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 lost interest: And at this point I don't think I'll ever join another one: I recently got an email about one that finished and the winner was a guy who created something like an "AI team of engineers". What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? As a friend of mine likes to say, "you hit rock bottom and started drilling into the rock now".
At least with hardware, people are actually making something and have to use their brains.
True. And it has the same safety implications as in software and security but more obvious since the slop creeps it's way into the physical world: One of my main hobbies is drones. Lately less flying cause of a long track record of crap weather every weekend for like 6 months so I'm more on the building side of things. I would not trust a slop machine to design and build something that weights 4 kilos, carrying a highly flammable lithium(ion or polymer) battery and fly it in a remote field even. Off the top of my head, I can think of 200 ways this could go wrong. And most people with a functioning brain that have watched the news will agree with me. The line between "Claude sloppus is so good man, look at this awesome thing it did" and "Lost control of the drone, it flew into an airfield and crashed into the engine of a plane taking off" is incredibly thin. What pisses me off is that if this happens, regulations will hit those of us that know what they are doing and will make sure this never happens, and not the geniuses who think slop is a viable solution for everything. Same story with the never ending leaks and supply chain attacks which are a direct consequence of sloppers.
> 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 building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.
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 problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
When I first read about the hackathon concept, it was a bunch of OpenBSD developers getting together to work on stuff like cryptography or drivers. I think it was from Facebook where I first heard it as some bullshit corporate event. The idea of a "winner" seems to misunderstand what should be a goal. It's not a competition. It's collaboration.
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 about, and talking with confidence was all it took.
We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
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 same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.
I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time
Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result.
The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time.
Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
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 "improvements".
Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this.
It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea.
The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.
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.
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).
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.
You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.
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.
I'm ok with them. It's all the stuff I'm weak on: pitching, making eye-contact, telling convincing stories, and engaging audience. I suck at this.
Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at.
Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend.
This is the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.
Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.
That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.
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"
> "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively".
G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.
There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW
They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!
Practically all corporate backed or organized ones are more or less lots of job interview tasks running in parallel, so they get lots of work for free on a problem they really should've paid people to solve, and get to pick the result they like most. I've always found the idea too exploitative to ever join.
I went to a London one once and this was totally my impression of it. The free beer and food was a drop in the bucket for what the massive corporate got out of it at the end.
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.
The author notes that vibecoding has entirely replaced coding in hackathons (where speed is essential, bugs are tolerated, and only the demo is judged). I agree.
But then says this means software is “solved” so only hardware hackathons matter. Why?
If anything, I think software hackathons have become more useful, because ideas have become more useful. Even if ideas are cheap, not everyone has 24-72 hours for a prototype, in a creativity-inducing space that may inspire better details.
And software isn’t solved: some ideas still require low-level knowledge and skill to translate into prototypes, especially if the hackathon judges require some functionality.
Whether your purpose of a hackathon is:
- Make a prototype, then if it seems useful afterwards rewrite it into a full product
- Make a prototype that seems useful to attract investors (whether you start a company that may not launch or apply to a company that wants your creativity)
- As an organizer, find ideas related to your company
>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.
And one needs to think from the outcome perspective too: maybe it is too hard to cut the part of the enclosure, but can it 3D print a new one hollowed out exactly where needed?
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.
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
The conference scene is not doing that much better either.
I begrudgingly went to one a few months ago and I was absolutely shocked, it was a two-day one, not even going to mention the programming language because at this point it probably doesn't matter, since only about 20% (tops) of the talks/presentations were strictly about programming.
A small assemble of self-defined industry champions took the floor once after the other to preach about their holiness and the outstanding work they have done for the community in areas that bordered software engineering as much as Iceland limits the Indian Ocean.
It was lecture after lecture, it was lifestyle, it was virtue-signaling, it was everything but programming. There was a single ham-fisted workshop that did not even had enough time to build on the basics of what was trying to accomplish, and there was a guy who I had as a personal hero of sorts that went in there to talk about some internal package manager drama.
There's something nice about holding your work in your hands. Tangible work is also both easy to explain, and hard to fake. So going the hardware route felt fun, fulfilling, and scored well.
I was thinking about this the other day. Now that software is within reach of most idea makers, it opens the door for a much deeper level of tinkering. With very affordable, if not slow, 3d printers, and an abundance of hardware interfaces, I think we are going to see some really great weekend projects that will turn into beautiful, "where has this been until now" utility for the world!
