[michaelbuckbee]

Hackathons, Startup Weekends, etc. aren't really intended to birth the "next great startup". They are primarily a way for you (and me) and fellow people who are better at coding than chit-chat networking to meet some interesting new people, make some friends and if startups are really your thing to maybe meet a cofounder or a business person.

I get it, it's extremely frustrating that hackathons, like TechCrunch and the rest of the startup press focus inordinate amounts of attention on lightweight, consumer focused startups that are probably going to go under in a couple months if they ever actually get off the ground. But that is the reality that we live in because that which is easily understood (obviously) gets more attention from more people than other topics which may have more value, but require significant industry knowledge to even understand, much less competitively evaluate.

We fall into this same trap though, as a CS student you probably understand on a much more detailed level what a profound breakthrough it would be to have some sort of technology that would double the speed of database queries, but it's much less likely that you'd really deeply get the impact of a cool "hack" for some chemical process for doubling the rate of some reaction.

So, in summary:

1. Don't despair.

2. Go to hackathons to make stuff and meet people and don't worry about winning them.

3. Found your own company and do your own thing.

[microtonal]

3. Found your own company and do your own thing.

I realize that this is news.ycombinator.com, but it's really sad that everything needs to end in entrepreneurism, startups, and money.

In hacker culture, the hack used to be the end, not money or power.

The Theo Deraadts and Werner Kochs are the real hackers of this world. They could have worked for anyone from Google to Facebook and have big paychecks. Instead, they accepted having more modest means to do what they love: hacking on code and being in a position where one can uphold their ethics (and the hacker ethic).

[arfliw]

hacking and money are not mutually exclusive. just like music doesn't automatically suck once it's mainstream.

Case in point:

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

-Mark Zuckerberg in his letter to investors at the FB IPO.