I've done numerous hackathons, and more often than not, I'm disappointed. Yesterday, I participated in the Hacker Olympics "hackathon" in Manhattan. It was absolutely awesome, and somewhat of a unique event. We did silly things like have timed contests on who can assemble a computer the fastest, who gets the most kills in N64 golden eye ... oh ... and some coding too! Most of the programming challenges were easy but with tight timelines. This is certainly different from the regular build-an-app-over-a-weekend.