I'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!
My little brother is a beach lifeguard but in the last year he’s pumped out so many incredible projects. It feels like he’s been unleashed. Such a cool era!
The height of hackathons was back in the early to mid 2010s in my opinion. That was the height of the indie game scene and mobile app goldrush - and there were plenty of sponsors willing to contribute real $$, prizes, and swag - all of which were necessary to build the excitement around the event.
I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).
But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.
I like the fax machine idea. Reminds me of an idea I had. Get some receipt printers for my friends and we can print to each other's printers to send text messages
That brings back memories. I once built an XHTML page served over WAP 2.0 (on 2G networks) from my home server that could send messages directly to the printer in my mother's office. It was incredibly clunky, but a lot of fun. I forgot to tell her before I tried it, so random pages just started coming out of the printer one day.
You get what you incentivize. Just go back to the roots and remove any and all judging and awards. The incentive should be to get things done in a project, not to “win” a hackathon.
> How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?
In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board
We did this once at a traditional hackathon - we took a food dehydrator and wired up a temp sensor and raspberry pi, wrote PID controls and turned it into a 3D printer filament dryer.
The moment Opus 4.6 came into existence, the RIP was software with them and unfortunately now making software is ready. Even though thinking a particular solution in a hackathon still makes sense, when it comes to making real physical solutions now that makes no sense. That's why I get our day of hackathons like in the future.
Opus 4.6? More like Sonnet 3.5. The last Hackathon I did was almost 2 years ago. I was probably the only one there doing agentic coding, or at least I didn't meet anyone else who did (some people did ask questions to ChatGPT). We won. We wouldn't have won if I'd coded by hand.
Someone was bragging to me about their new AI startup a few months ago. I went to look at their website. It was some AI slop. I checked out the code for their form to register interest for the launch… it wasn’t setup at all. It was just a form that went nowhere. They had an idea, told AI to make a site about it, didn’t bother replacing the boilerplate to make it work, hosted it, and then started bragging to their friends about how they were going to be rich.
there's an Ice cream shop in my city that has obviously generated all their signage and menus and everything else, even on their website the photos section has AI generated people smiling and happy next to the sign.
I get that it's a small business that has probably saved a couple of G's on design/code but it's all so sloppy and obvious.
I'll even excuse the ones with food photos that look like they were taken with a feature phone. New places that can't even bother to take photos of their own menu are a massive red flag to me. Where else are they cutting corners?
I absolutely despise food delivery sites where there is either "example picture" or AI generated picture on food item. Why even bother? I understand that food-photography needs some level of skill, but still maybe bad photo of real thing is lot better than fake photo of fake thing...
I find that even looking at a teenager's crappy Sonic the Hedgehog fan artwork is much more pleasant than looking at impeccably machine-drafted AI slop. It sounds like a bit of a handwave to talk about how much "soul" an art piece has or doesn't have, but there's a certain something there that's a product of human experience and (so far) can only come with that, that manifests in every human-created piece. So I'm at the point where the only AI-generated art I can tolerate is fictional: to wit, the little crayon doodles Diana draws for you in Pragmata.
There's a new bakery that opened up near me and they have signage on their windows with clearly AI generated images of their food. How the hell do they think that is going to appeal to a potential customer?
Well then that person was already making "stupid" things. Boy does it make me mad when someone makes something that is interesting to them and isn't up to my personal standards! Everyone is so dumb but I am so smart, I know better. I'm so cool and talk about the most interesting things :)
> As software subtends to becoming more and more "solved" ...
Really? Maybe if we do not care about robustness, elegance, coherence, consistency and generally anything beyond making a buck and leaving more waste behind... sure!
Reading the post made me quite sad because it felt like the author didn't understand the actual purpose of a hackathon and just shit out some AI crap tied to a raspberry pi and pat themselves on their back.
At least game jams still carry on that general spirit and the people that try to put together stuff with AI immediately make it obvious.
> ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code...
> ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task...
The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?
Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive difference in the outcome of the project.
It's the rotary phone and the raspberry pi, of course. Don't gatekeep.
The fact that microcontrollers are so cheap now means for most (but, sure, not all) applications they're strictly superior in every way compared to e.g. 555 timers and LM386 amplifiers, or whatever. This is because, critically, you can debug and reprogram a micro. To do the equivalent with a 555 timer means, at minimum, de-soldering a bunch of components and probably poking around with a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope.
