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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty amazing to see how much the term "hackathon" has been diluted in such a short time. How did we go from a very literal "a hacking marathon" where the developers of project X get together to hack non-stop for a week on their project to "non-programmers scraping together some off the shelf javascript/css frameworks into a trivial web app for a couple of hours, and then having some marketing person call it an awesome hack"?

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"Non-programmers?" Where are you getting that from?

From the fact that programmers don't go to "hackathons" that are 8 hours long, have no set purpose, and are run by marketing weasels who say things like "build awesome hacks".

"have no set purpose" - you can't code without somebody else handfeeding you a purpose? God forbid we hold an open-ended event and let the programmers decide what to build!

And I'm sorry I didn't realize there was a minimum time limit for writing code to be considered "programming". Next time I only code for 8 hours, I'll be sure to remind everybody that it didn't really count.

sigh Why do I poke at the trolls?

I didn't say there was a minimum time to be considered programming. I said "spend 8 hours doing something random" isn't a hackathon. "OpenBSD developers spending a week hacking on OpenBSD" is a hackathon.

I wish I were surprised that this sort of hostility is only shown when attracting women is one of the main goals of an event.

But I'm not. I'm not.

Granted, the OP is showing an inappropriate level of hostility; but you bring up an interesting point:

Why should having women show up at a hackathon be a goal in its own right? It seems contrived, and doesn't do much to address the disparity of women in technology (in fact it seems to further enforce the notion that such contrived measures are the only way to effectively get women to participate in such an event.)

It has nothing to do with attracting women, unless you are suggesting that women can't program, and so the only way to attract them is to have fake hackathons like this? Don't project your sexism on me, I simply commented on the dilution of hacker terminology by marketing weasels.

I was at this hackathon. I am sad to find out that I am not a programmer :(. My teammates will also be sad to find this news :( :(. I will inform my employer tomorrow and instruct them to do the same. It will be hard to make a living anymore since this has been my only profession, but I guess I will have to make do.

Thank you for sharing your insight and correcting my worldview!

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