8 ms·

RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

284 points by ozcap 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
hacker_88 4mo ago
Prompt-a-ton
- locusofself 4mo ago
  Slopathon
NDlurker 4mo ago
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
- choubli 4mo ago
  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.
- calvinmorrison 4mo ago
  it's easy to do as well. most of these printers can be setup to easily work by catting text directly to /dev/lp0.
ex-aws-dude 4mo ago
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...
- ojo-rojo 4mo ago
  Ha, this is very true. When this happens I have to tell myself "Okay, time to wait out yet another story"
- al_borland 4mo ago
  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.
  - NothingAboutAny 4mo ago
    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.
    - al_borland 4mo ago
      I find basic sites, that were probably put together by the owner’s nephew, rather charming. Much better than AI.
      - kajman 4mo ago
        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?
        Ekaros 4mo ago
        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...
nekiwo 4mo ago
[dead]
ElijahLynn 4mo ago
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!
- marketingess 4mo ago
  [dead]
- calepayson 4mo ago
  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!
  - ElijahLynn 4mo ago
    That's really great to hear! I just woke up 2 hours early this morning with my mind spinning but all sorts of cool hardware projects. I could do that now all feel within reach! Before my list of ideas, never really got much action because I didn't think I could execute on all of them in my lifetime. But now I'm making notes on all my little project ideas because they think once I get the hang of this new way of working then I will be able to execute on way more projects and it is really becoming quite exciting. But this excitement is definitely going to cause me to have a nap today, lol...
sublinear 4mo ago
> 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.
- stackghost 4mo ago
  >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?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
le-mark 4mo ago
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!
- j45 4mo ago
  I thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
- glitchc 4mo ago
  Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  It's all about the pitch the other half.
- aaron695 4mo ago
  [dead]
- yieldcrv 4mo ago
  I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
  - pelagicAustral 4mo ago
    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...
    - makapuf 4mo ago
      "a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...
- 4mo ago
pdntspa 4mo ago
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
- d1sxeyes 4mo ago
  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.
  - pdntspa 4mo ago
    The lack of participation is often one of those things that management will quietly hold against you.
    - a34729t 4mo ago
      mandatory fun
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      The problem in that case is working for a toxic employer, not the hackathon. You need to fix that regardless.
- q8zd3 4mo ago
  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.
  - mnky9800n 4mo ago
    retro hackathons will replace retro arcades as gen x retires and millenials are 50+ and have money and kids out of the house. haha.
deadbabe 4mo ago
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.
- smaudet 4mo ago
  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.
  - kusokurae 4mo ago
    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.
    - fluffybucktsnek 4mo ago
      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.
  - fluffybucktsnek 4mo ago
    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.
kristopolous 4mo ago
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.
- mannanj 4mo ago
  Ah I hear that. Do you think it's more like a self confidence problem? Not to attack or bring you down in any way, just wondering from a self diagnostic and awareness perspective. I feel your way some times too, and when I reframe it and share with others from a place of interest and passion and let go of performance & anxiety, I usually don't come across as total garbage.
brador 4mo ago
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.
- CrzyLngPwd 4mo ago
  Show me the wabi sabi!
ryancnelson 4mo ago
[flagged]
croshan 4mo ago
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 https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite) * https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win 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.
Dig1t 4mo ago
[flagged]
feverzsj 4mo ago
Just ban internet connection.
- sam1522 4mo ago
  just ban the internet lol
yieldcrv 4mo ago
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
ashm1104 4mo ago
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...
kangaroozach 4mo ago
Everyday feels like a hackathon now!
zem 4mo ago
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"
- komali2 4mo ago
  > "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 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!
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  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.
  - christoph 4mo ago
    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.
- adfm 4mo ago
  You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.
- aquariusDue 4mo ago
  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.
armchairhacker 4mo 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
- dvh 4mo ago
  >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.
  - ssl-3 4mo ago
    > 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 https://github.com/aimoda/rigol-dho824-mcp
    - 4mo ago
d_tr 4mo ago
> 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!
- fzeroracer 4mo ago
  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.