What's more, you can get a full tcp/ip stack in a surprisingly small and low-power package these days. No need to futz with analog telemetry, or even SPI/I2C unless you really need to.
The "hack" in TFHackathon is altering the function of a phone. Who cares if they used a ras pi to do it vs something else? In what possible way does that diminish their feat?
On the contrary, I think software hackathons could really hit a golden age where we see how far people can push the limits of what we ever thought possible within 24 hours or a weekend through the use of AI. Less “pretty UI with mock data” and more fully working products ready for the consumer market.
I don't think you understand the goal of a hackathon. They aren't (or weren't) VC pitch sessions.
You don't run marathons to be usane bolt, you don't go to hackathons to land VC deals.
24 hours of non stop AI usage doesn't sound fun. It sounds hateful and demotivating, you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do.
The problem is my friend you're right but people who tend to browse this website are no longer engineers who would also understand this; it's mostly HR, Managerial staff, and jaded engineers who never enjoyed implementation details, and who are presently trying to convince everyone else implementation details are no longer of relevance.
I see this being thrown sometimes, but, honestly, it feels like a "HN is becoming reddit" situation. Would be interesting to see a study or a review of recent comments to confirm if that's really true.
I think it's you who has a very narrow vision of what a hackathon can be. Hackathons can both be about developing your programming skills or coming up with, then presenting new and interesting ideas.
In a sense, the latter is kind of about "landing VC deals", but replace VC with possibly a different audience.
I think this narrowness of mindset is more notable in the last paragraph: "...you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do." In my perspective, what I think OP is saying, and I can personally see, is not about what a robot can do (at least no more than when experimenting with a different language/framework/library/etc.), but how far can you shape and accomplish your idea into reality using AI.
I've found most hackathons not personally fulfilling because you can only get small stuff done and finalize maybe a happy path or two, accompanied by some rushed slides, before you run out of time. The AI really changes this and you can actually deeply exhaust an idea.
It's just gatekeeping. It should make them super cool. "Well you have to have good ideas and skills to do anything with AI or it's just slop!" Ok, then it sounds like nothing changed.
Is participation in your off time mandatory? If so, the problem is not hackathons. If not, why not just… not participate? The folks who do often enjoy working on the problems, networking, etc., so I’m not sure killing them all together is particularly fair to folks who do get a lot out of them.
I enjoyed "old fashioned" hackathons, which you had 24h to build or play with some technology or API. It has lost its charm (for me)since it moved to be startup-ish like events that you need to pitch a product instead.
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.
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 lost interest: And at this point I don't think I'll ever join another one: I recently got an email about one that finished and the winner was a guy who created something like an "AI team of engineers". What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? As a friend of mine likes to say, "you hit rock bottom and started drilling into the rock now".
At least with hardware, people are actually making something and have to use their brains.
Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|
True. And it has the same safety implications as in software and security but more obvious since the slop creeps it's way into the physical world: One of my main hobbies is drones. Lately less flying cause of a long track record of crap weather every weekend for like 6 months so I'm more on the building side of things. I would not trust a slop machine to design and build something that weights 4 kilos, carrying a highly flammable lithium(ion or polymer) battery and fly it in a remote field even. Off the top of my head, I can think of 200 ways this could go wrong. And most people with a functioning brain that have watched the news will agree with me. The line between "Claude sloppus is so good man, look at this awesome thing it did" and "Lost control of the drone, it flew into an airfield and crashed into the engine of a plane taking off" is incredibly thin. What pisses me off is that if this happens, regulations will hit those of us that know what they are doing and will make sure this never happens, and not the geniuses who think slop is a viable solution for everything. Same story with the never ending leaks and supply chain attacks which are a direct consequence of sloppers.
> 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 building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.
It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".
You suggest doing it with water, perhaps? The same one we use in the toilets? Yuck!
But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...
That may not actually cut trees.
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 problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.
To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.
And it drives the mini-MENSAs of the world insane.
Absolutely. Which is why the hackathon was conceived: to serve as an escape from the real world.
All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
When I first read about the hackathon concept, it was a bunch of OpenBSD developers getting together to work on stuff like cryptography or drivers. I think it was from Facebook where I first heard it as some bullshit corporate event. The idea of a "winner" seems to misunderstand what should be a goal. It's not a competition. It's collaboration.
