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 :|
RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
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Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#92Hackathons 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!
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
#93Hackathons 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.
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
#94How 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
#95Hackathons 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?
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
#96Can 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.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#97Enterprise is just fishing for other people's ideas that they can use as their own
If you truly had a novel and useful idea, someone else can just steal it and recreate it themselves
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#98Earlier 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".
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#99Hackathons 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
#100Earlier 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. >…