zan2434

Whoa. This is pretty big news. This + Piecable + Facebook's huge push in mobile development recently = Facebook building a new, simpler development platform/environment for mobile apps? This speculation can be taken pretty far.

hackathons are indeed very supportive learning environments, just make sure to comprehensively relearn topics picked up at a hackathon

I love the idea that a hackathon is a more supportive environment for learning than the typical school or even home. However, I urge those who are learning to code at hackathons to take the time afterwards to more comprehensively understand the concepts you picked up in the rushed environment of a hackathon. Rushed learning can result in some serious deficiencies and gaps in knowledge that will be an impediment to future productivity.

Wow, the stickers feature is a blatant replication of stickers in Path. Not that such replication by FB is unprecedented, but I'm still quite shocked.

very clever implementation with the flashes! We'd love to see Mosaic used at such a large scale

Gorgeous photos. Love the simple UX. Watch your backs, Expedia, Travelzoo, etc.

I agree; don't be fooled by the vanity metrics. Properties of a hackathon necessary to evaluate it fairly against others include not only registration counts but: food, quality of hacks, management/organization, venue, events (beside hacking), sponsors, etc.

Those can't be evaluated until it happens, but let's see how it fares.

the web audio api seems to function well in Safari

Interesting, I did something similar with http://puur.tk/better

That it is. I'm not sure about the playback stopping either. It's just a quick hack to provide a cleaner interface amidst cluttered interfaces like that of Grooveshark and Spotify. I tried to minimize extra features in favor of that minimalism.

You might be hitting enter instead of clicking go. The form isn't actually a form and I'm using JS to trigger the redirect on clicking the link, so the default enter behavior isn't active.

Is the appeal just that it's a strobe affect achieved in JS?

See my other comment. But yes, I'll add the ability to click Go with enter.

The front-page here is just to explain what it is. Use-case:you are sharing a url that you know will be the first search result for a simple word, so you just share http://bloo.tk/simple+word

I, with some friends, created DOM: a bookmarklet that turns websites into 3D platformers using jQuery, Three.js and an accompanying multiplayer server with Node and Socket.io With it we won HackNY and presented it at NYTM

http://tiny.cc/domjs

I'm loving what you Michigan guys are doing; met you guys at PennApps and HackNY. Great work at both hackathons. Which hack from PennApps are they turning into a full-fledged startup?

I don't think it's necessary to actively quell increased entrepreneurship. If these "starstruck entrepreneurs" really don't have the chops to survive in the market, they wont. Also I think one great benefit is that this increased celebritization isn't just of entrepreneurship in general, which has been popular long as anyone can remember a guy striking it rich with his own company, but technology entrepreneurship. It's encouraging more and more bright youth to pursue careers in technology and engineering; finally, programmers are receiving due respect, and as a result we're getting stronger and brighter young talent in the industry that would have otherwise pursued more popularly rewarding career paths.

I wrote my first blog post on the latter topic of your comment! Well, specifically, communist design principles and constraint driving productivity and creativity: http://zan2434.tumblr.com/post/32412314207/communist-princip...

Can you manipulate future and past states by manipulating the current state? I'm not too knowledgeable about the matter but it seems like if the crystal's states at certain points in time are fixed from its inception then it can be manipulated to transfer information to future and past states of the crystal.

haha I decompiled their jar the other day actually, and they basically just combined abc4j with the YIN method of finding fundamental frequency for sound and, a table between frequencies and notes. I doubt it works nearly as well as most alternatives, because they made no provisions for noise in the signal or other complications. Very simple implementation even by hackathon standards, but it was presented like magic so I'm not surprised they wowed the judges. One of the team members even said this though "We just used Java, which is really basic programing. We didn’t even use fancy web app stuff, which is why we didn’t expect this at all. I don’t even know what to say about this" -theDP

I, too, was a hacker there. PennApps this year was definitely a great time, but the judging didn't really align well with the quality of apps. One of the most popular apps, PayTango, had a completely faked demo from what I saw (I saw the play button show up when they tapped a button on the iPad, revealing that it was just an image slideshow of mockups). That and the demo time was severely truncated, 75 seconds is enough to demo about one feature, and when your app has several features it's impossible to show it all. The press didn't even cover some of the coolest hacks in my opinion, like http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com , http://bbcat.co , http://electioneering.us , and http://notableapp.herokuapp.com , and some more I can't recall. I understand that it's hard for them to deal with so many participants though (it was may more than they had planned), so I applaud them for their effort and expect them to improve their plans accordingly for the spring event, which will definitely be just as popular if not more-so.