<i>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."</i><p>Puke.
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.<p>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?
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.
Not much have changed since the time of OS hacking back in 95-2000. These days hacking is "mashing" up a few web-services.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>Q: Which single line from the article should stand out above all others?<p>A: <i>Were Mr. Stoller and his friend, Tal Safran, thinking of going to work for banks when they graduated? "Fuck no."</i><p>Extrapolate as necessary.