axegon_ 4mo ago
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.
- junon 4mo ago
  Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|
  - axegon_ 4mo ago
    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.
smackeyacky 4mo ago
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
- Hugsbox 4mo ago
  But... like, how? Was it that interesting of a powerpoint?
  - necovek 4mo ago
    They also vibe-coded a PowerPoint clone ;-)
  - smackeyacky 4mo ago
    [dead]
sameersri2004 4mo ago
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.
- deaux 4mo ago
  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.
pelagicAustral 4mo ago
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.
flawn 4mo ago
Owe a lot to them. If you have kiddos in Germany: jugendhackt.org
amelius 4mo ago
How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?
- helsinkiandrew 4mo ago
  > 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
  - sambaumann 4mo ago
    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.
    - amelius 4mo ago
      I bet somewhere in Shenzhen you can actually have a hardware hackaton with an infinite supply of components and a PCB fab around the corner. They should organize this and show us how it is done :)
revlsas 4mo ago
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
jasoneckert 4mo ago
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.
teddyh 4mo ago
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.
JoyenBenitto 4mo ago
[flagged]
killerstorm 4mo ago
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
- tracker1 4mo ago
  If 3D printing were a bit faster, a BYO robot hackathon could have some really cool outputs for different weight/size classes etc.
tracker1 4mo ago
I was a corporate representative of a sponsor of a major hackathon a bit over a decade ago... two of the presentations that stood out to me was one with Google Glasses that allowed the presenter to control the presentation, see the notes slides on his view, while the presentation showed a different deck/slide, using gestures to switch for either. The other presentation that stuck out, iirc, became leet codes.
Footprint0521 4mo ago
This makes me so happy, because I have totally made my new side project lately lol I just recently turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller and it took so a little time. It actually makes me laugh I swear the bar with AI now is just the craziest things that you can think of
- marssaxman 4mo ago
  > turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller That sounds like fun. Do you have anything written up about the project?
  - Footprint0521 4mo ago
    I wasn’t planning on it, but it could be kind of fun to do a write up
- emp17344 4mo ago
  I mean, a quick Google search shows that the web is absolutely inundated with articles and how-to guides on turning guitar hero controllers into MIDI controllers. It seems like a pretty common project.
  - Footprint0521 4mo ago
    Oh 100%! But this still ended up being super fun, and I did mine differently with micro python and a knock off raspberry pi pico (cheaper on Amazon plus usb c) not to mention custom modes (keytar, strum) It’s definitely not rocket science, but I have enjoyed having more control of it directly, as a musician, to tune it to what actually makes it make sense and be legitimately playable
Innittech 4mo ago
[dead]
Silamoth 4mo ago
I’m all for hardware hackathons. But I think there’s still a place for software hackathons: Just don’t use LLMs. Generating an entire application with LLMs kinda defeats the point of a hackathon to begin with. It’s supposed to be about showing you can make something in a short time frame. It’s supposed to be about exploring and learning new areas with no long-term commitment. It’s supposed to let you develop your skills and build your portfolio; the time constraint forces you to actually finish something. I can’t imagine going to a hackathon just to not write any code and outsource it all to an LLM. I wonder if any hackathons ban LLMs?
zachlatta 4mo ago
At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years. It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com https://fallout.hackclub.com
_the_inflator 4mo ago
I was never into hackathons. Usually something organized by a company and prizes awarded for something that managers without any Computer Science background or otherwise merit reward. I am only judging the ones I was offered to send in teams but always refused. They appeared to be a rip off and and let's call it as it is: shit show. I don't think that a hackathon solves anything worthwhile. If it would, why not make everything a hackathon? Why don't declare the exception the rule? Good stuff takes effort and time. Crunch mode or death march as I used to call it because with their pale faces after three weeks without any free time, was generally something I despised and prevented in the first place. I build the only successful Web Application in Financial Systems in a global bank and I knew we need to think smarter with all the responsibility and accountability. So we always sharpened our axe first. I let my best devs work as much and long as they wanted because if you are in the zone, you exploit it. And yes, quite many freely worked at home on weekends as well, but I pushed them hard to not put this into the normal work stream in order to prevent any fake improvements that come to hurt them. I gave them the promise to any free time they wanted and when they wanted given that they take care of their absence beforehand. I was never disappointed and people work differently. One guy worked month on no end, and suddenly hit me 9 pm "Boss, I need a break, give me two weeks starting tomorrow." Always granted without any hesitation. Sprints? 80%, not 120% masked as "challenge". No dev gets bored. They need the feeling of being free to do their craft. It worked best. That's why I never personally as well as with any of my teams took part ever in a hackathon.

