Check out the hackNY Flickr account for photos of the event.

Occupying New York University once more, hackNY students again raised the bar for the hackathon this weekend.  With the fifth installment of their long running companion event to their successful fellowship program, the joint NYU / Columbia venture hosted over 375 students, a new record.   Hacker League logged 56 different projects in total built during the 24-hour event with students participating from every major engineering program in the Northeast US.

Students representing NYU, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, Princeton, Brown, RISD, UPenn, and Carnegie Mellon all congregated in the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences for the 24-hour buildoff.  Dragging along their sleeping bags and second monitors, the undergraduate hackers, hustlers and designers signed up for no sleep and lots of food over a weekend celebration of creativity.  The hackNY hackathons have become street cred showcases for East Coast students looking to cut their teeth in tech  Strong showings at hackNY are strongly considered in applications for their competitive fellowships, demo slots at New York Tech Meetup and employment at startups all over the United States.

Next Level Hacking

MongoDB makers 10gen ran buses from Philadelphia and Boston to pick up students. Photo by Matylda Czarnecka.

If you’re a student, hackNY is where you bring your A-game and last weekend’s event continued to up the ante.  ”Today’s hacks were a significant step up from even the Fall hackNY Hackathon six months ago,” said Gary Chou from Union Square Ventures, a frequent judge and mentor at past events.  ”Hacks often used to stand out being technologically awesome.  Today, the ones that stood out were conceptually awesome.”

The students did not sacrifice quality, with the prolific production demonstrating greatness in both number and gnarliness. The crowd favorites were all over the computing spectrum.  One team produced ncnyt, an ncurses frontend for the New York Times and posted it on the Cheese Shop, meaning I’ll never have to leave my terminal window again.  Another made Discofy, a Spotify playlist generation app based on the classic game of selecting a song based on one word from the artist or title before it.  Another fave was Quill, a dead simple blog engine for node.js taking inspiration from Jekyll.

hackNY alumni and staff coordinate. Photo by Matylda Czarnecka.

Stunning Winners

Appropriately following the longest hackNY demo session was the longest hackNY judging session with each judge commenting on the difficulty of selection in such a high quality field. Numerous honorable mentions were awarded along with first, second and third place.

Hacking For Good Award
Give A Little – an app to auto-contribute to your favorite charities each time you check in to your favorite places.
Tess Rinearson (UPenn), Nicholas Meyer (UPenn), Drew Inglis (CMU), Willy Huang (UPenn), Alice Lee(UPenn)

Best Hardware Hack
RFID Food Orderer – an Arduino RFID reader that will take an RFID tag and place an order on Ordr.in.
Kevin Barresi (Stevens Institute of Technology)

Most APIs
hacknyancat – A valiant effort to use every API on the demo list for the event.
Charlie He (Columbia University), Nathan Hwang (Columbia University), Nancy Ouyang (MIT), David Iserovich (NYU), Timothy Yang (MIT)

Photo by Matylda Czarnecka.

Not Quite Erlang Award
Fourthsquare – A wrapper for the Foursquare API… written in Lisp.
Aditya Mukerjee (Columbia University)

Most Judgmental
JudgingHipster – a Turntable.fm bot that sits in your room while you are away, trolling anyone who plays Top 40 to keep it credible.
Hans Hyttinen (Columbia University)

Third Place
Musigallery – A “Pinterest for music” displaying a cross-platform tiling UI to play free music.
Raymond Zhong (Princeton), Daniel Chyan (Princeton), Elaine Liew (Princeton)

Second Place
Nonsense and Sensibility – A slightly psychic text editor that anticipates your every word.
Jacob Andreas (Columbia University)

First Place
cLoudspeaker – an unbelievable web app that syncs music among all open browsers connected to it.
Xin Yang Yak (Princeton), Eugene Lee (Princeton), Alexander Zhao (Princeton), Kaushal Parikh (Rutgers University)

See For Yourself

Video of all the demos (all 120 minutes!) are available here in Part 1 and Part 2.  Video of the awards ceremony available here.

I went to my first hackNY hackathon this past weekend, and, boy, am I glad I did. The energy there is incredible. I’m pretty sure that hackNY is beginning to outgrow its venue, but, really, that just contributes to that buzzy feeling I had throughout the event.

