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RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

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Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#91
post #73
post #71

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went to sleep and me and another guy spent the entire night locked up in a venue with 200 other people building stuff and bashing our heads against the table, looking for optimizations, hacks, half-assed solutions to near-impossible problems. In recent years, I've…

Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|

True. And it has the same safety implications as in software and security but more obvious since the slop creeps it's way into the physical world: One of my main hobbies is drones. Lately less flying cause of a long track record of crap weather every weekend for like 6 months so I'm more on the building side of things. I would not trust a slop machine to design and build something that weights 4 kilos, carrying a highly flammable lithium(ion or polymer) battery and fly it in a remote field even. Off the top of my head, I can think of 200 ways this could go wrong. And most people with a functioning brain that have watched the news will agree with me. The line between "Claude sloppus is so good man, look at this awesome thing it did" and "Lost control of the drone, it flew into an airfield and crashed into the engine of a plane taking off" is incredibly thin. What pisses me off is that if this happens, regulations will hit those of us that know what they are doing and will make sure this never happens, and not the geniuses who think slop is a viable solution for everything. Same story with the never ending leaks and supply chain attacks which are a direct consequence of sloppers.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#92
post #14

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data.

I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#93
post #14

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data. I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.

Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI).

Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#94
post #89

How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?

> How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?

In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#95
post #14

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

Yes, I ran into this during an internal company hackathon. This was before LLMs. We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations. After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real. We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?

That last bit is why I'll never do one again.

Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#96
post #30
post #21

Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves

I enjoyed "old fashioned" hackathons, which you had 24h to build or play with some technology or API. It has lost its charm (for me)since it moved to be startup-ish like events that you need to pitch a product instead. I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.

retro hackathons will replace retro arcades as gen x retires and millenials are 50+ and have money and kids out of the house. haha.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in bui…

It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".

You suggest doing it with water, perhaps? The same one we use in the toilets? Yuck!

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#99
post #14

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

This has pretty much always been the case. You've never been able to build production-level software in 2 days (not even in the age of AI, no), so it's always been about having a UI with mocked data. I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.

You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#100
post #79
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But then says this means software is “solved” so only hardware hackathons matter. Why? Because ai cannot do hardware, it cannot solder wire, it cannot replace red led with blue one and find current limiting resistor for optimal brightness. It cannot see what part of enclosure needs to be cut. It cannot see the startup transient on the ldo.

> Because ai cannot do hardware It can. > it cannot solder wire Plenty of placement and soldering machines exist that are far faster than humans. They just aren't yet integrated with the bot. For the stuff that is unusual or particularly difficult, just add a human. Same as with code. > it cannot replace red led with blue one and find current limiting resistor for optimal brightness Sure it can. Just add a camera. >…

And one needs to think from the outcome perspective too: maybe it is too hard to cut the part of the enclosure, but can it 3D print a new one hollowed out exactly where needed?
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