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
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.
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.
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"
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.
> "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!
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!
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!
I think any idea of discipline demonstrations will get whittled away until its more like battlebots or robot wars
"and then this happened, then this happened, then this feature, then this feature"
Wow that's crazy...
What a joke.
We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.
Imperfections of value.
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.
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.
> ...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?
Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.