Comment by jmcohen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmcohen | Hacker News Reader

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Penn's hackathon is by application only. I think this is pretty silly. Here's a quote from a Medium post by one of the event organizers announcing this year's low acceptance rate of 30% [1]:

  The people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or 
  worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion.

I'm just trying to imagine these kids at Penn sitting around a table deliberating which applicants have the most "major" hackathon victories and most "blew our socks off" projects:

Organizer #1: This team looks promising. They placed second at the State U hackathon last spring!

#2: That's not impressive. Everyone knows that StateUHacks is a third-tier hackathon. A monkey with a rotary phone could win the Twilio prize there. Who do you think we are, Cornell? This is UPenn; we accept elite hackers only. Only the cream of the crop from HackMIT is good enough to don Dropbox t-shirts with us.

#1: Ok, how about this girl? The side project she submitted under the "Supplemental Materials" section of our application looks pretty good.

#2: As IF! I'd give that side project a 4/10. No infinite scrolling? What a waste of my time. And look at that .ly TLD. It's like, "HELLO, 2012 is calling and asking for its domain name back," am I right?

[1] https://medium.com/pennapps-x/pennapps-x-application-stats-6...

To be fair, if you're criticising selective hackathon idea, you have to go all the way criticise the whole competitiveness of hackathons altogether. Because "selective hackathons" are just a logical continuation of the idea that hackathon can be won. Personally, I don't yet have a definite opinion on the whole matter, but you certainly can't be OK with one thing and be opposed to it's logical conclusion.

Yes, I think that the idea that a hackathon can be "won" is silly too.

I am one of the founders of Hack the North (in Waterloo). We completely agree. In fact, last year we didn't offer any top prizes. Instead, there was a "top 10" which got to present their hacks to everybody. This kept the event fun, and not competitive.

As a member of the team that "won" that hackathon, I agree.

Interestingly, one of my least-favorite parts about "doing well" at hackathons like these is that I don't get the opportunity to go around to other tables and see what everyone has else made, and talk with them about it. Sometimes, really cool projects and people go under-noticed (I've been there as well).

But would you go to a hackathon with no prizes?

Uhm, to create something? For challenge? For fun? That's what hackatons and gamejams are for, aren't they?

But I have to admit that sometimes there are pretty nice prices - like on the last gamejam I attended there was an organized trip to bigger gamejam for the winners (except of small stuff like T-shirts). There were no judges, all attendees voted on their favorites. That's in my opinion the true hackaton/gamejam spirit.

Another hackathon attendant here.

I would attend a university sponsored hackathon that had little / no prizes. I would not attend a corporate sponsored one with bad prizes.

For example, AT&T recently held a hackathon in Atlanta. The prizes were meager, and it was clear to me that ulterior motives were present. Why would anyone attend a hackathon like that is beyond me?

I took home first prize at a AT&T hackathon here in Houston and I thought the exact same thing.

A lot of corporate ones are set up with contracts that leave your work at their mercy to continue without you. Unless there's a prize - it isn't worth it with these types of arrangements.

For social good, civil, city government, university etc - I'll do it with no expectations just to make a difference.

In the last year here (Austin), I've hosted a half dozen hackathons with no prizes.. not even silly prizes. It takes minimal effort getting 40-50 people, and some effort to get 100. On the other side, our last major social good hackathon (Hack for Change) had nearly 250 with no prizes announced up front.

(We did award SXSW 2015 badges to the "audience favorite" but that was a surprise at the tail end of the demo time.)

There are two types of hackathons: The Sun and the OpenBSD type. Most of what is talked here seems to be more of the former, but that term can mean two entirely different things.

For starters, the OpenBSD one can't be "won".

I happen to know a few hackathon organizers and have an idea of how these things work under the hood. I wouldn't be so quick to judge. The reason Penn's hackathon is application only is that they literally can only support a certain number of participants. There's a limit to how many people they can feed, fit in one building, control in a big crowd, etc. Some hackathons manage this limit by accepting participants first come, first serve. Penn decided to take what they consider to be the best applicants, and I don't blame them for that. Their goal as organizers is to impress sponsors enough so that they can do it again next year. There's no evidence that this sort of conversation happened.

People are right in criticizing some aspects of the hackathon culture, but be careful about generalizations. For example, HackDuke has taken steps to include beginners with a series of seminars in the off-season (and by offering a beginner prize), encourage projects that do social good (as opposed to just "hacks"), and they encourage people to continue working on their projects after the hackathon is over. Disclaimer: I went to Duke and participated in their hackathons (and greatly enjoyed them!).

