Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 164 posts

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#71

Post by microtonal »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #29

Hackathons, Startup Weekends, etc. aren't really intended to birth the "next great startup". They are primarily a way for you (and me) and fellow people who are better at coding than chit-chat networking to meet some interesting new people, make some friends and if startups are really your thing to maybe meet a cofounder or a business person. I get it, it's extremely frustrating that hackathons, like TechCrunch and t…

3. Found your own company and do your own thing.

I realize that this is news.ycombinator.com, but it's really sad that everything needs to end in entrepreneurism, startups, and money.

In hacker culture, the hack used to be the end, not money or power.

The Theo Deraadts and Werner Kochs are the real hackers of this world. They could have worked for anyone from Google to Facebook and have big paychecks. Instead, they accepted having more modest means to do what they love: hacking on code and being in a position where one can uphold their ethics (and the hacker ethic).

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#72

Post by golergka »

glhaynes wrote: post #59
pgeorgi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the notion of not raising taxes on the rich, that's coming up every now and again. From a 1976 musical, for example: "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." (Peter Stone)

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." — [likely not] John Steinbeck

I guess from US you see that as something negative; but from outside this culture, it actually seems to be one of the best american qualities, to be honest. You're really lucky if you don't know what's it like to live in a country where all the poor people are certain that things will never change for the best and therefore do absolutely nothing about it.

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#73

Post by jmcohen »

golergka wrote: post #68
jmcohen wrote: post #44

Penn's hackathon is by application only. I think this is pretty silly. Here's a quote from a Medium post by one of the event organizers announcing this year's low acceptance rate of 30% [1]: The people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion. I'm just trying to imagine these kids at Penn sitting around a table d…

To be fair, if you're criticising selective hackathon idea, you have to go all the way criticise the whole competitiveness of hackathons altogether. Because "selective hackathons" are just a logical continuation of the idea that hackathon can be won. Personally, I don't yet have a definite opinion on the whole matter, but you certainly can't be OK with one thing and be opposed to it's logical conclusion.

Yes, I think that the idea that a hackathon can be "won" is silly too.

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#76

Post by pgeorgi »

golergka wrote: post #72
glhaynes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." — [likely not] John Steinbeck

I guess from US you see that as something negative; but from outside this culture, it actually seems to be one of the best american qualities, to be honest. You're really lucky if you don't know what's it like to live in a country where all the poor people are certain that things will never change for the best and therefore do absolutely nothing about it.

You contrast "lazy poor" (that support the status quo) with "busy poor" (of which one in a million manages to leave the poor class).

The quote contrasts "known poor" (exploited proletariat) with "delusional poor" (temporarily embarrased millionaires).

Those are orthogonal: there are enough temporarily embarrased millionaires out there that will never "make it" while self-aware exploited proles can be quite the force.

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#77

Post by r00nk »

lazyseq wrote: post #58

It is very mature that you want perspectives and I appreciate people who are not afraid to say what they mean. You touch on a lot of hot topics here including agism, hackathons, "hacker" culture, brogrammers, and so on. I'll try to write a few replies to address your concerns. I am one of these "older engineers" as you describe. Mostly I am well-respected by anyone who works with me because I tend to intimidate, but…

Hey there, one of the young guys here, trying to weasel my way into a job, I have a few questions for you If you don't mind.

You said this:

More likely I am not impressed because your code is terrible and I am shocked that it took you so many weeks and commits to do what you would be expected to finish in 1 day at our office.

I have a github account, and I use it to host a few of my projects. Right now I'm working on writing a operating system. It's been somewhat successful so far, but as operating systems are a deep and complex field, and I'm definitely still learning, there's a lot of embarrassing mistakes and bad code throughout the git log. For example, I just recently learned how to properly write makefiles , and a day on my project was just on writing a somewhat simple in hindsight makefile (because I was reading the man page at the same time). Should I just not host said projects on my github?

Also, when you look at a github profile, what do you look at? Asking because I can probably get more followers if I make more node.js whatever, but I really like my C and I tend to go for more challenging projects then popular ones. Is that a bad idea?

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#79

Post by pgeorgi »

golergka wrote: post #68
jmcohen wrote: post #44

Penn's hackathon is by application only. I think this is pretty silly. Here's a quote from a Medium post by one of the event organizers announcing this year's low acceptance rate of 30% [1]: The people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion. I'm just trying to imagine these kids at Penn sitting around a table d…

To be fair, if you're criticising selective hackathon idea, you have to go all the way criticise the whole competitiveness of hackathons altogether. Because "selective hackathons" are just a logical continuation of the idea that hackathon can be won. Personally, I don't yet have a definite opinion on the whole matter, but you certainly can't be OK with one thing and be opposed to it's logical conclusion.

There are two types of hackathons: The Sun and the OpenBSD type. Most of what is talked here seems to be more of the former, but that term can mean two entirely different things.

For starters, the OpenBSD one can't be "won".

Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

#80

Post by carucez »

Welcome to the future of CS. As technical fields cross into the phase of commonly understood knowledge, the ability to exploit imbalances rises. Opportunity exists everywhere, but we as insiders with our vast technical knowledge are distracted by our awe of capability. We fail to exploit the low hanging fruit that a capitalist might immediately sense. We would rather pursue deeper knowledge within our domain to be masters of our craft.

People selling cell phone mods don't usually know anything about electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or manufacturing; yet they somehow can pull millions of dollars of profits out of plastic cases and LED mods simply by dangling a few slices of pizza in front of a hungry college student.

Point is, exploitation is everywhere -- don't be exploited, and computer science is at the stage where it's simple enough to follow some rules and slap a few APIs together to build a decent mash-up that's never existed before... that a fraction of people are willing to pay for, and "make bank bro".

I hate it. It's not just you feeling this frustration. Just see the writing on the wall, and know that app dev / pipelining of data feeds is going to be as "easy" as programming a VCR in the 90's.

Post reply on HN