Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture by Rodney Folz
https://medium.com/@folz/selling-out-and-the-death-of-hacker...
Previous discussion:
Hackathon Be Gone
71–80 of 143 posts
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#72The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate…
Just exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.
I hear this is done already with the race thing, I've heard of the "check Hispanic" trick a while back to make it easier to get into collge.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#73At Khan Academy we've been running ours as "Healthy Hackathons" — we kick people out at 11:45pm to get sleep, bring in healthy food, snacks, and activities, and always include our work week as part of the schedule (not just weekends). We actually just held our Monday-Friday Healthy Hack Week last week ( http://healthyhackathon.khanacademy.org ). One of my favorite weeks ever, particularly because we encourage "hacks"…
Actually what your so-called "Healthy Hackatons" demonstrates to me is that not a lot of Khan Academy employees are married with kids. I know my wife would be annoyed if I was goofing off at the office until midnight for a week leaving her to feed our kids and put them to bed by herself. But, hey, it's all for the greater good of "disrupting" education! It's ironic that obviously very few Khan Academy employees have…
You can express your disagreement with staying past office hours without being condescending. Though, the post only indicated no participants were allowed to work past a time, not that everyone must work until that time.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#74Hackathons are cool, but not those company funded ones.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#75>> Salesmanship is rewarded. The rewards are given strictly based on the presentation
This is not a bad thing. I've won hackathons partly–but not strictly–because we had a team that could present well in front of judges and an audience.
Public speaking, sales, and presenting to others is an important skill in business and entrepreneurship. The author would be wise to convey this to his students. A hacker who can build a product of value AND sell it well is a force to be reckoned with.
Sorry, but I love hackathons as long as they're run somewhat well. If I don't like the food, I'll go eat somewhere else. I'm too old these days to work through the night so I usually get a hotel room and get a good sleep. But college students are already used to studying through the night, so I don't see what the big deal is.
Beyond the intersection of making presenting (see above), I also love that hackathons force you to work within constraints–most notably time.
Its a great way to network–especially if there are corporate sponsors. I've met some great friends at hackathons and I've received job offers from companies I've met. I've even been offered investment in a project.
Yeah, people cheat. Yeah, some hackathons are poorly run. The pros still outweigh the cons for me though.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#76I've been organizing Hackathons for the past few years. They have been incredibly successful in a number of ways. The group that organizes them has recognized a few powerful factors: - The organizers are diverse and have a wide array of skills I didnt start the group that I have collaborated with, but I immediately tried to contribute to the best of my ability. We have people who are good at promoting, thinking about…
I'm curious: how do you market these events? I have literally never in my life encountered a hackathon directly and only know they exist because people talk about them; they are a purely theoretical construct in my world. Through what channels do people discover your events?
I have mostly been to them through word of mouth, heard through friends, colleagues, related meetup groups, Reddit, etc.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#77The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate…
Just exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.
It actually turns out that cargo culting the language of social justice works about as well as the sovereign citizen idiots that cargo cult legal jargon -- both of these phenomena exist in a broad, clear social context and it's laughably obvious when someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, like you, attempts an "incantation" with the idea that it's magic words because they don't or can't understand what's actually happening.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The older you get - the less patience you have for tight deadlines and 'forcing yourself to make a choice'. That's just having more energy than you know what to do with. The tragedy is young people have lots of energy and are scatterbrained and old people are sometimes wise but too tired. The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.…
> The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts. Absolutely not. The most brilliant of minds made their marks on history at 30 or younger. Science has shown that, over time, learning becomes more difficult and slower. The whole idea of an older person being more "wise" is more of an old wive's tale more than anything else. Young peopl…
I don't disagree with you - I just mean something else by ambitious projects.
Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
The brilliant minds who've contributed to math/science I imagine oftentimes had great teachers along the way. Not always.
The ambitious projects I have in mind go beyond solving a previously unsolved math problem - I am thinking of something more calculated and long-term like wikipedia.
If we can give a lot of people in the world the best educational materials by the best teachers - that's a massive win.
If we can secure funding for people who show promise and let them affect the real world, not just 'do research' - that's a massive win.
In other words - the problems we're facing are not really science problems, they're philosophical and societal problems that require a willingness of the current ruling class to say ok, this isn't working, let us try something new here.
That'd be nearly unprecedented - another smart kid solving another science riddle, that's cool too :)
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts. Absolutely not. The most brilliant of minds made their marks on history at 30 or younger. Science has shown that, over time, learning becomes more difficult and slower. The whole idea of an older person being more "wise" is more of an old wive's tale more than anything else. Young peopl…
I don't disagree with you - I just mean something else by ambitious projects. Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not. The brilliant minds who've contributed to math/science I imagine oftentimes had great teachers along the way. Not always. The ambitious projects I have in mind go beyond solving a previously unsolved math problem - I am thinking of some…
Okay we're mostly agreeing here just one point
> Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
Maybe? It's hard to say considering we have laws preventing the young from getting into politics. President / Vice President have to be 35, 30 to be a senator and 25 for the house of representatives. Most states also have age restrictions for many other political offices that I'm too lazy to look up (some are similar to the federal ones, some are simply 21).
Making it not possible for them to do it doesn't mean they couldn't if given the ability. Many politicians are career politicians. That may not be good but the young folks can't be career politicians, at least not right away.
I would be very curious to see the data if we removed all agent restrictions then let 1-2 generations go by and see if the demographic changes much / some / none.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#80In Austin, we started running an event called "Finish Up Weekend" or FU Weekend - http://fuweekend.com/ ;) We have some simple rules: * you can't start anything new; * you have to celebrate something being done - usually with a round of applause; * there are no prizes - only the satisfaction of being done. While there is plenty of coding, we've had designers finish their portfolios, screenwriters finish pilots, an ar…
That sounds amazing! I went to Austin once for a tech conference and the vibe was really amazing. I could really use something like this, though I feel like 20$ of your food is a lot better than 20$ of our food (I'm in Montreal).
Another vote for Montreal. This event sounds like a great idea.
(Already spoke with the organizers about this in another thread. I think they need someone who's organized an event of similar scale. That's not me, but I'm very willing to help out anyone who can take a lead role)