside of stock). Now A16Z has some control over their operations. Not sure what their terms were in the deal, but investment and board members change how a company operates.

Hope for good things and more elaborate octocats

New York, NY/Palo Alto, CA/London UK - Software Engineers - Fulltime

10gen(With a recent funding round from NEA, Sequoia, USV, Flybridge funded) are looking for C++ engineers to work on the MongoDB kernel, building new features for MongoDB, working with MongoDB users such as foursquare, eBay and craigslist. We are also looking for Java engineers to work on our Applications team and Ruby, Python, Node.js and PHP engineers to work on our drivers team.

More details and how to apply 10gen.com/careers

as of right now, nothing because this is super raw and hasn't been fully tested. I think since this has built in Node.js from the ground up and since it is designed to be front&back end integrated with the shell it will free up lines of code and be more flexible--also issues of translation will be streamlined.

Awesome. Glad you found NoSQL. Scaling MongoDB is a breeze, you will love it.

I was hoping hackernews would have a better discussion on this topic but I guess not.

I think I'm the only person who is infuriated by Penelope Trunk's article in TechCrunch Titled "Stop telling women to do startups" It moves up to the top of HackerNews very quickly, and I'm a little disappointed by the comments in the article. The title is pure nonsense first of all, and while there are maybe two points that I could agree with, it overall is a very poorly constructed argument. As a 20-something starting her career, I would hate for this type of talk to become a trend amongst women, because this logic cannot influence the next gen of women movers and shakers.

1. Women have choices and they aren't choosing startups because they want to have their own children: FALSE women are not empowered to balance the work life continuum. For men, the startup legend is one they would like to fulfill--a la the Pirates of Silicon Valley. For Penelope Trunk, she would rather be soft on the women who are itching to live life with a less exciting career (quite contrary to her title of "Brazen Careerist").

2. Raising Money and Running a Startup is Hard, so don't just tell anyone to do it!: FALSE women should be empowered to make these decisions and push themselves into riskier situations. In fact women who have partners with a stable income and have children should feel even more empowered to launch their own company (like so many women on this list have done) WHY CAN'T THEY BE RISKY! Why can't they work their ass off and succeed--or fail? I tried to start my own company, tried to raise money and failed miserably and guess what, I'm probably WAY more clever now because of that.

Saying that women have a natural imperative to raise children is horrible backwards. Women are the only ones who can give birth, but they are also capable of building great ideas, great work environments, great products and great companies. I'm horribly disappointed in this piece.