It's telling how out of touch the evaluators of these things are that the grand winner designed a tool that's been in use by fire services for decades. (Software that predicts fires based on lightening strikes). But you slap LLM on it, and assert that somehow you can replace the arborists and helicopter pilots with drones (as if the human piloting the thing is the expensive part of a multi million dollar vehicle hauling tonnes of water around anyway) and that tricks non-professionals into thinking you're disrupting a field.
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zachlatta
One easy answer to the slopification of hackathons is to turn to the same method that game jams use - peer voting.
We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.
acheong08
Oh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.
It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.
Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.
There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)
HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)
Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.
I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips away daily at one's moral compass.
P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.
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azalemeth
From TFA:
> Some other funny ideas I saw: [...]
> "Palantir for tech teams". "A real-time security guardian sitting silently on every dev's machine, scanning their screen, code, and communications to proactively prevent vulnerabilities."
Jesus hell, people – normal people, okay those who code at presumably _some_ sort of high level like you and I – think that is not only a good idea but a novel idea and one worthy of funding.
> Front-end is almost everything. There is 0 burden of proof that your project is actually functional or that it has any practical application. As long as it looks cool, investors and non-technical people will eat that up.
This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.
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yitchelle
On the other hand, if AI enables ideas like wildfire prediction to the come into the public's view, it should be encouraged, right? imho, its seems to be the right app to have won.
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RugnirViking
yeah. To some extent hackathons always were this - ideas and frontend only.
It's up to you to decide whether to play the game or make something actually worth making, for your own pride.
This is also true to a lesser extent of the wider world.
kypro
It's crazy how some non-tech people have become so LLM-brained they think LLMs are the tool for literally everything.
I've had a few conversations like this at my company now:
- Why do we need Elasticsearch? Can't we just ask an LLM to return matches? (We have many gigabytes of text data to search).
- Why do we need to write code to determine what actions to take when does x, y, or z happens? Can't we just ask an LLM? (We have 1,000s of concurrent events which require high throughput rates, and even if we could scare it the cost of using an LLM for this would be absurd).
- Why is it going to take a week to build x. John built a prototype in an afternoon using Claude. (0 understanding of the difference between using an LLM to build a prototype and reworking core behaviour in an existing production application with hundreds of thousands of users – something that requires extensive human planning and review even if an LLM can make most of the code changes.
show comments
yieldcrv
> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that
It's telling how out of touch the evaluators of these things are that the grand winner designed a tool that's been in use by fire services for decades. (Software that predicts fires based on lightening strikes). But you slap LLM on it, and assert that somehow you can replace the arborists and helicopter pilots with drones (as if the human piloting the thing is the expensive part of a multi million dollar vehicle hauling tonnes of water around anyway) and that tricks non-professionals into thinking you're disrupting a field.
One easy answer to the slopification of hackathons is to turn to the same method that game jams use - peer voting.
We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.
Oh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.
It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.
Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.
There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)
HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)
Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.
I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips away daily at one's moral compass.
P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.
From TFA:
> Some other funny ideas I saw: [...] > "Palantir for tech teams". "A real-time security guardian sitting silently on every dev's machine, scanning their screen, code, and communications to proactively prevent vulnerabilities."
Jesus hell, people – normal people, okay those who code at presumably _some_ sort of high level like you and I – think that is not only a good idea but a novel idea and one worthy of funding.
I realise HN is not Reddit, but I do think this comic rather fits the bill... https://i.redd.it/kyoumnqngzih1.png
> Front-end is almost everything. There is 0 burden of proof that your project is actually functional or that it has any practical application. As long as it looks cool, investors and non-technical people will eat that up.
This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.
On the other hand, if AI enables ideas like wildfire prediction to the come into the public's view, it should be encouraged, right? imho, its seems to be the right app to have won.
yeah. To some extent hackathons always were this - ideas and frontend only.
It's up to you to decide whether to play the game or make something actually worth making, for your own pride.
This is also true to a lesser extent of the wider world.
It's crazy how some non-tech people have become so LLM-brained they think LLMs are the tool for literally everything.
I've had a few conversations like this at my company now:
- Why do we need Elasticsearch? Can't we just ask an LLM to return matches? (We have many gigabytes of text data to search).
- Why do we need to write code to determine what actions to take when does x, y, or z happens? Can't we just ask an LLM? (We have 1,000s of concurrent events which require high throughput rates, and even if we could scare it the cost of using an LLM for this would be absurd).
- Why is it going to take a week to build x. John built a prototype in an afternoon using Claude. (0 understanding of the difference between using an LLM to build a prototype and reworking core behaviour in an existing production application with hundreds of thousands of users – something that requires extensive human planning and review even if an LLM can make most of the code changes.
> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.
I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints
So this doesnt surprise me
And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that