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.
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"
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
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 :|
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!
Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
It's all about the pitch the other half.
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.
It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.
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 thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
It’s been like that for at least a decade.
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"
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.
You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.
> "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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 second that, hardware hackathons were and will be the game changers, software hackathon is a done thing, shouldn't be taken much seriously tbh...
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.
> 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.
Prompt-a-ton
Slopathon
Just ban internet connection.
just ban the internet lol
Everyday feels like a hackathon now!
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...
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.
This validates my prediction that GenAI will be the Comic Sans of the late 2020s.
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?
Ha, this is very true. When this happens I have to tell myself "Okay, time to wait out yet another story"
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 :)
[flagged]
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.
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.
In the end you will just be doing stuff with a robot anyway.
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.
> 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?
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
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 lack of participation is often one of those things that management will quietly hold against you.
The problem in that case is working for a toxic employer, not the hackathon. You need to fix that regardless.
mandatory fun
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!