HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons | Hacker News Reader

HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons

duti.dev

57 pointsmindracer62 comments

It's telling how out of touch the evaluators of these things are that the grand winner designed a tool that's been in use by fire services for decades. (Software that predicts fires based on lightening strikes). But you slap LLM on it, and assert that somehow you can replace the arborists and helicopter pilots with drones (as if the human piloting the thing is the expensive part of a multi million dollar vehicle hauling tonnes of water around anyway) and that tricks non-professionals into thinking you're disrupting a field.

There's a whole class of software people who think the rest of the world is a bunch of pitiful and sadly ignorant apes stuck in the past who just need the loving administration of the clarity, vision and genius of the software engineer to fix all their problems.

This is the reason why the rest of the world rolls their eyes when a software developer starts speaking...

There are the people doing actual work and science to move society forward, and then there's the people who stroll up and confidently peddle their idea to replace them with a barely thought-through app...

The scary part to me is that it actually works. Not practically, but that upper management and whatnot actually buy it.

Most early stage startups around me right now are built on the premise of replacing groups of people. There's a startup strapping sensors and cameras onto blue collar workers in developing countries to take "egocentric" data and train "world models" to the get robots to replace skilled physical labor. Lots of "ambient capture" to then automate away the work of the employees getting recorded.

Even what I'm building right now, which was initially just a tool to help me with my ADHD and memory problems is slowly getting twisted towards the same direction based on where the money is.

I would love to know how to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations.

> I would love to know how to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations.

Wouldn’t we all. It is not possible, actually.

> Wouldn’t we all.

Clearly not. Otherwise Bezos wouldn’t create a culture where employees feel the need to pee in bottles and continue working while a colleague is dead on the floor.

> It is not possible, actually.

I don’t believe that. Sure, if you want to be filthy rich you’ll exploit people, but there are plenty of smaller companies who treat their employees well (some owners have even left their companies to their employees) and genuinely care about customers as people.

Yeah, and these ♥genuinely-caring♥ capitalists always end up either bankrupt, or Bezos.

> I don’t believe that.

Of course not. Bezos is spending a lot to make sure you don’t.

I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Why would Bezos be spending money to make me believe it is possible for small companies who can treat their employees well, all the while making me think even worse of him for how he treats his own employees? That makes no sense.

Bezos doesn’t want you to abolish private property.

If you believe it possible to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations, you will try that instead.

> If you believe it possible to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations, you will try that instead.

No. That is wrong. Saying it is possible to generate less harm within a system does in no way mean I don’t think the system is flawed and rigged and incentives bad behaviour.

Bezos doesn’t mind you thinking that the system is flawed and rigged and incentives bad behaviour.

Bezos is happy as long as you don’t abolish private property.

Ah, sorry, I didn’t realise I was the sole arbiter of private property and it was within my hands to abolish it. I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow, send me the papers.

> The scary part to me is that it actually works. Not practically, but that upper management and whatnot actually buy it.

That “below average” intelligence pool are well represented in upper management. FOMO is a powerful thing, smart people are often tricked by dumb ideas because they don’t want to miss out on something or be perceived to not understand the value of a bad idea

I'm living in this ecosystem right now, and I see this every day. The mentality that "normal people" are beneath them.

I live a fairly social life and enjoy going to karaoke and going on hikes with friends or strangers not in tech/startups, and many of the others in the residency simply can't understand why I'd want to interact with people they perceive as less intelligent than them.

"Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"

I’d take a nice person of average intelligence over a smart asshole any day of the week.

At your service :)

> "Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"

That right there is very telling. They don't know the difference between median and average

> [They] simply can't understand why I'd want to interact with people they perceive as less intelligent than them.

"Who would you have me speak to instead? It’s not like I’m surrounded with geniuses anyway."

> "Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"

Possible response: “And yet they’re all still more intelligent, compassionate, interesting, and a better company than you.”

There are many others: “The average person I know is pretty smart. I’m sorry to hear about your family, though.”

Or: “You’re right, I do indeed not get any value out of listening to you. I feel stupider already.”

Alright, alright, let’s actually try to be kind and change some minds: “There are different kinds of intelligence, and everyone has a full life rich in perspectives that we know nothing about. Making a blanket statement that someone we never met is “stupid” is reductive, lacking in empathy, and stifling to our own personal growth. To put it in your terms: What’s the best <relevant tech stack>? The answer is, of course, that it depends. They all have strengths and weaknesses and to be good you must learn to identify what those are. People are similar. If you only hang out with one type of person, you are the proverbial hammer who sees everything and everyone as nails.”

