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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

#141

Post by Footprint0521 »

marssaxman wrote: post #135
Footprint0521 wrote: post #133

This makes me so happy, because I have totally made my new side project lately lol I just recently turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller and it took so a little time. It actually makes me laugh I swear the bar with AI now is just the craziest things that you can think of

> turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller That sounds like fun. Do you have anything written up about the project?

I wasn’t planning on it, but it could be kind of fun to do a write up

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#142

Post by Silamoth »

tripledry wrote: post #93
iLoveOncall wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI). Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.

I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#143

Post by zachlatta »

At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years.

It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y

We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#144

Post by torginus »

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…

I dunno, I think I got more out of it than I put in, but it was mostly due to happenstance and knock on events, and my name sounding more familiar to some important people, but this wasn't really in the cards.

Imo if you don't do stuff others dont you wont end up in places others dont, which might be good or bad.

I mean, one of the biggest raises I got was when I brought my dog to the company cookout, and it turned out my boss's boss was a huge dog person, and we bonded over that, and he decided I was a good guy, which was kinda ironic as I was working my arse off to little benefit at that time.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#145

Post by mckn1ght »

win311fwg wrote: post #129
Yizahi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but the spirit of the contest goes out of the window. "-thons" aren't contests, at least not in the traditional sense, they are activities where participants test the limits of their endurance. A marathon, for example, allows runners to see how far they can push themselves running. Likewise, a hackathon gives a place for one to see how far they can push themselves to create something over a short amount of time, be…

I’m not following here. Marathons are very much actual races. They even give out 1st/2nd/3rd place awards and everything.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#146

Post by whattheheckheck »

Silamoth wrote: post #139
klustregrif wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot. Setting up config files for a tool is not making something.…

What is the gold that were all mining for?

Ah yes higher fidelity, external stimulus + human response tuples to feed the ad revenue machine

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#147

Post by smackeyacky »

Hugsbox wrote: post #85
smackeyacky wrote: post #72

Last hackathon I went to our team was beaten by a group that produced a PowerPoint presentation. I have no interest in doing that any more

But... like, how? Was it that interesting of a powerpoint?

[dead]

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#148

Post by win311fwg »

mckn1ght wrote: post #145
win311fwg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the spirit of the contest goes out of the window. "-thons" aren't contests, at least not in the traditional sense, they are activities where participants test the limits of their endurance. A marathon, for example, allows runners to see how far they can push themselves running. Likewise, a hackathon gives a place for one to see how far they can push themselves to create something over a short amount of time, be…

I’m not following here. Marathons are very much actual races. They even give out 1st/2nd/3rd place awards and everything.

It is viable for a race to take place at the same time as a marathon. From a logistics point of view, there is benefit in trying to draw in both those interested in marathons and those interested in racing. But there is a difference in motivation. Choose at random one of the 70,000 registrants of the NYC Marathon and ask them if they plan to win: the answer will almost certainly be no. They are there to see how far they can push themselves only. Whereas in an event that is strictly conducted as a race, generally every participant will tell you that they are seeking the win.

It is also viable for a sales pitch competition to take place at the same time as a hackathon. When we look past the early hackathon days, we can observe a trend towards events hosting both. Similar to marathon/races, appealing to a wider audience helps with logistics. Maybe that is where things get confusing?

Perhaps this is easier for you to reason about with a telethon? Rarely do we find a competitive element show up as being an objective of the event in that setting. Only the endurance component, where telephone operators push themselves to answer phones for periods of time beyond what would be considered normal.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#149

Post by klustregrif »

Silamoth wrote: post #139
klustregrif wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot. Setting up config files for a tool is not making something.…

> Setting up config files for a tool is not making something.

This is like complaining if someone used Unity at a game making hackathon. “They didn’t really bill anything they just configured an existing solution!”. At the core hacking hackathons are about what you deliver not the effort put into it. It’s crazy how people want to turn it into a purity question. People feel threatened because AI has removed a barrier for those whiners not as good at programming as they see themselves. But hackathons where never won by the rules of people who go “I am going to build my own game engine because using existing tools and libraries feels like cheating!”

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#150

Post by plopilop »

axegon_ wrote: post #109
plopilop wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking a…

I mean, this is hardly surprising. Who takes the most points is an accumulative score from subjective opinions(judges, audience, etc.). We didn't win the one in Amsterdam but got second: Around 50 teams began, 20 managed to deliver something, even if the winner is picked at random, that's a 5% chance, which is a very high random chance. When you toss in several senior developers(who at the time worked together in the…

My point is that flashy presentations already were an issue before the rise of LLMs. The evaluation of a hackathon relies on presentations and subjective opinions rather than pure benchmark of technical assets, there is nothing new under the sun here.

You can now win with 20 skills.md files now, you could win with "it would be great to use this sexy tech" 10 years ago.

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