[carlio]

Again you're missing my point. I don't care if it's a viable business, I want to hack on something for the sake of hacking.

> You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage

But I want to, that's the whole point! Obviously you can pitch anything. I don't want to.

What you're describing is as perfectly valid '-thon' but it's not, at least in my mind and the mind of the author, a good hackathon. (For the avoidance of doubt I'm not talking specifically about SW whatever that is, but in general).

I guess what I'm yearning for is a return to the demoscene days :)

[exelius]

Well, a good product person can inform the design of your hack and likely improve it. But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.

Recently I have seen a trend of "useless hackathons" where the goal is to produce the coolest and least useful hacks you can think of (like a remote controlled toilet). I think the idea is to free people to just build stuff and not worry about it being useful. These ones tend to be community-organized though, for many of the reasons the original article author mentioned.

[joshstrange]

> But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.

Yeah, it's called my day job :) (In all honesty I'm not a code-monkey at work, I do have input into the future of our product if I didn't I'd probably be working somewhere else) If all that's going to happen is someone different is going to tell me what to build then I'm not interested. But remote controlled toilets? That's something I could get behind haha.