[afavour]

Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.

[boscillator]

> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design

I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.

[afavour]

I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.

[inigyou]

Aren't most hackathons pseudo-startup pitching competitions? At the very least, they've always been about established companies trying to extract value from newcomers.

[dghlsakjg]

To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.

[9rx]

Absolutely. Which is why the hackathon was conceived: to serve as an escape from the real world.

All good things must come to an end, I suppose.

[asveikau]

When I first read about the hackathon concept, it was a bunch of OpenBSD developers getting together to work on stuff like cryptography or drivers. I think it was from Facebook where I first heard it as some bullshit corporate event. The idea of a "winner" seems to misunderstand what should be a goal. It's not a competition. It's collaboration.

[sgerenser]

I’ve always heard of hackathons as being a competition with judges and a winner.

[asveikau]

Sounds like you only know the corporate or post-commercialized version, and not the original concept. The entire point of my comment.

[newtonianrules]

And it drives the mini-MENSAs of the world insane.