Those who remember the start of eternal September have similar sentiments about the decline of the Internet experience as well.
Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
91–100 of 140 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#92Hack 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…
this, agree 100%
Hackathons are about meeting like-minded folks, and building stuff.
Learning how to get stuff done in a tight timescale is a skill worth learning. Having something that vaguely works at the end is a great feeling.
All the sponsorship and bullshit that goes around it can be safely ignored
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I... I'm about to hit 40 in a couple of years, and I still pull all nighters on the couch when I'm deep into my weekend hobby projects. Not to be overly sentimental, but for me the 5am feeling is still the same if not better with family and pets around and the sunrise view I created for myself.
I find that I still can do the all nighters but much like the festive overconsumption of alcohol, the recovery time tripled and made the whole thing very much not worth it (except maybe on very rare occasions). Sure I can stay up all night but it really just ruins the entire next week.
Early-40s here who still does all-nighters. How long is recovery time for you? What does it entails -ie what doesn't work as much as it should / takes longer while you recover?
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#94From my experience, I find most of the time the best part about hackathons is not what you create, but who you get to meet/network with. It may just be my uni/age cohort, but most projects I saw at the last hackathon I went to were less "MVP" type/semi-complete projects and more just "we have a concept of a plan."
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#95Seeing some good comments and will add to the pile.
IMO it's not a "now" thing. There's a natural ad-hoc, close proximity vibe that some gatherings have. They often come with everything else, including flow and good (best of this kind) memories.
I imagine some of these were called hackathons and some LAN parties, etc. Nevertheless it's not a straightforward thing to recreate artificially. Unfortunately most public / large "hackathons" I went to were failed attempts.
I've had the great experience of growing up in eastern Europe in 90s and 00s and so in highschool if you qualified for the higher stages of CS olympiads you were allowed to skip classes and spend time in the "lab" with the other "olympics". That was the first "hackathon", basically sometimes a few weeks in a row of coding with everyone else from 8AM till whenever you were in trouble if you didn't get home. Sometimes playing Doom, sometimes with the teachers, but most times coding. It was ... "electric" - unfortunately I don't have writing skills to make justice to it. Then there were the LAN parties and those were very good too, and so on.
I've actually been through a few hackathons at work that were pretty good.
Every time they are with the people you know well and few more (1-2) degrees of separation, but always with a shared goal and nothing else but the pure shared goal of the hackatahon. Everyone is already fluent and will hit the ground running, etc. Otherwise it's bunch of people that never worked together, not "style" cohhesion, etc. fucking around trying to figure out stuff that should already be in place for a proper hackathon.
I could go on and think I'd probably have a few good things to add here, but wouldn't be sure that it's a "solution", just some facts from my own experience.
But man, those days in the "lab" doing CS problems, they gave me the "high" for what coding can be like for the rest of my life. I don't need more than 15s of that to want to GO, haha :)
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#96When I was in college (over 20 years ago now), what we called “hackathons” was a bunch of us (4-6 max) holing up in an apartment for the weekend, and working on our personal projects while ordering pizza and sleeping on couches. It was really nice having a group of people you could demo what you were working on/ask for help or feedback within immediate range at all times. There was also something really peaceful abou…
I... I'm about to hit 40 in a couple of years, and I still pull all nighters on the couch when I'm deep into my weekend hobby projects. Not to be overly sentimental, but for me the 5am feeling is still the same if not better with family and pets around and the sunrise view I created for myself.
come over for pizza and lets work on a project together :3
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that I still can do the all nighters but much like the festive overconsumption of alcohol, the recovery time tripled and made the whole thing very much not worth it (except maybe on very rare occasions). Sure I can stay up all night but it really just ruins the entire next week.
Early-40s here who still does all-nighters. How long is recovery time for you? What does it entails -ie what doesn't work as much as it should / takes longer while you recover?
Early 40's too lets jam together
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#98I agree. As a sponsor, we don’t also do it any longer. The incentives are fake. You want people to be excited about using your tool, not using it in some contrived way to win a few bucks. When the use is real, the feedback is real. Otherwise, it’s the blind leading the blind.
The hackathons I remember as a college student were different. They were much more free form. You were asked to create something around a broad topic: eg graphics, operating systems, modeling a neuron. You were allowed and encouraged to go outside the box.
Getting the prize was fun, but a working artifact was much more satisfying. That’s why we did it.
So, yes, it’s too commercial these days.
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that I still can do the all nighters but much like the festive overconsumption of alcohol, the recovery time tripled and made the whole thing very much not worth it (except maybe on very rare occasions). Sure I can stay up all night but it really just ruins the entire next week.
Early-40s here who still does all-nighters. How long is recovery time for you? What does it entails -ie what doesn't work as much as it should / takes longer while you recover?
I'm very tired a mildly stupid and my body has no idea at all when it should be asleep for about a week at which point i'm mostly but not entirely better. then again I always had trouble with keeping a regular sleep schedule
I have long since learned how to maintain a healthy sleep schedule when the system is not disturbed by stupid decisions, my techniques just don't work as quickly as they used to. (the most impactful technique is "don't stay up all night, idiot")
Re: Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
#100I participated in a competitive university hackathon recently. It was sponsored by some B2B cloud company peddling an "agentic platform" and an ill-defined (but also AI oriented) Google program.
Shockingly, all the cases demanded SaaS chatbot wrappers. I spent a good chunk of time commiserating with one of the other undergraduate teams about how cosmically lame this was, especially when contrasted with the "innovation" rhetoric espoused by the organizers.
To quote one girl: "Bro, my backend is just stateless Ollama calls and prompt templates. I could one-shot this garbage while hammered."
So, yes, they do feel fake. There's no challenge. The focus is on churning out box-checking slop rather than taking some kernel (a theme, perhaps, instead of precisely specified cases) and building something novel around it.