I've gotten to to PennApps multiple times and the only hackathon I've ever won is a Codeday, so this scenario that you're constructing is blatantly false. I'm assuming they look for people that will attract big sponsors to their hackathon, and the idea makes a lot of sense. Hackathons can't expand indefinitely, and the idea of having some consistency still makes more sense to me than random selection, which leads to situations where you're not accepted to a single hackathon in an entire semester. Unless you have a better idea, perhaps you should not mock this one?

yeah the selective hackathon is a relatively new thing and kinda stupid - like hackathon organizers have some magic formula for picking winners... dumb idea

Got rejected by several hackathons. Once I was rejected but my friend (similar college, same previous hackathon experience, significantly less experienced than me but is a girl) was accepted. And I just got a summer intern from a well-known tech company a week ago.

Well that is the intended (and worthwhile) purpose of these application systems – to create more diversity.

Especially in an environment where these "Hackathon Hackers" are already so homogenous.

Which further promotes the idea that making decisions based on culture/gender/etc is totally acceptable if they benefit the "right" groups.*

* Depending on whoever is the "right" group at the moment.

Well, no.

The actual objective of the hackathon is (probably) oriented around the group more so than the individuals. College applications work exactly the same way – top schools could fill their classes with 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA, Porsche-driving philanthropist-of-the-year white or Asian males year after year. But frankly, that school would suck.

A better approach would be to focus on the group. Metrics like: how enjoyable the hackathon was, what cool people did you meet, what did you learn from fellow hackers, and ultimately: how many quality submissions were created. This is ignoring any explicit goals of increasing diversity/inclusion in the field, which is a fairly common theme for hackathons.

One can rightly argue that increasing the diversity of their participants falls well in line with their entire purpose of existing. Even if they're single mindedly optimizing for quality submissions, it's not absurd to hypothesize that more diverse groups create more creative solutions.

It's making a decision on overall group performance, with individuals' culture/gender/age/school/languages/years experience/company background being a proxy for their impact in group performance.

If increasing diversity wasn't an implicit or explicit goal of virtually every hackathon ever, I'd agree with you.

I not arguing against the value of diversity. My point is much simpler and can be summarized from your response:

"It's good to take culture/gender/etc as a factor when choosing who can participate and who will be excluded from your event."

Good or bad, that is the only conclusion to draw.

Ironically does UPenn even have that highly regarded of a CS program? B-school sure, but CS? This really sounds like B-school bullshit.

UPenn's CS program is quite good. Sure MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU might have better programs. But I've heard nothing but good things about UPenn.

The alternatives to a juried pool are (a) first come, first serve and (b) random selection, which would you have preferred in this case?

("Admitting everyone" is simply not possible, there's neither the space nor the support staff)

Both first-come-first-serve and random selection are better ways to admit people to a hackathon than "let's play college admissions committee."

HackMIT came up with a nice hybrid solution this year [1]. Most spots were filled by lottery, but a few were reserved for the first people to solve a puzzle. This left a place for merit --- but, like, actual merit, which is not well-assessed by a 19-year-old college student scanning resumes for "placements at major hackathons."

[1] https://medium.com/hackmit-2014/joining-the-fancycat-club-ha...

I'll just like to point out that no selection system, including the puzzle game, is without flaws and bias. IIRC (I might be wrong) the catmit puzzle was released when most people in the US were awake, which meant it was the middle of the night for me. I was also pretty annoyed that it involved calling a US number.

I think admitting everyone IS possible. It's important to realize that these hackathons spend thousands to fly a lot of out of state hackers in (travel reimbursements). These hackathons will also send buses to nearby colleges, and even colleges out of state (e.g. anything within an 8 hour drive). If they didn't do those things (especially airfare reimbursements - kind of excessive if you ask me, or limiting buses to 3 hour drives) as much as they do now, they'd be able to narrow the pool a lot.

I've been a sponsor at multiple hackathons and have seen how the staff and facilities are already stretched to the limit.

It's unclear from the article how or if they prioritized local people, but from this: "In the end, we accepted 708 students ... Combining these numbers with students from the University of Pennsylvania, we anticipate 1200 hackers will be joining us this fall."

it sounds as if there was a major effort to get local kids involved.

(and it's unspecified of the 70% rejection rate, how many of those were UPenn students, how many were in the greater Philadelphia area, how many within easy driving distance (say, DC to NYC), and how many were further away)

The rejection rate was for non-penn applicants. Any Penn student who wants to can attend.

2012 is calling and skiing for it's domain name back

Love it :-)

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