Show HN: Projects from “Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas” Hackathon

I was at Stuipd Hackathon. I&#x27;ve never been to anything so unabashedly motivated to be pointless and irreverent. Workshops included: &quot;3d printed sex toys&quot;, &quot;how to be come alan ginsberg in 30 minutes&quot;, and &quot;pissing off my landlord&quot;.<p>All the projects there were so beautiful because they were liberated from the whole motif in tech of products constantly &quot;revolutionizing field-xyz and solving 1000 major world problems&quot;.<p>If we are going to enter into a truly tech-literate, post-internet phase of humanity, we gotta be making dumb, hilarious junk like this.

This is incredible. I think a few things are worth noting:<p>1) these &quot;terrible idea&quot; hackathon projects were so much more _sexual_ than your typical hackathon. This goes with the indications that the sex-tech space is anathema more for market reasons (VCs want to stay family friendly) than because sex-tech isn&#x27;t fun or interesting to people. With the chance of funding not on the table, a healthy mix of projects veered toward sex. Maybe humor can actually be a way for a few sex-tech startups to take off. :)<p>2) the funniest projects all involved hardware. There&#x27;s something extra-ridiculous about juxtaposing our own bodies into these stupid projects. I recommend anyone interested in a solid philosophical grounding in humor to read Henri Bergson&#x27;s early 20th century treatise on laughter (<a href="http://www.templeofearth.com/books/laughter.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.templeofearth.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;laughter.pdf</a>). He writes that we find use laughter as a way to draw attention to the rigid, mortal, and physical in all of us. That is why impersonating someone&#x27;s habits is funny-- because the rigidity of their personality is made super clear. I wonder what it says about us that strapping ipads onto people&#x27;s faces makes me laugh out loud.

This is already over? DAMN. Now what am I going to do with my idea to build a payment gateway on top of snapchat...

This is always my hacker&#x27;s-block-breaker. If I&#x27;m stuck on something, and not feeling particularly creative, I&#x27;ll make something intentionally useless, and funny, and it usually cheers me back up and gets me working again.

Aren&#x27;t we all participating in this hackathon on a global scale except for a very small number of us who build something people want?

I wish I knew about this. I wrote a file server that serves your webroot directory over League of Legends chat. Any time you request a file that is more than a few bytes, your chat gets flooded with base64 strings... The extraslow web.

Aw, I should have entered my rotary mobile phone...:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8</a>

This looks rad.<p>A very similar hackathon I went to a few months back is <a href="http://www.comedyhackday.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comedyhackday.org&#x2F;</a> They matchup comedians and hackers to create beauty.<p>Easily the most fun hackathon i&#x27;ve ever been to&#x2F;

The Stupid Font is actually very cool. I am going to use it for my blog title. So sorry Stupid Font creator: You failed - I find your idea useful.

I learnt some great definitions around creativity and innovation at a conference I was involved with recently. To wit, &quot;Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas.&quot;<p>The speaker (Dr David Hall) recommended that the search for Creativity often needs to start with generating something novel and <i>useless</i> - this can then inspire the useful application to emerge. Only when we pursue the novel, however useless, do we really open ourselves up to surprising creativity.<p>This Hackathon seems to fully embrace that principle, so I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised at all if many of those who participated take the germ of an idea and develop it further into the <i>useful</i> space.<p>[1] <a href="http://jacobaldridge.com/business/3-blockages-to-creativity-shirlaws-conference-blog/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacobaldridge.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;3-blockages-to-creativity-...</a>

How is this different from every other Hackathon?

This is awesome. Especially the beautified intellectuals.

Wow. 100,000 projects submitted? With that many projects, you&#x27;d think the odds would make it that one wasn&#x27;t terrible.

Where is the &quot;Intellectual Babes Calendar&quot; I&#x27;d like to buy this...

Please note:This is NSFW

This is incredibly funny.<p>Just today I was reading i am devloper tweets and just started wondering are there communities for developer jokes? Reddit comes to mind, but it become too mainstream. Anything else?

The food bite tweet is my favorite.

Ahhhh this is beautiful :) Reminds of the days when blogs and websites were creative absurdities and programming was a cool hobby.

How regularly is the Stupid Hackathon held? Fall and spring? Georgia Tech student here, I would seriously fly up to participate.

The rearview mirror one is actually a really cool experiment. I wonder if eventually you&#x27;d just get used to it (although you probably wouldn&#x27;t get used to all of the neck and joint pain from trying to do things so awkwardly).

That &quot;tweet from food&quot; thing reminds me of Vessyl. <a href="https://www.myvessyl.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myvessyl.com&#x2F;</a>

If they sold it, I might buy that thing that tweets my food bites. It would also make twitter more useful &#x2F; entertaining for me.

That &quot;Focus Tools&quot; chrome extension looks like it could potentially help me from getting distracted. Disqualified!

So it&#x27;s like a normal hackathon?

kudos to the &quot;Kim Kardashian On A Newton&quot; team.<p>...thats some non-trivial archeology to get that running :)

Any equivalent of this sort of a Hackathon in the SF Bay? If not, wanna organize one together? :)

Really hope this type of event spreads - looks like a lot of fun.

A very honest hackathon!

DO NOT click to watch the drone delivery video. Trust me.

Ahh unintentional hipster self-parody at its finest.

Can someone do this in the Bay Area? I&#x27;ll help.

Hahaha! The Focus Tools one is great! looool

This Hackathon should be international :)

We need more Hackathons like this.

Yeah... might want to mark this NSFW

anddddddddddd NSFW

can we please have a NSFW tag

This is about systemd, I suppose?

If no-one needs stupid shit, then what do we have Facebook for?