284 points by ozcap 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

hacker_88 4mo ago

Prompt-a-ton

locusofself 4mo ago
Slopathon

NDlurker 4mo ago

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

choubli 4mo ago
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.
calvinmorrison 4mo ago
it's easy to do as well. most of these printers can be setup to easily work by catting text directly to /dev/lp0.

ex-aws-dude 4mo ago

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...

ojo-rojo 4mo ago
Ha, this is very true. When this happens I have to tell myself "Okay, time to wait out yet another story"
al_borland 4mo ago
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.
- NothingAboutAny 4mo ago
  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.
  - al_borland 4mo ago
    I find basic sites, that were probably put together by the owner’s nephew, rather charming. Much better than AI.
    - kajman 4mo ago
      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?
      - Ekaros 4mo ago
        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...

nekiwo 4mo ago

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ElijahLynn 4mo ago

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!

marketingess 4mo ago
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calepayson 4mo ago
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!
- ElijahLynn 4mo ago
  That's really great to hear! I just woke up 2 hours early this morning with my mind spinning but all sorts of cool hardware projects. I could do that now all feel within reach! Before my list of ideas, never really got much action because I didn't think I could execute on all of them in my lifetime. But now I'm making notes on all my little project ideas because they think once I get the hang of this new way of working then I will be able to execute on way more projects and it is really becoming quite exciting. But this excitement is definitely going to cause me to have a nap today, lol...

sublinear 4mo ago

> 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.

stackghost 4mo ago
>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?
- deleted 4mo ago
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le-mark 4mo ago

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!

j45 4mo ago
I thought I was the only one wondering why people are preparing in advanced with polish and not much to build the day of.
glitchc 4mo ago
Judges are managers with typical mediocre technicality
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
It's all about the pitch the other half.
aaron695 4mo ago
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yieldcrv 4mo ago
I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon
- pelagicAustral 4mo ago
  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...
  - makapuf 4mo ago
    "a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...
4mo ago

pdntspa 4mo ago

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

d1sxeyes 4mo ago
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.
- pdntspa 4mo ago
  The lack of participation is often one of those things that management will quietly hold against you.
  - a34729t 4mo ago
    mandatory fun
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    The problem in that case is working for a toxic employer, not the hackathon. You need to fix that regardless.
q8zd3 4mo ago
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.
- mnky9800n 4mo ago
  retro hackathons will replace retro arcades as gen x retires and millenials are 50+ and have money and kids out of the house. haha.

deadbabe 4mo ago

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.

smaudet 4mo ago
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.
- kusokurae 4mo ago
  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.
  - fluffybucktsnek 4mo ago
    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.
- fluffybucktsnek 4mo ago
  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.

kristopolous 4mo ago

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.

mannanj 4mo ago
Ah I hear that. Do you think it's more like a self confidence problem? Not to attack or bring you down in any way, just wondering from a self diagnostic and awareness perspective. I feel your way some times too, and when I reframe it and share with others from a place of interest and passion and let go of performance & anxiety, I usually don't come across as total garbage.

brador 4mo ago

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.

CrzyLngPwd 4mo ago
Show me the wabi sabi!

ryancnelson 4mo ago

[flagged]

croshan 4mo ago

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 https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite) * https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win 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.

Dig1t 4mo ago

[flagged]

feverzsj 4mo ago

Just ban internet connection.

sam1522 4mo ago
just ban the internet lol

yieldcrv 4mo ago

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

ashm1104 4mo ago

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...

kangaroozach 4mo ago

Everyday feels like a hackathon now!

zem 4mo ago

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"

komali2 4mo ago
> "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 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!
moffkalast 4mo ago
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.
- christoph 4mo ago
  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.
adfm 4mo ago
You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.
aquariusDue 4mo ago
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.

armchairhacker 4mo 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

dvh 4mo ago
>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.
- ssl-3 4mo ago
  > 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 https://github.com/aimoda/rigol-dho824-mcp
  - 4mo ago

d_tr 4mo ago

> 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!

fzeroracer 4mo ago
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.

axegon_ 4mo ago

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.

junon 4mo ago
Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|
- axegon_ 4mo ago
  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.