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 about, and talking with confidence was all it took.
We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
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 same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.
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 thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
It's all about the pitch the other half.
I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...
"a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...
When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time
Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.
It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.
It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result.
The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time.
Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
It’s been like that for at least a decade.
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 "improvements".
Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this.
It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea.
The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.
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.
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).
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.
You'd be surprised about how much production level software was built in two days — the fact that organizations are usually unable to do that is what gave rise to the agile movement, though it falls apart as soon as management asks for agile coaches and for agile teams to document their processes for others to use.
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.
I'm ok with them. It's all the stuff I'm weak on: pitching, making eye-contact, telling convincing stories, and engaging audience. I suck at this.
Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at.
Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend.
This is the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.
Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.
That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.
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"
> "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively".
G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.
There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW
They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!
Practically all corporate backed or organized ones are more or less lots of job interview tasks running in parallel, so they get lots of work for free on a problem they really should've paid people to solve, and get to pick the result they like most. I've always found the idea too exploitative to ever join.
I went to a London one once and this was totally my impression of it. The free beer and food was a drop in the bucket for what the massive corporate got out of it at the end.
You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.
I think organizations like KDE (during the Akademy) and LibreOffice still run those during the last day of their conferences?
I had the chance to attend the LibreOffice one back in 2023 but life got in the way and I missed it sadly.
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.
The author notes that vibecoding has entirely replaced coding in hackathons (where speed is essential, bugs are tolerated, and only the demo is judged). I agree.
But then says this means software is “solved” so only hardware hackathons matter. Why?
If anything, I think software hackathons have become more useful, because ideas have become more useful. Even if ideas are cheap, not everyone has 24-72 hours for a prototype, in a creativity-inducing space that may inspire better details.
And software isn’t solved: some ideas still require low-level knowledge and skill to translate into prototypes, especially if the hackathon judges require some functionality.
Whether your purpose of a hackathon is:
- Make a prototype, then if it seems useful afterwards rewrite it into a full product
- Make a prototype that seems useful to attract investors (whether you start a company that may not launch or apply to a company that wants your creativity)
- As an organizer, find ideas related to your company
- Have fun, enjoy free food and good company
>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.
> It cannot see what part of enclosure needs to be cut.
Challenge accepted.
> It cannot see the startup transient on the ldo.
It can see that using the same tools we use to observe such things. https://github.com/aimoda/rigol-dho824-mcp
And one needs to think from the outcome perspective too: maybe it is too hard to cut the part of the enclosure, but can it 3D print a new one hollowed out exactly where needed?
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.
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
The conference scene is not doing that much better either.
I begrudgingly went to one a few months ago and I was absolutely shocked, it was a two-day one, not even going to mention the programming language because at this point it probably doesn't matter, since only about 20% (tops) of the talks/presentations were strictly about programming.
A small assemble of self-defined industry champions took the floor once after the other to preach about their holiness and the outstanding work they have done for the community in areas that bordered software engineering as much as Iceland limits the Indian Ocean.
It was lecture after lecture, it was lifestyle, it was virtue-signaling, it was everything but programming. There was a single ham-fisted workshop that did not even had enough time to build on the basics of what was trying to accomplish, and there was a guy who I had as a personal hero of sorts that went in there to talk about some internal package manager drama.
NEXT! never again. It's all rotten to the core.
Nearly all my hackathon projects were hardware, back in college.
A couple examples (both from HackPrinceton, which had the best EE labs):
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite)
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win (a "moonshot" idea)
There's something nice about holding your work in your hands. Tangible work is also both easy to explain, and hard to fake. So going the hardware route felt fun, fulfilling, and scored well.
Good times.
I was thinking about this the other day. Now that software is within reach of most idea makers, it opens the door for a much deeper level of tinkering. With very affordable, if not slow, 3d printers, and an abundance of hardware interfaces, I think we are going to see some really great weekend projects that will turn into beautiful, "where has this been until now" utility for the world!
I'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!
My little brother is a beach lifeguard but in the last year he’s pumped out so many incredible projects. It feels like he’s been unleashed. Such a cool era!
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?
They also vibe-coded a PowerPoint clone ;-)
The height of hackathons was back in the early to mid 2010s in my opinion. That was the height of the indie game scene and mobile app goldrush - and there were plenty of sponsors willing to contribute real $$, prizes, and swag - all of which were necessary to build the excitement around the event.
