I guess it has a bit to do with the different focuses, at the foursquare event your likely to get people who are trying to grow a business, so networking will be a primary goal of theres and it is advantageous to them to show something more polished to get some attention for the project.

A quick look at the Haskell page shows you guys are more focused on the language and supporting libraries themselves, which I assume most people are doing it out of love for the language and programming rather than any commercial gain.

The focus is primarily about building open source infrastructure, so yep, for the love of code (though often informed by commercial need).

Did you ever attend an OpenBSD hackathon? I'm just curious.

No, was a bit hard to make it to .ca from .au. However, they did inspire the structure of the Haskell ones.

If you're getting a lot of code out of it then you're doing a fine job.

Argh! It was last weekend at Hacker Dojo? I live downtown Mountain View, and learning Haskell is my pet project, how did I miss that?