smackeyacky 4mo ago

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

Hugsbox 4mo ago
But... like, how? Was it that interesting of a powerpoint?
- necovek 4mo ago
  They also vibe-coded a PowerPoint clone ;-)
- smackeyacky 4mo ago
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sameersri2004 4mo ago

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.

deaux 4mo ago
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.

pelagicAustral 4mo ago

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.

flawn 4mo ago

Owe a lot to them. If you have kiddos in Germany: jugendhackt.org

amelius 4mo ago

How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?

helsinkiandrew 4mo ago
> 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
- sambaumann 4mo ago
  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.
  - amelius 4mo ago
    I bet somewhere in Shenzhen you can actually have a hardware hackaton with an infinite supply of components and a PCB fab around the corner. They should organize this and show us how it is done :)

revlsas 4mo ago

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

jasoneckert 4mo ago

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.

teddyh 4mo ago

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.

JoyenBenitto 4mo ago

[flagged]

killerstorm 4mo ago

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

tracker1 4mo ago
If 3D printing were a bit faster, a BYO robot hackathon could have some really cool outputs for different weight/size classes etc.

tracker1 4mo ago

I was a corporate representative of a sponsor of a major hackathon a bit over a decade ago... two of the presentations that stood out to me was one with Google Glasses that allowed the presenter to control the presentation, see the notes slides on his view, while the presentation showed a different deck/slide, using gestures to switch for either. The other presentation that stuck out, iirc, became leet codes.

Footprint0521 4mo ago

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

marssaxman 4mo ago
> turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller That sounds like fun. Do you have anything written up about the project?
- Footprint0521 4mo ago
  I wasn’t planning on it, but it could be kind of fun to do a write up
emp17344 4mo ago
I mean, a quick Google search shows that the web is absolutely inundated with articles and how-to guides on turning guitar hero controllers into MIDI controllers. It seems like a pretty common project.
- Footprint0521 4mo ago
  Oh 100%! But this still ended up being super fun, and I did mine differently with micro python and a knock off raspberry pi pico (cheaper on Amazon plus usb c) not to mention custom modes (keytar, strum) It’s definitely not rocket science, but I have enjoyed having more control of it directly, as a musician, to tune it to what actually makes it make sense and be legitimately playable

Innittech 4mo ago

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Silamoth 4mo ago

I’m all for hardware hackathons. But I think there’s still a place for software hackathons: Just don’t use LLMs. Generating an entire application with LLMs kinda defeats the point of a hackathon to begin with. It’s supposed to be about showing you can make something in a short time frame. It’s supposed to be about exploring and learning new areas with no long-term commitment. It’s supposed to let you develop your skills and build your portfolio; the time constraint forces you to actually finish something. I can’t imagine going to a hackathon just to not write any code and outsource it all to an LLM. I wonder if any hackathons ban LLMs?

zachlatta 4mo ago

At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years. It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com https://fallout.hackclub.com

_the_inflator 4mo ago

I was never into hackathons. Usually something organized by a company and prizes awarded for something that managers without any Computer Science background or otherwise merit reward. I am only judging the ones I was offered to send in teams but always refused. They appeared to be a rip off and and let's call it as it is: shit show. I don't think that a hackathon solves anything worthwhile. If it would, why not make everything a hackathon? Why don't declare the exception the rule? Good stuff takes effort and time. Crunch mode or death march as I used to call it because with their pale faces after three weeks without any free time, was generally something I despised and prevented in the first place. I build the only successful Web Application in Financial Systems in a global bank and I knew we need to think smarter with all the responsibility and accountability. So we always sharpened our axe first. I let my best devs work as much and long as they wanted because if you are in the zone, you exploit it. And yes, quite many freely worked at home on weekends as well, but I pushed them hard to not put this into the normal work stream in order to prevent any fake improvements that come to hurt them. I gave them the promise to any free time they wanted and when they wanted given that they take care of their absence beforehand. I was never disappointed and people work differently. One guy worked month on no end, and suddenly hit me 9 pm "Boss, I need a break, give me two weeks starting tomorrow." Always granted without any hesitation. Sprints? 80%, not 120% masked as "challenge". No dev gets bored. They need the feeling of being free to do their craft. It worked best. That's why I never personally as well as with any of my teams took part ever in a hackathon.