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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

#111

Post by KMnO4 »

le-mark wrote: 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!

I did a hackathon many years ago (before LLMs) where I spent a serious amount of effort training a conventional machine learning algorithm and integrating it into a react native app. I had a genuinely impressive team to make this possible given it was 2016.

The winning team bought a bootstrap theme for $35 and made a landing page for a nonexistent app.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#113

Post by afavour »

boscillator wrote: post #107
afavour wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.

> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a proble…

I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#114

Post by aiisjustanif »

ssl-3 wrote: post #79
dvh wrote: 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. >…

Not at the entry price point of a hackathon, which is the point. Using AI in software hackathons are magnitudes cheaper than AI doing manual labor in hardware hackathons.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#115

Post by dghlsakjg »

afavour wrote: post #102
axegon_ wrote: 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…

Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.

To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#116

Post by Yizahi »

torginus wrote: post #82
le-mark wrote: 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?

Corporate "hackatons" are often a mess. We have anything from a truly novel ideas clearly invented right at the hackaton (as was originally intended) which are rough and very unpolished and buggy or even broken, to teams brazenly bringing up developments which clearly were ongoing for months, not even hiding that and showing weeks or months of test and dev results in the eventual presentation. The latter teams won of course every time. I kinda get the business benefits, but the spirit of the contest goes out of the window.

Oh, and don't get me started on the fact that a lot of developers get two relaxed fun days while with catering, networking and basically paid for self-improvement workdays, while QA, supports and other teams are expected to work as usual AND cheer for those participating and watch presentations (thankfully that last is optional).

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#117

Post by yardie »

zem wrote: post #59

as someone who got into linux and open source in the early 90s I will never stop being sad that "hackathon" morphed into a competitive activity, rather than "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively". I guess the latter tends to get called a "dev sprint" these days, but it's always the first thing I think of when I hear "hackathon"

I grew up going to hackathons and they were fairly open ended and collaborative. The recent hackathons I've attended are just a vehicle to get you to use cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Vercel, etc).

More recently, teams have been attending hackathons with an already completed product, using the event to attend VC meetings instead of doing any hacking. And when they invariably win with a well done, complete product they use the media announcements to generate leads. My duct-tape and cardboard hack doesn't look very good but we designed and built it within the team we assembled 48hours ago.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#118

Post by killerstorm »

Hmm, looks like by "hardware hackathons" he really means "making software for more resource-constrained platforms". Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think that's a right name for it. Also adding some soldering to it won't make much difference.

When my daughter was 4 y.o. she went to robotics classes where they assembled a small LEGO robot and made software for it using environment like Scratch. That's a good activity, but my point is that doing some assembly doesn't put the task into entirely different category of difficulty

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#119

Post by Schlagbohrer »

biglyburrito wrote: post #95
torginus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "impro…

Same scummy move as streamers / online personalities having a "contest" for a t-shirt design or logo design, which the streamer will sell for their personal profit while offering nothing but "exposure" to the creator.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#120

Post by newtonianrules »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #115
afavour wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.

To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.

And it drives the mini-MENSAs of the world insane.
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