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Comment on Ask HN: Are hackathons anything more than a lame distraction?

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More often than not, yes. I’ve worked companies of varying sizes for 15 years and all have done atleast one hackathon a year. Over that time I’ve seen exactly 3, maybe 4 hacks that could have been an amazing product.

In two cases legal said hell no after the prototype. One was mine and the state of hardware and the ux wasn’t good enough to release.

Legal said no to: Listen to songs for free by taking meta data of freely available radio station recordings (like what’s available for 7 days after broadcast) and just playing the x many minutes of the show that the songs on.

Taking sports f25 sports data and generating a live top down 2d view of the event. Legal said no.

Playing html5 games on a tv using your phone as a controller via a chromecast. You could probably do this now with a QR code and web sockets or something.

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