My company started running hardware hackathons this year to connect with our community, etc., and we are doing 10 events in total across the US. After our first event we realized that conditioning hackers/makers/learners to build stuff that is "commercially worthy" or "prize worthy" takes away from what we set on doing: create a fun and safe place to learn, explore, to push the envelope, to create for the sake of creation. I totally agree with you that we should all take a step back from all the commercial/ego/noise culture and connect as teachers, learners and a community first. We noticed that the more we emphasize the real culture of our events, the better the connection, the magic and creation. Plus the real cool kids don't have to act cool...they just are. Long term, you can't fake authenticity.
Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
161–164 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
#162I'm a CS freshman at UMD who's been getting into the hackathon scene in the past months (been to 3, am somewhat involved with the HH facebook groups). I've been involved with the software community for about 5 years though, and programmed for 7. > It bothers me to see how obsessed with success this generation of "hackers" seems to be. Yeah, there's a lot of people who want to get rich by making a startup, and recentl…
> While this does display narcissism, I think you're misinterpreting "we are not criminals". I think in context this person is saying that "hacking" in the context of hackathons is not what movie hackers do, breaking into networks and stealing sensitive information. "Criminals" do things like try to watch DVDs on Linux. "Criminals" use encryption without giving the US government a key[2]. "Criminals" design platforms…
Yeah. But this isn't what most "Hackathon Hackers" mean by "We are not criminals". It's also not what OP was referring to when he criticize lack of regard for civil liberties and tolerance of "unfair business practices".
I agree with most of what you said, but as I understand you are arguing that radio should have been left unregulated? Wireless wouldn't work on the scale we use it today if it weren't for these regulations. Or maybe today we would get by, working around interference, but 15 years ago we wouldn't have had the tech. I'm sure there are better methods of regulation than partitioning the spectrum, but radio anarchy is not one of them.
Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While this does display narcissism, I think you're misinterpreting "we are not criminals". I think in context this person is saying that "hacking" in the context of hackathons is not what movie hackers do, breaking into networks and stealing sensitive information. "Criminals" do things like try to watch DVDs on Linux. "Criminals" use encryption without giving the US government a key[2]. "Criminals" design platforms…
Yeah. But this isn't what most "Hackathon Hackers" mean by "We are not criminals". It's also not what OP was referring to when he criticize lack of regard for civil liberties and tolerance of "unfair business practices". I agree with most of what you said, but as I understand you are arguing that radio should have been left unregulated? Wireless wouldn't work on the scale we use it today if it weren't for these regul…
> 15 years ago we wouldn't have had the tech
There was a whole community of dare I say hackers who were ready to innovate around spectrum crowding at the dawn of the 20th century. They were systematically removed from participating in radio technology, except as passive consumers. Anarchy was working just fine up until then.
With all the power that Clearchannel has had, they could have been helping to be part of that solution. Instead they've been allowed to be lazy, and reap the benefits of a monopoly without contributing back in terms of advancement on this problem.
Knowing whether or not they could have been able to do so is of course an open question and as we learn how to do it right we can extrapolate whether they were capable of it. We could have had Frequency-hopping spread spectrum deployed decades earlier had the right mind been put to the task, and had patents not gotten in the way.
Re: Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't make a programming language. You probably aren't the guy to do it. There is most likely exactly two people in this world in every generation qualified to do this well and you probably are not one of them. Know how they got qualified to do this? By actually doing it, and by reading about others who were doing it. Modern language developers have so many shoulders of giants to sit on it's not even funny, but eve…
No, making more languages is not a solution. If your language solves a problem that others cannot do as easily, great. The point is that even if you succeed on one level, you can create messes. One of the largest problems we have today in computer science is all the mess of poorly constructed languages. Just because something is widely used does not make it good, rather there are other realities like popularity conte…
> Making languages is a very hard thing. If you don't understand why this is true, you are probably one of these people that should not make a language.
It is a very hard thing, which is precisely why we should be doing it. We do not do things because they are easy, but becuase they are hard, and because the practice makes us better at it. I have maintained a language for a living and I know what mess you're talking about. There are real systems out there that languages can be useful for, and even if you're right that the 99% of the time they cause more harm than good the 1% I would argue justifies the 99 failed attempts in practice.