I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).
But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.
I like the fax machine idea. Reminds me of an idea I had. Get some receipt printers for my friends and we can print to each other's printers to send text messages
That brings back memories. I once built an XHTML page served over WAP 2.0 (on 2G networks) from my home server that could send messages directly to the printer in my mother's office. It was incredibly clunky, but a lot of fun. I forgot to tell her before I tried it, so random pages just started coming out of the printer one day.
it's easy to do as well. most of these printers can be setup to easily work by catting text directly to /dev/lp0.
You get what you incentivize. Just go back to the roots and remove any and all judging and awards. The incentive should be to get things done in a project, not to “win” a hackathon.
I second that, hardware hackathons were and will be the game changers, software hackathon is a done thing, shouldn't be taken much seriously tbh...
The implementation that can be achieved at a hackathon is trivial at this point
Enterprise is just fishing for other people's ideas that they can use as their own
If you truly had a novel and useful idea, someone else can just steal it and recreate it themselves
How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?
> How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?
In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board
We did this once at a traditional hackathon - we took a food dehydrator and wired up a temp sensor and raspberry pi, wrote PID controls and turned it into a 3D printer filament dryer.
Just ban internet connection.
just ban the internet lol
The moment Opus 4.6 came into existence, the RIP was software with them and unfortunately now making software is ready. Even though thinking a particular solution in a hackathon still makes sense, when it comes to making real physical solutions now that makes no sense. That's why I get our day of hackathons like in the future.
Opus 4.6? More like Sonnet 3.5. The last Hackathon I did was almost 2 years ago. I was probably the only one there doing agentic coding, or at least I didn't meet anyone else who did (some people did ask questions to ChatGPT). We won. We wouldn't have won if I'd coded by hand.
Prompt-a-ton
Slopathon
Owe a lot to them.
If you have kiddos in Germany: jugendhackt.org
Listening to someone tell you about their AI-coded project is like listening to someone tell you a dream they had last night
"and then this happened, then this happened, then this feature, then this feature"
Wow that's crazy...
Ha, this is very true. When this happens I have to tell myself "Okay, time to wait out yet another story"
Someone was bragging to me about their new AI startup a few months ago. I went to look at their website. It was some AI slop. I checked out the code for their form to register interest for the launch… it wasn’t setup at all. It was just a form that went nowhere. They had an idea, told AI to make a site about it, didn’t bother replacing the boilerplate to make it work, hosted it, and then started bragging to their friends about how they were going to be rich.
What a joke.
there's an Ice cream shop in my city that has obviously generated all their signage and menus and everything else, even on their website the photos section has AI generated people smiling and happy next to the sign. I get that it's a small business that has probably saved a couple of G's on design/code but it's all so sloppy and obvious.
I find basic sites, that were probably put together by the owner’s nephew, rather charming. Much better than AI.
I'll even excuse the ones with food photos that look like they were taken with a feature phone. New places that can't even bother to take photos of their own menu are a massive red flag to me. Where else are they cutting corners?
I absolutely despise food delivery sites where there is either "example picture" or AI generated picture on food item. Why even bother? I understand that food-photography needs some level of skill, but still maybe bad photo of real thing is lot better than fake photo of fake thing...
I find that even looking at a teenager's crappy Sonic the Hedgehog fan artwork is much more pleasant than looking at impeccably machine-drafted AI slop. It sounds like a bit of a handwave to talk about how much "soul" an art piece has or doesn't have, but there's a certain something there that's a product of human experience and (so far) can only come with that, that manifests in every human-created piece. So I'm at the point where the only AI-generated art I can tolerate is fictional: to wit, the little crayon doodles Diana draws for you in Pragmata.
There's a new bakery that opened up near me and they have signage on their windows with clearly AI generated images of their food. How the hell do they think that is going to appeal to a potential customer?
This validates my prediction that GenAI will be the Comic Sans of the late 2020s.
Yeah dumb until it wins a competition. If it's so stupid why are you worried about it?
Bizarre comment. OP didn’t say that they were worried or that AI is stupid. Only that it’s boring to hear someone talk about what their AI made.
Well then that person was already making "stupid" things. Boy does it make me mad when someone makes something that is interesting to them and isn't up to my personal standards! Everyone is so dumb but I am so smart, I know better. I'm so cool and talk about the most interesting things :)
> As software subtends to becoming more and more "solved" ...