The quality of the hacks was also great. I am repeatedly amazed by the stuff that my peers can throw together in 24-hours. I also noticed that the hacks at hackNY were considerably more “cool for the sake of cool” than the hacks at PennApps, which was refreshing. (That is, at PennApps, there are a lot of apps that could make cool startups or features, while there were more hacks at hackNY which aren’t profitable but which were just pretty damn cool. For instance, someone wrote a Turntable.fm bot called “Judging Hipster” which will make snarky comments when people start playing music that’s too popular.)

Meanwhile, my team’s hack was decidedly more “practical.” We began with a simple line that people toss around all the time (“You know, if you didn’t get that $4 daily latte you could give 20 people access to clean water”) and ran with it. What if that daily latte helped give 20 people access to clean water? So we made Give A Little, which lets you sign up to donate some number of cents to a charity every time you check into a coffee shop. Or a Chinese restaurant. Or, heck, a casino. It was fun, it was fulfilling, and we even won a little Honorable Mention-style award for “Hacking for Good” (one of my favorite things to do). Two my team members, Alice and Willy, have said that they plan on finishing and expanding Give A Little, and I really hope they do! (Though Nick and Drew wrote the backend to handle credit card transactions, we never implemented a front-end for it… So you can only donate fake money for now, which is probably for the best.)

It was also the first time I’d worked in a “big” hackathon team. We had five people, and I learned quickly that working in a hackathon team of five is hard.

Don’t get me wrong, working with this team was a real thrill. Each person would be an asset on any team. For starters, we had my old PennApps 2012 team, Nick Meyer and Drew Inglis. Nick is astute, laid-back and a quick study, and Drew is an experienced developer who is a fantastic pseudo-technical lead. (At one point in the evening, he gave an informal primer on Rails to our team and garnered a small crowd.) We were then joined by design goddess Alice Lee–who I’ve wanted to work with ever since I saw her amazing project at PennApps–and Penn senior Willy Huang, whom I’d never met before but who turned out to be a very respectable developer, especially on the front-end. (I was surprised it took us this long to meet!)

Part of our trouble, I think, stemmed from the fact that we hadn’t all worked together before. We didn’t know what each person could or couldn’t do, really. So we spent the first six hours or so each noodling around on our own before we started to really come together. And then the sleeping happened, so only half the team was awake at any given time. Had everyone checked their work in? What was <Sleeping Person X> trying to do with this code? Was this design chopped up yet? What was going on?

And yet, for all our struggles, I still had a great time and made new friends. (Like I said, this team was a thrill.) And we walked away with a solid product.

So I think the long takeaway here was this: Don’t try to win with a team of five strangers. It’s just too unwieldy. But if you’re just trying to work with a bunch of new people and have a blast… Go for it.

And the shorter version? Go to hackNY.

1st Place: cLoudspeaker
Xin Yang Yak (Princeton), Eugene Lee (Princeton), Alexander Zhao (Princeton), Kaushal Parikh (Rutgers University)

2nd Place: Nonsense and Sensibility
Jacob Andreas (Columbia University)

The weather is chilly now, but a warm and joyous time of year is fast approaching. Italians refer to it as Primavera, English-speaking Swedes call it Spring, but student hackers know it as the hackNY 24-hour Student Hackathon.

Oh, yes, friends, get your game face on, for the time is nigh at hand when students gather to hack on API’s from some of the freshest startups in New York City. The hackNY 24-hour Student Hackathon is a great place to show off your mad skills, learn some new ones, and rub shoulders with other student hackers and superawesome NYC tech startups.

So come join us on March 24th and 25th at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where the flow of creative tech juices will be matched only by the flow of coffee, Red Bull, and burritos.

Click here for more details and to register.

The event was a tremendous success and over $100,000 was raised for hackNY. The money will be used to continue to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

It was great seeing the outpouring of support from the community and we are extremely thankful to those that contributed and helped make this happen. We got together some former hackNY fellows to say thanks.

