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Ask HN: Are hackathons really effective?

15 points by pal_25 ↗ HN
Recently i attended an angelhack event in kenya and wasn't interested in coding but to see what happens at the event.After 24 hours hacking,the candidates presented their projects and the rest is history.The final contestant won,i kept on asking,what is twitter?what type of problems can be solved using twitter api's?are they suppose to be realtime problems like..you to guess.

9 comments

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erac1e
A lot of hackathons have a corporate sponsor so you have to use their api to win the prizes. That kind of sucks. The best hackathons have no such constraints.
tedmiston
I've participated in many and been an organizer for several hackathons, including one with AngelHack.

This part about the best hackathons having no constraints is pretty baseless.

Every hackathon needs someone to pay for food / drinks / space / ideally prizes. Unless candidates cover this themselves (roughly Startup Weekend style), there will be sponsors. And sponsors do these events for marketing and exposure and sometimes feedback on their API. They will always want you to try their tech.

If there is a prize that requires using sponsor tech, it's almost always a smaller side prize vs. the main prize(s) for the event.

I think the best solutions build a sponsor's tech into another idea instead of being built around that tech itself.

colund
Effective in what way? I guess people do it for the fun and experience but I may be wrong...
pal_25
like trying to solve a genuine problem i.e use twiter api trade stocks ...
tedmiston
Perhaps you could elaborate a bit more on what's meant by "using the Twitter API to trade stocks".
progressive_dad
Create a bot with a set budget which uses a short term gains investment strategy called, "Day Trading". The timing of the purchase and sale of these stocks would be informed by a script written to digest and interpret live twitter feeds around the world and monitor them for key terms and indications that the stock of a particular company will dramatically go up or down.
tedmiston
Whether or not that's reasonable in real-life [1]... learning the Twitter API + doing some sentiment analysis, etc is a good scope for what could be an interesting hackathon project.

You could run the trades on a simulated network or just print out the trades and calculate when/if the bot can beat the market.

1: Much automated trading these days is very high frequency, on the order of milliseconds (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/416805/trading-shares-in-...).

pal_25
Thank you for your advice.Do u think if you push live trade with the twitter api it will have positive impact i.e anyone can get a stock update provided they subscribe to a trading company of their choice.
tedmiston
The goal of each hackathon (and each team) can vary a lot. There is a big difference between say a local community hackathon and TechCrunch Disrupt.

The most common goals I've seen are:

- to learn a new tech: API / framework / language / etc.

- to build a random side project

- to solve a small personal pain point

- to begin to solve a larger problem that many people in the world experience (i.e., an idea with potential to become a startup) [1]

- just to win prizes

1: A lot of people think this is the only way to compete in a hackathon, or will go out of their way to present their product or idea as if it were a potential company, even if that's unrealistic. I don't think this is the best or only way to participate.