Anyone trying to express intelligence in a single dimension has already failed to understand the topic.

It's pretty common right here on this platform to call such people "normies". I cringe every time I read it.

Amazingly well put.

I think I've read a short story by Cory Doctorow that explored this misconception.

You just described every single YC company.

The human pilot is not an expensive part of it but it is a dangerous job and when mistakes or issues happen you lose a life you didn't need to lose. Out of all jobs to eliminate that doesn't sound so bad.

Its kind of insulting how many people look at other industries and think they can "solve" the problems with their simple solution. As if the people in these industries havent been thinking about this problem for decades.

Reminds me again of crypto. Lot of stuff being done in banking and payments happens for a reason. Or because someone from outside like politicians meddled into it. And forget that people are extremely gross when it comes to getting their bank balance wrong...

Industries can be trapped in a local optimum. It sometimes a fresh take (and a heavy bag of investor money) is needed to get to a higher level.

Yes. But in my limited experience, the practically useful fresh takes come from people who have immersed themselves deeply into a problem, not from people who spend a weekend with ChatGPT.

I’ve been at multiple hackathons over the past 15y that rewarded impractical or copies of existing products. And I think that’s fine? A hackathon doesn’t have to be about creating something revolutionary IMHO.

Still LLMs do remove most of the fun of hackathons

A large part of the reason that these are multi million dollar vehicles is that it needs to safely sustain a human pilot in it.

Also, that pilot does need to get paid on the 350 days a year that there are no forest fires to be extinguished.

A fuse can sit 99.9999999% of its lifetime in a circuit doing nothing, should we get rid of fuses?

I've literally heard someone say that we should remove the protection circuits because it's two dollars of parts protecting under a dollar of amplifiers.

Yes, the amplifiers are cheap, but the rest of the board isn't and if the amplifiers get blown up that's 1000 dollars in support costs and RMAs, bad customer opinion and a line stoppage to boot.

If a fuse can be replaced by something that's a lot cheaper and also effective.. why not?

Stochastic fuse with false positives and false negatives? No, thanks!

One easy answer to the slopification of hackathons is to turn to the same method that game jams use - peer voting.

We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.

It's crazy how some non-tech people have become so LLM-brained they think LLMs are the tool for literally everything.

I've had a few conversations like this at my company now:

- Why do we need Elasticsearch? Can't we just ask an LLM to return matches? (We have many gigabytes of text data to search).

- Why do we need to write code to determine what actions to take when does x, y, or z happens? Can't we just ask an LLM? (We have 1,000s of concurrent events which require high throughput rates, and even if we could scale it, the cost of using an LLM for this would be absurd).

- Why is it going to take a week to build x. John built a prototype in an afternoon using Claude. (0 understanding of the difference between using an LLM to build a prototype and reworking core behaviour in an existing production application with hundreds of thousands of users – something that requires extensive human planning and review even if an LLM can make most of the code changes).

> It's crazy how some non-tech people have become so LLM-brained (…)

Remove the “non-tech” qualifier and your assertion remains just as true.

Oh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.

It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.

Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.

There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)

HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)

Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.

I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips away daily at one's moral compass.

P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.

> Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out

Yeah. I was an engineer in a startup for a good bit and after a certain point I realized that for us there wasn't any point in actually trying to make working products - a flashy render did so much more than anything working ever would, at least until tens of millions of funding had been raised. Many of the other startups pitching at the same events as us were using off-the-shelf software and saying it was theirs, if they had any demo at all instead of concept renders.

And at that point, having little experience in creating renders, I contented myself with going to conferences, following around my much more charismatic cofounder, and saying tech buzzwords to make the business types smile. They sure love their AI. More than one conference we went to had an itinerary of talks where literally every talk title had "AI" in the name.

I don't think it was a waste. I learned people skills, I can talk to a crowd, pitch ideas confidently to men in suits full of the right words if I have to, and I do think on some level it is actually the right call to not build. Whatever I would have hacked together with me and whoever else was around would not have been the basis for a good product and probably would have calcified bad decisions anyways - better to raise capital before building.

Oh it definitely wasn't a waste for me either. I've gone from an introvert stumbling over trying to explain technical concepts to being able to pitch abstract ideas that check all the right boxes for VCs and whatnot.

