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"
That right there is very telling. They don't know the difference between median and average
"Who would you have me speak to instead? It’s not like I’m surrounded with geniuses anyway."
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.”
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...
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.
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
Wouldn’t we all. It is not possible, actually.
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.
> I don’t believe that.
Of course not. Bezos is spending a lot to make sure you don’t.
Still LLMs do remove most of the fun of hackathons
Also, that pilot does need to get paid on the 350 days a year that there are no forest fires to be extinguished.
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.
We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.
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.
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.
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.
I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle
if I click "Blog" button, there's only 1 entry and it isn't the one posted here
Use the "archive" button (as per the URL)
> 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
This is depressing, I'd expect people at these events to be more informed and less ignorant than the general public.
(Wish I was joking.)
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
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'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).
Remove the “non-tech” qualifier and your assertion remains just as true.
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
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.