
A Day at the Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon - gribbits
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a19330/a-day-at-the-stupid-hackathon-2016/
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personjerry
After going to a few hackathons, I observed a trend of mostly useless, tech-
bubble oriented products developed. So I had the idea of a marketplace style
site where people would talk about their problems, and simultaneously provide
ideas for hackathon hackers. Then hackers would visit the site for ideas, and
if they build a solution, they get users immediately--the people who were
subscribed to that problem. This would also hopefully channel all that hacker
power into useful products. Does anyone think that's worth building?

~~~
myrryr
The New Zealand Government did. There was a Hackathon last weekend around a
bunch of problems that various government departments wanted to have solved.

The people at the hackathon have has a week since to get their teams together
and pitches for the next stage.

The pitches are to the government department CEs, so people just under the
ministers.

If the pitch is accepted, then we get 3 months (paid) to be put though a Tech
Accelerator (run by CreativeHQ) in Wellington and get the application in a
state to be used. During which time the teams will form companies, get advice
for how to run things, and have the government departments domain experts on
hand to answer any questions we need and get feedback from them.

At the end we get to demo our solutions to the departments. If they like them,
then they will licence the results, and we have a bunch of new tech companies
in New Zealand, with an existing cash flow.

Seriously, this is it done right. Small companies / groups of developers (and
designers, etc) get chances at solving problems which would normally go to the
big guys in the industry.

My team is presenting their pitch (Machine learning to help route problem
tickets in various call centres) just after lunch today - I'm nervous as all
hell :)

\--- Blair

~~~
flashm
That sounds excellent, I wish there were something like it in the UK.

Good luck with your pitch.

~~~
joshvm
There was Job Hack last October, though I didn't hear about anything coming
out of it.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/news/join-the-job-hack-and-
hel...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/join-the-job-hack-and-help-shape-
the-future-of-a-generation)

------
brudgers
From the early days of Hacker News, termites as a service.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423)

~~~
sleepychu
Gives me an Animal Crossing vibe xD

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sebringj
How do you vet these things without stifling creativity and accidental
serendipity? You don't. You have to take the mostly shit ideas and eventually
one sticks even if it sticks like shit. The vetting will have a detrimental
effect of the types who can even come in the door AND it assumes people know
what works or what doesn't which is the overall illusion we have of "great
ideas" that's why great ideas are only hindsight unless they are like
inventing cheap fission or anti-gravity. Technology is evolutionary, meaning
we don't control evolution, it just happens based on the environment, aka the
mob's choice. Maybe pan handling robots spin off to charity assisting robots
or social fart sharing turns out to be valuable health data? We don't know
unless its obviously popular. The messier the better.

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ChuckMcM
I really liked their summary site
[http://www.stupidhackathon.com/](http://www.stupidhackathon.com/) the
"holding" app cracked me up.

~~~
Slump
I love the project categories. "Monetizing children" is a personal favorite.

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lucd
A lot of these project could easily qualify as contemporary art..

~~~
wxs
That's no surprise: the event was hosted at ITP
([http://tisch.nyu.edu/itp](http://tisch.nyu.edu/itp)) which is a
technological art program at NYU. Many of the participants were current
students or researchers there.

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noonshine
NSFW if you scroll far enough on the actual stupid hackathon website. Oops.

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bakhy
absolutely wonderful! the list of projects on the site is definitely worth a
visit. [http://www.stupidhackathon.com/](http://www.stupidhackathon.com/)

~~~
Mizza
And from the SF one held last May:
[https://stupidhackathon.github.io/](https://stupidhackathon.github.io/)

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enraged_camel
The "A virtual reality experience of looking at a fireplace on TV" is actually
a thing.

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marknutter
Someone should create boilerplate marketing websites for all of these ideas
and see how many bites they can get from people who believe they're legitimate
startups.

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cordovas
That's awesome. ITP for the win!

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bomatson
Loved being a part of this, the presentations were absolutely hilarious. We
made Larry, a "lazy Siri" in webapp form:
[https://www.larri.rocks/](https://www.larri.rocks/)

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pizzacowboy
Fantastic idea. The service OptIn, mentioned at the end, is certifiably
hilarious.

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peterwwillis
Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas thread: go!

My submission: Robot Pan Handlers.

 _googles_

Shit. Nevermind.

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st3v3r
Along the same lines is Comedy Hack Day:
[http://www.comedyhackday.org/](http://www.comedyhackday.org/)

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ctdonath
"Strange how much human progress and achievement comes from contemplation of
the irrelevant." \- Scott Kim

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lazyant
for the British Nanny Netflix, how do they do that?, do they have a transcript
of every (or some) movie and then synchronize the sound? some of these
projects are really good

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Puts
Isn't this the theme for EVERY hackathon?

~~~
ivanca
The fb like button came from a hackathon and now is without doubt the backbone
of our society.

~~~
elliotpage
Sounds like it would be right at home at the Stupid Hackathon then, hyuck
hyuck

