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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
Puke.