Comment by float4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by float4 | Hacker News Reader

About 5 years ago, I attended a hackathon, as I did every so often.

My team was comprised of CS undergrads and we made something that was technically interesting but not at all marketable. This was fine with us, as we were there to have fun. To us, that was "winning".

However, another team was clearly there to win. Their "leader" was a CS grad student, and they were developing an iOS app that would show you a random weighted complete graph. The task for the human was to build a hamiltonian cycle with minimum edge weight sum, i.e. they had to solve a TSP. Their app only showed very small graphs (<= 5 nodes IIRC) with significant edge weight disparities, such that it was usually trivial to find the correct solution. During their presentation they went on to say that they were using the solved puzzles as input for an AI that could then be used to solve larger TSPs. This was very interesting and valuable they said, as the TSP is relevant for delivery companies, logistics etc.

That grad student must have known that it was pure nonsense, but they actually won. There were people from pretty reputable tech companies in the jury, yet they won.

My teammates and I weren't mad though; to us, and some CS students from other teams who clearly knew what was going on, it was pretty funny.

If your goal is to win a hackathon (or a game jam, or anything similar), your project is there only to support your presentation. It's how you sell your idea what gets you the price, not the project itself - it doesn't even have to work all that well as long as you present it right.

Of course details depend on the judging rules of the particular contest - you "market" your project differently when there's a panel of jurors and differently if it's the contesters that vote on each other's projects. In contests with panels of jurors you can often predict which project each jury member will likely vote on based solely on their professional background.

I've been to countless game jams and my first win (after a long while) was with a simple one-gimmick game that barely managed to not crash during the presentation. If you're there to have fun with technical stuff, you have small (but non-zero) chance of winning, because perfecting your presentation is rarely what people who go to hackathons for fun consider fun ;)

TBH, the best jams often have no voting and no prizes at all :)

I wonder if you might have misinterpreted it. It could have been that the grad student's team was also there for fun, but the game they were playing was "can we sell the judges on complete nonsense."

Honestly, that'd be a fun hackathon in of itself. You'd declare this the stated goal, and at the end of the hackathon there'd be big, dramatic presentations. You'd bring in a half dozen judges who would not be informed of the hackathon's purpose who would judge the projects in earnest, and you could have a couple more judges who'd be judging primarily on the audacity of the fiction.

The Underhanded Hackathon!

Could be the early stages of a Theranos play.

I know it’s probably just me, but most tech startups look like a Theranos play these days. So much technology, so little real value…

Is the trend of "Uber for something something" still a thing?

"The SodaStream of home gunsmithing platforms"

I’m not a scientist, but we’re going to hire the best 100 scientists in the world and turn cheap dirt into valuable rechargeable light-weight batteries.

That doesn't sound that Theranos to me. Theranos was (at least in my opinion) a fantastic sell. Had they been able to pull if off it would have provided huge value to a lot of people.

The problem was that the technology was all fiction.

This is similar to my experience.

Part of the problem is, the entire idea of making the “next big thing”, which will make millions of dollars, in just 48 hours is ridiculous. Even just coming up with the idea is kind of a stretch, but making any sort of prototype and presentation which would seek this idea is very, very rare.

I like the concept of a “game jam” better, because then you’re just making games. Or something like that, where the entire goal is to make a toy project. But then it’s harder to get approval and/or funding, I guess.

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