Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

This is really to vent my frustration. I've participated in about 6 hackathons in the last year. 4 in the SF Bay area and 2 in NYC. Today, I'm at the Foursquare hackathon in NYC. It seems the majority of people are just talking and networking. Now it is possible that these guys have learned to code without keyboards but I highly doubt it. I am not pissed that people are networking ... this should not be the primary activity. Otherwise, we should call it a bloody mixer!! The thing that really pisses me off is that these chatterboxes are going to show off completed apps ... ones they have not built at the hackathon. Now seriously ... in the few hours at one of these events, you simply cannot create a polished app unless you have a large group of developers who are seriously coding. I have seen such efforts (e.g. at the iOS hackathon at Paypal earlier this year ... people were actually coding inside the auditorium and talking outside).

I'm really frustrated by this state of affairs. I don't come to a hackathon to pitch my latest startup app ... I come to code. In some instances, I've decided not to present at all the end of the hackathon cause most of the other teams are presenting an extremely polished piece of work (again, I have BIG doubts that some of these are done during the event).

Anyways ... vent complete. It would be nice to know I'm not alone.

as someone who regularly competes in hack days and has won a few, there is nothing more annoying than having someone come in for a few hours, add a new feature to an already developed product then enter the whole thing in as a hack, a lot of the time the Judges don't know and it just promotes the tactic to other people...

I've observed this sort of thing in a few coding contests recently - coding contests that were poorly designed. It is quite unfair to people who want to follow the intended spirit, you're right.

Yes, they can be successful, if people are focused.

For example, see this account of a recent OpenBSD hackathon: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2010111509113...

When we run hack days we do simple things like check when the domain was registered, check if its indexed in Google and a few other things but what we also do is have at least two developers on the judging panel that can judge if someone has cheated or not... It does work both ways though, we almost lost a PayPal hack day last year because the judges believed we had worked on the product previously when we had genuinely built it from scratch in 24 hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkKRO4Po_g is the video of our presentation btw :)