We’d like to thank the following for making this happen:

The Raise Cache Team
Bianca Campued, Brian Malkerson, Claire Knebl, Kane Sarhan, Karene Schloss, Kendall Brezinski, Mallory Blair, Meghan Grosso, Nolan Filter, Rachel Lin, Rebecca Zhou

Sponsors
Raptor, Squarespace, Nasdaq, Thread, Secondmarket, Eventbrite, Lot18, KPMG, Fashion GPS, Serve, MongoDB / 10Gen, Watchittoo, Greycroft Partners, IA Ventures, RRE Ventures, Softbank Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Bread Alert, Insight Venture Partners, Square 1 Bank, Daily Worth, Workbridge Associates, Zelkova Ventures

Fashion Brands
Rent the Runway, Bonobos, Bauble Bar, Shoptiques, Proper Cloth, Of A Kind , The Cools , Market Publique , Source4Style , 72Lux , Carrie Hammer , Quincy , chloe + isabel, Stylecaster , Edition 01 , Lineby, Edition 01, Rent the Runway, Quincy , Bauble Bar, Bauble Bar, Katherine Kwei, Life Tie

Raffle and Auction
Broodr, Movie Pass, Jetsetter, Join Bklyn, Join Bklyn, Svpply, Gin Lane, Pivotal Labs, General Assembly, Fashion Center, Microsoft, Fueled, Sail Thru, Projective Space, Warby Parker, NewsCred, Total Control, Uber, Gilt City, Gansevoort Gramercy, Jack Robie, Loom Decor, NYTM, Everything Butt Art, Fitted Fashion, Aha.Life, Life Tiek

Models
Alex Nelson, Alexa Von Tobel, Alexis Tryon, Amy Cao, Andrew Rasiej, Ashley Granata, Aubrey Sabala, Brooke Moreland, Caren Maio, Carol Han , Caroline Scheinfeld, Carrie Hamerslag, Carter Cleveland, Cezary Pietrzak, Chris Paik, Christina Cacioppo, Christina Wallace, Courtney Boyd Myers, Dan Herman, David Rodriguez, David Tisch, Erin Tao, Fred Wilson, Jessica Lawrence, Joe Yveoli, Jordan Cooper, Kathryn Minshew, Katia Beauchamp , Katie Hunt, Kevin Prentiss, Kristine Kubat, LauraZapata, Lilia DeGregory, Marissa Evans, Marissa Wilson, Matt Kochman, Matt Shampine, Maya Bartz, Megan Filipp, Melanie Moore, Mimi Nguyen, Nate Westheimer, Nihal Mehta, Nikhil Kalghatgi, Phil Thomas Di Giulio, Phin Barnes, Quinten Farmer, Rachel Sklar, Rameet Chawla, Reece Pacheco, Roger Ehrenberg, Sarah Kunst, Scott Carleton, Summer Rayne Oakes, Will Peng

Hosting Committee
Adam Rothenberg, Alan Chen, Alex Kirshbaum, Alex Taub, Amanda Peyton, Andrew Chen, Ari Goldberg, Brooke Moreland, Carter Cleveland, Chris Paik, Chris Wiggins, Christinia Cacioppo, David Goldberg, Evan Korth, James Wahba, Jason Baptiste, Kristen Ming, Matt Shampine, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Mimi N, Nikhil Kalghtgi, Rachel Sklar, Richard Blakely, Steven Rojas, Vin Vacanti, Will Peng, Yuli Ziv, Bianca Campued, Mallory Blair, Amy Jain, Daniella Y, Alex Kirshbaum, Jesse Kirshbaum, Josh Weinstein

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Most of all, we’d like to thank you, NYC, for helping us keep the kids off the street (Wall Street).

The hackathon is not a new concept, but around NYC, it’s turning into a movement. These days, you can go to a different hackathon just about every weekend and build for the sake of building. Granted, many of the apps that get built at these hackathons are trivial, and they don’t solve “real” problems, but I think that’s missing the point. The developers who go to hackathons build more than just weekend hacks – they build community.

The dense community of developers and entrepreneurs has turned Silicon Valley into the hub of innovation that it is. But I see no reason why a strong developer community, and the innovation that comes with it, needs to be tied to a small strip of land in Southern California. Isn’t the point of the Internet to connect people who otherwise wouldn’t?

This is why we built Hacker League. We want to see more and more hackathons popping up. More and more mini-Valleys. The more hackathons there are, the more united the developer community will be, and a united developer community bodes well for the future of technology.

To that end, Hacker League is a tool for hackathon organizers. We want to make it easy for anyone thinking about throwing a hackathon to get up and do it. We provide everything you need to organize a fantastic hackathon: a wiki, a blog, a voting platform, a hack submission system, and hacker registration.