Opened a ton of doors after the hackathon. Would've never dreamed of coming over here to SF and being part of the whole startup/VC ecosystem.

Of course most (on-site) Hackathons are best for networking and not for building great software.

The animation in the background is fun, but really impairs readability on mobile. At least there’s Reader mode in browsers, but a pity that the original form isn’t accessible!

Apologies! Not much of a UI guy and I thought I dimmed it sufficiently for the text to be readable. I might reduce the rows of eyes from 4 to 2 for mobile tomorrow morning or whatever helps. Let me know!

I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle

The animation of the background makes this blog very difficult to read :)

is blog page broken or smth?

if I click "Blog" button, there's only 1 entry and it isn't the one posted here

Looks like working as intended.

Use the "archive" button (as per the URL)

I did a hackathon this year. I used to do them 10 years ago when I was a student and the biggest difference is the intention of the hackathon. 10 years ago, it was all about having fun and learning some new and cool (it was where I learned NodeJS) but today, the sentiment is all about "what can GTM tomorrow?" or "what would VCs want to fund?"

I can't say I found the Hackathon I did particularly fun. Nothing thrilling about making Claude do things while drinking the free coke.

> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI.

I attended hackathons in the SF Bay Area where award winning participants had simply made powerpoints

So this doesnt surprise me

And I realized at that point there was an industry of aspirational coders selling a dream of talking to a VC at the hackathons, and I didnt need to be a part of that

> winning participants had simply made powerpoints

Wow. A student of mine told me of more or less the opposite (but also negative) experience: they attended a hackathon where the winning team spent the whole weekend playing cards - and then presented an app they had already built before the hackathon as their contribution. It was obviously much more polished than the weekend projects.

yeah, when I was attending them the trend became to have X% of code done at the hackathon, but given how many external packages are necessary-ish or commonplace to use, it was impossible to enforce

I began using hackathons as a shared focus space to work on side projects, more like a library

But eventually I got totally disillusioned by them in favor of a more higher signal

> Front-end is almost everything. There is 0 burden of proof that your project is actually functional or that it has any practical application. As long as it looks cool, investors and non-technical people will eat that up.

This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.

Investors want something to dream about.

This has been a lesson I learnt very early in my SWE career. This is nothing new sadly, but is a great lesson that not everything is technical expertise, but rather presentation and UI eye candy.

It's not new though. LLMs make it more pervasive, but hackathons have always naturally preferred shiny, cool-looking things. At least, in my experience.

Yes, the modern pointy-haired boss thinks he's the next Steve Jobs visionary and will pitch his shitty internal ERP automation tool project as "the next sleek iPhone-like UI".

(Wish I was joking.)

From TFA:

> Some other funny ideas I saw: [...] > "Palantir for tech teams". "A real-time security guardian sitting silently on every dev's machine, scanning their screen, code, and communications to proactively prevent vulnerabilities."

Jesus hell, people – normal people, okay those who code at presumably _some_ sort of high level like you and I – think that is not only a good idea but a novel idea and one worthy of funding.

I realise HN is not Reddit, but I do think this comic rather fits the bill... https://i.redd.it/kyoumnqngzih1.png

On the other hand, if AI enables ideas like wildfire prediction to the come into the public's view, it should be encouraged, right? imho, its seems to be the right app to have won.

There is already a lot of research on predicting [1] and monitoring [2] wildfires using traditional machine-learning approaches.

How would an LLM be useful in predicting wildfires? A project that incorrectly claims to solve a problem "using AI" has negative value. By proposing a solution that will not actually work, these hackathon participants make a complex challenge seem trivial and take away attention from other, more mature work.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-92171-w [2] https://sites.research.google/gr/wildfires/

EDIT: I checked out the project's description. It seems that they do not actually use LLMs but old trusty XGBoost. It looks like they actually have put some thought into this - however, I'm still not convinced that it would work in practice at any reasonable scale. (Maybe some billionaires might want to invest into something like this to protect their own mansions.)

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emmanuel-karibiye-509b9a1b3_h...

Project site: https://zerostrike.live/

Description on Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/zerostrike

If a break through product comes out of a hackathon, that would be amazing. As far as I can see it after participating in a few of them, I think a hackathon is more than that. There social aspect of it is important, including the motivation and the inspiration of the community.

yeah. To some extent hackathons always were this - ideas and frontend only.

It's up to you to decide whether to play the game or make something actually worth making, for your own pride.

This is also true to a lesser extent of the wider world.

i was there and i hated it same resentment,

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