The weed-smoking, Labubu-loving, hackathon king of SF
12 comments
·July 6, 2025sorcerer-mar
burnt-resistor
That's always been the case with the Silicon Valley meetup non-technical, wantrepreneur posers though.
beanshadow
Hackathon culture is different than it was, but that doesn't mean it's worse for the average person. It could be that "idea guys" do the important hackathon culture work better. Highly innovative people are a little off the beaten path, but describing them as a cultural corrupting force is moving the community backwards.
pragmatic
Surest sign we are in a bubble.
Cue the strip cub scene from the big short.
8f2ab37a-ed6c
How does the hackathon culture compare to the old school demoscene? My impression is that it was pretty hard to contribute to making demos without actually having some pretty deep expertise in one of the several disciplines required?
nubinetwork
Dupe, sensationalized headline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44480418
echelon
You meet all sorts of characters in SF. I didn't think I'd ever see this guy again.
Seeing Rene headlining a celebratory blog post makes me want to vent, but this probably isn't the appropriate space.
I have stories to tell, though.
bgwalter
He sells worthless Labubus that are pitched on Twitch to children. He smokes weed. He managed to get this advertisement article into a "newspaper" that lies about vibe coding.
He could get a position in the Trump administration!
mindslight
I don't know that he engages in enough viciousness signalling.
burnt-resistor
Grifters gonna grift.
Incipient
[assumptions included for effect]
One of the greatest grifters of all time is your president. "grifting" succeeds.
It may not be required, but it succeeds. So people do it.
These people are often called "salesmen" or "business development managers", but they sell the dream all the same.
reactordev
One of these things is not like the others…
King of hackathons doesn’t know how to code. Got it.
Good encapsulation of how corrupted hackathon culture has become.
Basically just “idea guys” have gotten great at LARPing and hijacked the scene.