Jenny Han’s Opinion piece on New York Times:

The People of HashtagNYU

Over our six-year run, we believed, among many things, that our team succeeded and failed together. We chose to never sign posts as individuals, instead taking collective ownership of our content. For our last post, we’re flipping the script.

In saying goodbye, we want to highlight the voices and experiences of the people who made HashtagNYU possible. These were the students who wrote tweets, snapped photos, shot videos, wrote posts, and so much more. We were the people behind the screen hoping to inform and delight you with each and every post.

To capture the experience, we asked our near-hundred alumni one simple question:

In 140 characters or less, what was HashtagNYU for you?

Keep reading

when you tell someone about your problems & they reply with “damn that sucks”

Intrusive thoughts are so weird because sometimes it’s blood and gore and horror and then sometimes it’s like hey you see that pot?You should wear it like a hat on your head. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Inspiring Projects From HackNYU 2017

Each year NYU’s main Hackathon sees a host of awesome, innovative ideas developed by smart, sleep-deprived students. There have been apps made to encourage healthier partying and others which changed the landscape of tutoring. This year was no different in inspiring excellence and vision. Here are the winning projects in no particular order!

Assistive Technology Track

Alzheimer’s Companion won in its specific category but also took home a sponsor prize for Best Use of Amazon Web Services. The system fills in the gaps for people suffering from memory loss. Utilizing Amazon’s Alexa Dot, the Companion tracks scheduled events, family members and their descriptions, personal information, specific memories, and the location of particular objects and recites them back to the user when prompted.

Voice[H]over is an amazing tool developed by a team from NYU Shanghai that allows people with Cerebral Palsy or other diseases that affect speech to communicate in a more natural and affordable manner. Rather than relying only on a head-mounted laser and print out, the program converts inputs into a .txt file which can then be read aloud in a less robotic tone.

ID Your Face is another program meant to aid those affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. The app uses facial detection and recognition to scan photographs of people and recite back their personal relationship to the user.

Healthcare Track

MealPic makes eating healthy easier! Simply by snapping a photo of the meal you want to eat, the app crunches out a report of how nutritious the food is and then offers a healthier alternative. The app promotes better eating habits and works to prevent and reduce disease!

Tactile Textures solves a problem many dental students face while earning their degrees: the lack of touch during pre-clinical simulations! Their product records vibrations and plays them back along with video in order to provide a more realistic simulation for students.

Pill Central is a pill box that uses colorful LEDs to differentiate between and remind people to take their medication. The hardware comes along with a helpful iOS app that lets users set up their pill schedule and view upcoming medicine reminders!

Education Technology Track

CalPal won for providing an easy fix for procrastination! With their helpful Telegram bot, students can turn their to-do lists into a full-fledged calendar of events. That means no more “I’ll just study later!”

EduPro is a lifesaver when it comes to delivering top-tier, effective educational videos to students. The search engine analyzes data from YouTube and decides which clips are most in line with the student’s query. Save time searching and get right to learning!

Memo Rooms draws on the natural human ability to remember three-dimensional spaces in order to help its users study! By constructing a memory palace, a digital world where students can post note cards and lecture slides, the app lets you hack your brain and learn material as if you really had a photographic memory!

Sustainability and Social Impact Track

Ologee, a streamlined portal for displaced families seeking refugee status, could help tons of people worldwide escape from dangerous environments affected by war or natural disaster. Their website keeps tabs on all of the required forms for the refugee application and directs users to a local translator and UNHCR office to aid in the referral process.

Machine Learning + Psychology uses sound to identify and monitor water appliances like showers and toilets. The technology can help consumers work toward reducing their water usage and saving the planet!

Fashion Tree takes data from numerous clothing websites like Nordstrom and H&M to compile an overall sustainability score. The algorithm, which measures clothing composition, price, and other factors, can help customers find ethical, longer-lasting pieces to purchase.

Viacom Sponsor Prizes

Latinissimus is a commendable language-learning tool masquerading as an adorable computer game. Users play as Odysseus from Roman mythology and fight mini green cyclopes. The only way to win? Learn new Latin words!

Quack, like Latinissimus, helps its users learn a new language, this time specializing in American Sign Language. The program uses Leap Motion to help users both identify and perform different signs.

Verizon Sponsor Prize

Den-Manager tracks the occupancy of a room in real time. When the space reaches a certain threshold, it notifies the user. Afterward, the information can be plotted and utilized in data analytics!

Make School Sponsor Prizes

Best iOS

STrip soothes some of the anxiety that comes along with traveling to a different university. Food? Housing? Transportation? STrip handles it all, allowing students to upload pertinent information about the availability and convenience of certain resources on campuses around the world.

Best Beginner Hacks

CommUnity gives people a place to come together in hopes of shaping the areas they live in. With the app, people can list and reply to projects centered around their specific geographic location. Whether it’s a park cleanup or building a fence, people can collaborate in bettering their communities. See CommUnity soon on the iOS and Google Play app stores.

sEd stood in the winner’s circle for teaching sexual education in a convenient and engaging format! The app lets you play as a cute blob who roams the stars looking for condoms to defend against STDs. The information is easily digestible and the game’s a whole lot of fun, too! 

Best Domain Name from Domain.com

WATGuru nailed themselves a win for providing an answer to all those “WAT” moments we have as students. Users can anonymously ask their questions during class and professors can respond and tailor their lectures as needed.

#HackHarrassment Prize

NID makes “new phone, who dis?” obsolete. By automatically updating users’ phones when a contact changes their number, the program helps keep people in contact, even when service providers seem to want to tear them apart.

Honorable Mentions

Edu-venture makes studying into an awesome gameplay experience! The RPG takes players through a comedic story while building their knowledge in whatever subject they’re studying. From the elementary to the collegiate level, the game offers an entertaining alternative to the classic flashcard method.

Chill Pill combines virtual reality with meditation and stress-busting exercises in order to combat Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Through the app’s games, people can manage their mental health in a more fun, immersive way!

Lexiko makes managing prescriptions a whole lot easier. This team worked to develop an app that breaks down complex medical terminology into a simpler, more visual and interactive report.

HaikuBot is the answer to all your poetry problems! All you need to do is send the Facebook messenger bot a photo (of literally anything) and it will pump out a glorious, perfectly formatted haiku related to what’s in the image. If that’s not cool, we don’t know what is.

These are only a fraction of the awesome projects we saw at HackNYU this year. Whether a project won or not, it’s a singular achievement to have built something from the ground up. To all the participants — congratulations!

It’s also worth noting that this year’s Hackathon saw an astounding number of female-identifying or non-binary winners! It’s clear that the hands responsible for shaping the world’s future will be as innovative as they are diverse. Keep creating!

dog jobs

signed prints

baby animals blog

*to the tune of barbie girl* i’m a garbage man,, in a garbage can

Post of the Year

National Geographic photographers are metal as fuck

actually thought about doing this for a profession..

Dogs Who Don’t Understand How BIG They Are

woooooooooooo i don’t believe this 

Professor Stephen Hawking believes Zayn might still be in One Direction - in a different universe

The important thing about this is that Stephen Hawking well understands the fact that you can enjoy and/or be upset about frivolous things while simultaneously enjoying and/or being upset about important things. He also turned this into a massive encouragement for girls to become female scientists as they age.

I fucking love Stephen hawking he gave this a serious answer instead of trivializing teenage girls like most men (esp. highly intelligent nerdy men) do

Oh my god.

dead.

Was this made for me?