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Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

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Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#71

Post by ezekiel68 »

meken wrote: post #67
aziaziazi wrote: post #31

Hack the hackathon. My follow-at-your-own-risk pro tip: Find a team not too much into wining and - connect with others. They’re primarily networking events and are still good for that. - Don’t bother checking the sponsors boxes too much. Have fun trying technical/product ideas that interest your for any _personal_ reason. Should fit with your team project obviously. If not, keep it for next time and instead: - peer w…

I think you meant pairing instead of peering

Unless you're making a joke about geeks not being overly social, "peering" works fine in this context. Basically, "connect with those on your level."

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#72

Post by kjellsbells »

Honorable mention must go out to the OpenBSD team who have been running hackathons for 20+ years now. The difference is that they are invitation only and tend to zoom in on a specific area, eg this week we will all show up in Prague and hack on routing protocols, or whatever. I can't imagine what deraadt@ would have to say about one of those Major League Hacking type events with a big corporate sponsor and influencer wannabe types floating around eveywhere.

The tl;dr is that hacking, like discussion on the Internet, is into the dark forest model now.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#74

Post by AlchemistCamp »

They felt fake 10 years ago. Some good still came from them but except the one I did at Facebook, they all felt dominated by BS. FB at least had a separate room for people actually coding who didn't want a constant stream of interruptions from advertisers, announcers, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#76

Post by mountainriver »

nkrisc wrote: post #24

I've seen some cool hackathons run internally at some companies I've worked for. It was during work hours (paid) and managers set time aside for people who wanted to participate. Often it was something like, "we have all this data, what could we use it for?" and teams would often come up with some pretty cool projects based on the data. At the end there was a big presentation that anyone in the company could attend a…

This is where they still feel good. Anything “sponsored” has turned into a sleazy marketing push.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#77

Post by spudlyo »

One company I worked for had a culture of semi-regular hackathons and are they were often a lot of fun. As an old, I got to work with some non-jaded wide-eyed interns from U of Waterloo who worked their asses off on inspired hackathon projects as well as doing some solid work for our team. Interns had plenty of motivation to make a splash (and to take chances) and working with them was often a breath of fresh air.

On our larger team, we'd have week long hackathons where the theme was the elimination of jank/cruft/hazards/annoyances across code, infrastructure, and process. We'd split into 2-4 person teams and do our work, and at the end there'd be presentations and war stories, celebrations and the occasional defeat. Somebody would win a prize, and we'd do it again in 6 months.

Corporate Hackathons have been a net positive for me, but I've also seen them implemented poorly, where you were still expected to shovel a full load of story points that sprint.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#78

Post by zachlatta »

I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.

We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!

You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

What makes Hack Club events different is:

1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count

2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not

3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures

One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.

https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus

It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.

It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.

Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now

#79

Post by yfiapo »

aiforecastthway wrote: post #57
krrishd wrote: post #4

I mostly agree with the premise, but to point out something kinda funny: these complaints are basically identical to the ones I remember from a time I personally remember as the "heyday" of hackathons (early/mid 2010s). I think: - they've had this degree of fakeness for almost the entirety of their existence (as long as they've needed "sponsorship" / been 6+ figure events) - at its best, there also was a scene/subcul…

I have never heard the term "Hackathon" used in any context other than a recruiting/sales event targeted at early-career types. Meatspace get-togethers focused on hacking, either for a specific project or for a clique, never used the term "Hackathon". At least in my circles. Those were just "get togethers" or maybe "hacking weekends". But with small caps. I.e., not "Hacking Weekends" or "Hackathons", but "a weekend w…

The term was used by OpenBSD starting in 1999 for a group of devs getting together for a few days or a week and hacking on specific projects together in person. Not sure about earlier than that but that’s what I still associate the term back to.

https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html

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