Really? Maybe if we do not care about robustness, elegance, coherence, consistency and generally anything beyond making a buck and leaving more waste behind... sure!
Reading the post made me quite sad because it felt like the author didn't understand the actual purpose of a hackathon and just shit out some AI crap tied to a raspberry pi and pat themselves on their back.
At least game jams still carry on that general spirit and the people that try to put together stuff with AI immediately make it obvious.
> We wired a Raspberry Pi...
> ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code...
> ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task...
The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?
Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive difference in the outcome of the project.
>The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?
It's the rotary phone and the raspberry pi, of course. Don't gatekeep.
The fact that microcontrollers are so cheap now means for most (but, sure, not all) applications they're strictly superior in every way compared to e.g. 555 timers and LM386 amplifiers, or whatever. This is because, critically, you can debug and reprogram a micro. To do the equivalent with a 555 timer means, at minimum, de-soldering a bunch of components and probably poking around with a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope.
What's more, you can get a full tcp/ip stack in a surprisingly small and low-power package these days. No need to futz with analog telemetry, or even SPI/I2C unless you really need to.
The "hack" in TFHackathon is altering the function of a phone. Who cares if they used a ras pi to do it vs something else? In what possible way does that diminish their feat?
Everyday feels like a hackathon now!
AI can one-shot hardware interfacing too
I think any idea of discipline demonstrations will get whittled away until its more like battlebots or robot wars
On the contrary, I think software hackathons could really hit a golden age where we see how far people can push the limits of what we ever thought possible within 24 hours or a weekend through the use of AI. Less “pretty UI with mock data” and more fully working products ready for the consumer market.
I don't think you understand the goal of a hackathon. They aren't (or weren't) VC pitch sessions.
You don't run marathons to be usane bolt, you don't go to hackathons to land VC deals.
24 hours of non stop AI usage doesn't sound fun. It sounds hateful and demotivating, you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do.
The problem is my friend you're right but people who tend to browse this website are no longer engineers who would also understand this; it's mostly HR, Managerial staff, and jaded engineers who never enjoyed implementation details, and who are presently trying to convince everyone else implementation details are no longer of relevance.
I see this being thrown sometimes, but, honestly, it feels like a "HN is becoming reddit" situation. Would be interesting to see a study or a review of recent comments to confirm if that's really true.
I think it's you who has a very narrow vision of what a hackathon can be. Hackathons can both be about developing your programming skills or coming up with, then presenting new and interesting ideas.
In a sense, the latter is kind of about "landing VC deals", but replace VC with possibly a different audience.
I think this narrowness of mindset is more notable in the last paragraph: "...you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do." In my perspective, what I think OP is saying, and I can personally see, is not about what a robot can do (at least no more than when experimenting with a different language/framework/library/etc.), but how far can you shape and accomplish your idea into reality using AI.
I've found most hackathons not personally fulfilling because you can only get small stuff done and finalize maybe a happy path or two, accompanied by some rushed slides, before you run out of time. The AI really changes this and you can actually deeply exhaust an idea.
In the end you will just be doing stuff with a robot anyway.
It's just gatekeeping. It should make them super cool. "Well you have to have good ideas and skills to do anything with AI or it's just slop!" Ok, then it sounds like nothing changed.
Ah yes, the eternal truth of "looks matter". It translates to almost everything imaginable, not just people's appearance.
Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT
Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
Is participation in your off time mandatory? If so, the problem is not hackathons. If not, why not just… not participate? The folks who do often enjoy working on the problems, networking, etc., so I’m not sure killing them all together is particularly fair to folks who do get a lot out of them.
The lack of participation is often one of those things that management will quietly hold against you.
mandatory fun
The problem in that case is working for a toxic employer, not the hackathon. You need to fix that regardless.
I enjoyed "old fashioned" hackathons, which you had 24h to build or play with some technology or API. It has lost its charm (for me)since it moved to be startup-ish like events that you need to pitch a product instead.
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.
retro hackathons will replace retro arcades as gen x retires and millenials are 50+ and have money and kids out of the house. haha.
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AI can make hardware. It can also generate the ideas for your next hardware hackathon. Human intelligence is no longer required.
We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.
Imperfections of value.
Show me the wabi sabi!