MLH Blog

Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different. Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1]. I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"! And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs, how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others, and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step…

If you go into the event hoping to build something productive or that has longevity, it will likely feel like a waste. But that's really not the point of hackathons, and seems to be a major factor that people take issue with. Especially for students/new programmers, the goal is to tinker with technology, have fun, and discover like-minded collaborators in a risk-free environment. You might be thinking - hey! a competition isn't risk-free - but really, compared to a work or academic environment there is far less risk involved with building something ambitious or using a technology you are completely unfamiliar with. The best hackathons don't focus on the competitive element, but instead create a system where people are rewarded for ambitious but not perfectly polished work. I wrote another blog post about that here: http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-since-moldy-sl…

I think the problem is deeper than whiteboard interviews. Too few companies are willing to invest in junior talent. Netflix famously only hires senior-level engineers, and Facebook has recently offloaded many of their internships to Major League Hacking [1], an exploitative outsourcing platform for unpaid, entry-level labor from developing countries [2]. This is entirely a problem of the tech industry's making. [1] https://news.mlh.io/introducing-the-mlh-fellowship-externship-09-10-20… [2] A close friend who was formerly employed by MLH

"At Hack the North, volunteers approached us after receiving a report from an attendee who felt unsafe after viewing the posts on Facebook." - from the update[0] Unfortunately if someone feels unsafe then it's escalated past a joke in poor taste. Personally I think the students should still have been allowed to participate and be barred from placing, but I wouldn't call expulsion an overreaction. [0] http://news.mlh.io/when-jokes-go-too-far-09-19-2015

Today, we're pivoting. Major League Hacking is now Major League Packing: http://news.mlh.io/major-league-hacking-now-major-league-packing-04-01…

"Top-down" and "bottom-up" in compression usually refer to which direction you build the prefix tree. In Shannon-Fano coding (top-down), you start with the set of all symbols and their frequency distributions and then recursively divide them into roughly even-sized subsets, assigning a 0 as the prefix to the first and a 1 as the prefix to the second. In Huffman coding (bottom-up), you start with a priority queue of each individual symbol/frequency pair, and then merge the two lowest frequency nodes together, building the tree from the bottom up. In middle-out coding, presumably, the algorithm decides at runtime whether to merge two existing codes into a single prefix tree, or to split an existing prefix tree in some other way. There's some speculation [1] that this is done in a probabilistic way. All of these algorithms require known frequency distributions, which requires that you have the full data available. In typical DEFLATE compressors (gzip, pkzip, zlib, etc.), this is handled by dividing the input stream into blocks and compressing each block individually. A similar approach could be used for video - you could easily make the block size a single packet - but in practice, you'd rarely want to use a lossless compression algorithm for video chat anyway. Most video compression is lossy; you can drop a lot of detail before the human eye notices. That's how you can stream a full widescreen movie (which has an uncompressed size of 2 megapixel * 4 bytes/pixel * 30…

In looking into who MLH were, I found their comments on the event: http://news.mlh.io/when-jokes-go-too-far-09-19-2015 In honesty, I completely agree with the actions of MLH in the expulsion. It is their event to run, and they have final say in the kind of discourse they accept from the attendees. It was obviously a joke, but obviously also distasteful so whether the decision was overly punitive is really the only debate. If I were the author, I wouldn't write about what transpired. There is nothing to gain by taking it publicly and now there is an easy to locate record of your mistake for future event organisers and employers. Should just let it rest. Edit: To clarify why I find it is distasteful — In context of recent events this is just a poorly and honestly unfunny joke. But the point isn't whether it was a joke though, the point is that universities have a long history of being the centre of vicious and deplorable acts of violence, mass violence. In the context of the university environment, I can see how jokes like this are unsettling and reminiscent of real social media posts that often precede real attacks that maim or kill real people. The authors insensitivity to this is what I find shortsighted.