Why NYC does, indeed, need HackNY

On Fred Wilson’s blog post about Raise Cache and HackNY, someone asked a very legitimate question:

Why are we raising money to benefit CS students from top programs around the country? Why are we raising money to help companies like Business Insider and bit.ly hire interns?

The event looks like fun but I’ve been trying to understand hackNY and don’t understand why it’s a charitable cause.

And, I wrote a response — providing some anecdotal information about how Parse.ly benefited from HackNY, and why it matters in a city flush with gold-plated Wall St. internships.

Let me give you a hint why HackNY is somewhat charitable: Wall Street firms pay between $15-$30k/summer for technical interns in NYC. Most startups — especially early-stage ones — simply can’t compete with that.

You may not think startups like bit.ly and Business Insider need any help (and with their $13-15M in capital funding raised, maybe you are right), but in 2010, when Parse.ly sought a summer intern, we had no funding and a < $3K/mo. burn rate. You can read our testimonial about HackNY here: http://hackny.org/a/2011/01/st... That said, it'd probably be good to have more truly early-stage (pre-funding) companies on the roster -- one of the problems with this, though, is that a lot of pre-funding companies are in such a fragile state that the internship might be over a couple weeks into the summer. Also, pre-funding companies aren't typically "buzzworthy". The first two years of HackNY has been partially about creating some buzz about NYC tech among university students, something at which it has succeeded spectacularly. Both of our HackNY interns (2010 + 2011) have commented about how one of the interesting parts of the program is that it simply raises awareness of the different stages of companies. Since the HackNY interns all live together in university housing, they share stories -- and you'll have folks working on >100-person teams at places like Gilt Group and folks working on <10-person teams at places like Parse.ly. Also, the program’s lecture series does a good job of encouraging students to consider entrepreneurship or startup work as a post-graduation option. This is a countervailing force to the professional HR/recruiting teams employed by Wall Street and other Fortune 500s to market their positions to top students.

from Raise Cache at AVC.com.

The C++ trap

I came across this wonderful piece of historical retelling by David Beazley, one of my favorite Pythonistas and the author of Python Essential Reference. Here is a man who conquered C++ in just about every way, but ultimately found himself trapped in its byzantine complexity, only to escape by way of Python.

Swig grew a fully compatible C++ preprocessor that fully supported macros. A complete C++ type system was implemented including support for namespaces, templates, and even such things as template partial specialization. Swig evolved into a multi-pass compiler that was doing all sorts of global analysis of the interface. Just to give you an idea, Swig would do things such as automatically detect/wrap C++ smart pointers.It could wrap overloaded C++ methods/function. Also, if you had a C++ class with virtual methods, it would only make one Python wrapper function and then reuse across all wrapped subclasses.

Under the covers of all of this, the implementation basically evolved into a sophisticated macro preprocessor coupled with a pattern matching engine built on top of the C++ type system […] This whole pattern matching approach had a huge power if you knew what you were doing […]

In hindsight however, I think the complexity of Swig has exceeded anyone’s ability to fully understand it (including my own). For example, to even make sense of what’s happening, you have to have a pretty solid grasp of the C/C++ type system (easier said than done). Couple that with all sorts of crazy pattern matching, low-level code fragments, and a ton of macro definitions, your head will literally explode if you try to figure out what’s happening. So far as I know, recent versions of Swig have even combined all of this type-pattern matching with regular expressions. I can’t even fathom it.

Sadly, my involvement was Swig was an unfortunate casualty of my academic career biting the dust. By 2005, I was so burned out of working on it and so sick of what I was doing, I quite literally put all of my computer stuff aside to go play in a band for a few years. After a few years, I came back to programming (obviously), but not to keep working on the same stuff. In particularly, I will die quite happy if I never have to look at another line of C++ code ever again. No, I would much rather fling my toddlers, ride my bike, play piano, or do just about anything than ever do that again.

From this Swig mailing list entry.