Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture

Totally ignore is probably stronger than I mean, I take a look, but I don't think it's ever strongly effected my decision.

I also can't speak for the entire industry, this is just what I've seen where I've worked.

Especially in an environment where these "Hackathon Hackers" are already so homogenous.

* Depending on whoever is the "right" group at the moment.

The actual objective of the hackathon is (probably) oriented around the group more so than the individuals. College applications work exactly the same way – top schools could fill their classes with 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA, Porsche-driving philanthropist-of-the-year white or Asian males year after year. But frankly, that school would suck.

A better approach would be to focus on the group. Metrics like: how enjoyable the hackathon was, what cool people did you meet, what did you learn from fellow hackers, and ultimately: how many quality submissions were created. This is ignoring any explicit goals of increasing diversity/inclusion in the field, which is a fairly common theme for hackathons.

One can rightly argue that increasing the diversity of their participants falls well in line with their entire purpose of existing. Even if they're single mindedly optimizing for quality submissions, it's not absurd to hypothesize that more diverse groups create more creative solutions.

It's making a decision on overall group performance, with individuals' culture/gender/age/school/languages/years experience/company background being a proxy for their impact in group performance.

If increasing diversity wasn't an implicit or explicit goal of virtually every hackathon ever, I'd agree with you.

We are living in a technological Cambrian explosion, and it is certainly very exciting to see the many types of hardware, software, and techniques that have emerged in a few short years.

The power that can be wielded by tying together a few components is enormous. Unfortunately the 'Hacker Way' is to glue components together and declare success if the whole thing 'works'. The glue is normally a scripting language of some sort, and the pieces can be enormously powerful, such as an EC2 cluster or an IP messaging framework.

There was a study a while back called 'The Cloud Begins With Coal'. While some may dispute the specifics, the main point is this- computation requires energy. When you integrate components without regard for how much energy is required to exercise them, you can end up with an enormous and inefficient or dangerous system.

Consider Facebook, a case study of the dangerous effects of a hacker system coupled with large amounts of money. They have built an enormous computational infrastructure to automate the task of sharing pictures over a network. Thousands of engineers and large amounts of electricity are being consumed to execute a process that has no clear social benefit, and for which few of the 'customers' would be willing to pay, other than the surveillance agencies.

Why is that? I propose it is due to non-systems thinking, nobody sat down at the beginning to engineer the end-to-end process (much less the business model). A properly engineered system would require a central piece of telecom equipment, say a typical Ericsson switch, and a git-like protocol that stored content on the client side. Boom, no data center required.

Somebody a few days ago demonstrated the ability to delete arbitrary content from the Facebook data center using a Raspberry Pi. Hacker vs. Hacker.

Another example of hacker culture is the NSA - nobody there thought of the world as a complete system, they just hacked together a whole slew of tools to accomplish one part of their mission (SIGINT) without regard for their ultimate customer, the American people.

We need to declare hacker culture a clear and present danger to society.