

Cockle Doodle Doo - Coder retains his crown at the HackNY Hackathon - toddml
http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/all-night-baby-hackers-gorge-twizzlers-and-red-bull-coding-till-sun-comes

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hvs
_Mr. Jablonowski, who won last year's hack-a-thon with an app that used
Twitter and Foursquare to determine the most "influential" person at a given
place, carried himself with marked swagger as he demonstrated the bit.ly API
on a laptop hooked into a projector. Earlier, when he walked in wearing a
stripey V-neck, slim-fitting jeans and white Adidas, he had tweeted, "The king
has arrived."_

Puke.

~~~
endtime
The alleged tweet is obnoxious, but in his defense, he was asked to give the
bit.ly presentation with no warning because no one from bit.ly who could give
it showed up, and he had interned there. I also didn't really think he was
swaggering or anything - though I guess I might have been looking for it had I
seen that tweet.

But yeah, this is kind of overblown. He seemed like a nice enough guy, as far
as I could tell.

~~~
newman314
Is there a link to his app somewhere?

~~~
endtime
Hmm, I can't find one. :/

~~~
newman314
Hard to judge when we can't even see a demo of the app. =(

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NathanKP
The article seems to me to be a highly idealistic look at the Hackathon by
someone who is not a hacker. For example, it likens Mr. Jablonowski to a DJ,
and makes him seem like a pop star, with people taking pictures with him. It
even refers to the "joys of startup life", and while startup life may have a
measure of joy, it is mostly a lot of hard work.

Anyway, the article just seems overblown, even cloying to me. I almost
expected the author to start gushing about the "rockstar programmers" and
"code ninjas" there. If anyone here was actually there, was the atmosphere
really as portrayed in this article?

~~~
endtime
I was there as a tech ambassador. The article exaggerates a bit about Ian, but
it was a pretty intense atmosphere. A lot of great companies presented
(Foursquare, Twilio, bit.ly, NYT, Dropio, Hunch, MongoDB, and several others)
and the participants did build some pretty cool stuff for a single night's
work.

It wasn't surreal and it wasn't a Hollywood montage, but there were probably
70-100 participants and a lot of smart people helping out, and a lot of people
came up with pretty cool ideas. So while the description of Ian was overblown
(and a lot of (intentionally?) misleading language was used, e.g. saying
Hilary "warned" people not to disturb Ian as if breaking his concentration
would ruin some magical dev process - she was really just reminding everyone
that despite having given a presentation, he was a participant, and that there
were other people hanging around just to answer questions, so please ask them
instead), the event itself was pretty awesome.

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geuis
I just skimmed through this. My overall sense was that this article is mostly
well-meaning but written in a condescending tone. The continued reference to
the contest participants as "the kids" and "those kids" was irritating. I
personally don't give a shit how old someone is or what they look like. If you
have a decent personality and are smart, that's all that matters.

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hello_moto
Not much have changed since the time of OS hacking back in 95-2000. These days
hacking is "mashing" up a few web-services.

The way news site portray these people haven't changed as well: smart, super
smart, trance, laptop, all-nigthers, coke, soda pop, weird looking, rebel,
social outcast.

Hire them and you'll have instant replay of dot-com bust back in the 2000:
you're growing in 1-2 years top and it all goes down-hill when you hit the
"maintenance" stage.

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Towle_
HackerNews is (loosely defined) a hacking/entrepreneurship community. I don't
need to tell you where in this article to look for the hacking perspective.
But the entrepreneurship slant?

Q: Which single line from the article should stand out above all others?

A: _Were Mr. Stoller and his friend, Tal Safran, thinking of going to work for
banks when they graduated? "Fuck no."_

Extrapolate as necessary.

------
ianjennings
Look out for my presentation at the New York Tech Meetup in November.