Hacker League is also for hackers. It’s a place to show off the great stuff you’ve built. A place to meet other skilled developers and get inspired. Each hacker on Hacker League gets a profile that lists his/her skills, interests, and past hacks. Each hack, in turn, has a page that lists who built it, what it’s built on, a screenshot, and of course, a link to the actual hack.

With Hacker League, we hope to give strength to the hackathon movement in New York, across America, and abroad. We’re still in beta, but we’re actively doing test runs. We ran the hackNY hackathon on October 1st, and it went over really well. If you’re planning on throwing a hackathon soon, we want to work with you to make your hackathon the best it can possibly be. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and email us at thehackerleague@gmail.com.

Major kudos to the winners of the hackNY fall 2011 student hackathon!

1st Place: MidiPHON
David Coss and Michael Bartnett, New York University
$600 plus tickets to Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend

2nd Place: AdRunner
Joey Dong (Rutgers) and Grant Kot (Julliard)
$400 plus tickets to Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend

hackNY hackathons give talented students an opportunity to meet each other, to find out about NYC’s great startup ecosystem, and to experience how hacking together a solution can be challenging, collaborative, and creative.

The schedule for the hackathon points to the final demo event where students, individually or in teams, present the creations they’ve built.

We couldn’t organize these events without the great support of a number of people, including our student organizing committee, our generous sponsors, the great talented students who participate, and of course our panel of expert judges who help us award prizes at the end of the hackathon.

We’d like to thank in advance the judges for the fall 2011 hackathon:

• Fred Benenson
• Gary Chou
• Chris Dixon
• Josh Knowles
• Charlie O’Donnell
• Jonah Peretti
• Frank Rimalovski
• Tal Safran
• Elena Silenok
• Victoria Stodden
• Max Stoller
• David Tisch
• Khoi Vinh
• Eric Wu

Summer Series lectures featured a wide variety of speakers who introduced Fellows to the ins and outs of working for and founding a company. This year’s speakers included a mix of technologists, founders, journalists investors and designers.

June 1 – The first hackNY Summer Series lecture kicked off with Ann Miura-Ko, who has been called “the most powerful woman in startups” by Forbes.

June 7 – hackNY Fellows attended the June 2011 New York Tech Meetup, the largest public event during Internet Week.

June 8 – For the second installment of hackNY’s Summer Series, Elena Silenok, founder of Clothia.com discussed her transition from computer science researcher to Wall Street to startup founder.

June 14 - Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow shared his academic experience and path to success during the third Summer Series lecture.

June 7 – hackNY Fellows attended the July 2011 New York Tech Meetup, whose theme was “The Now Neighborhood”

June 16 – Dan Guido, security consultant at iSEC Partners, spoke with hackNY Fellows about mobile application security.

June 20 – Josh Knowles, managing director of Pivotal Labs, NYC, discussed agile methodologies, pair programming and the shop’s philosophies.

June 21 – Howard Morgan spoke with hackNY Fellows about his varied experiences, from professor to investor and many accomplishments between.

June 27 – New York Times tech reporter Jenna Wortham gave tips on how to work with reporters to make sure your story gets told.

June 30 - User experience designer Whitney Hess shared her experiences and tips for building products with good UX.

July 7 - Christopher “moot” Poole talked with Fellows about starting 4chan and his latest startup, Canv.as

July 11 - Chris Dixon, Hunch.com founder and angel investor, spoke with Fellows about a variety of topics including his experience starting a company and seeking funding.

July 18 – Steven L. Baglio of Gunderson Dettmer, who represents many startups, including Christopher “moot” Poole’s Canvas, told Fellows about startups’ basic legal needs and things to look out for.

July 20 – Startup coach Jerry Colonna told Fellows about NYC’s startup ecosystem: then and now.

July 21 – Hilary Mason, hackNY cofounder and bit.ly’s chief scientist, discussed the impact and applications of “big data” in NYC startups.

July 25 -Union Square Ventures’ partners chatted with Fellows about the present and future states of NYC’s startup ecosystem.

July 27 – SecondMarket’s Barry Silbert spoke with Fellows about the history of his company and how US markets are changing.

Check out our collection of photos from these great events, and sign up for our newsletter to learn when applications open for next summer.