Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
Penn's hackathon is by application only.  I think this is pretty silly.  Here's a quote from a Medium post by one of the event organizers announcing this year's low acceptance rate of 30% [1]:  The people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or 
  worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion.

I'm just trying to imagine these kids at Penn sitting around a table deliberating which applicants have the most "major" hackathon victories and most "blew our socks off" projects:Organizer #1: This team looks promising. They placed second at the State U hackathon last spring!#2: That's not impressive.  Everyone knows that StateUHacks is a third-tier hackathon.  A monkey with a rotary phone could win the Twilio prize there. Who do you think we are, Cornell?  
This is UPenn; we accept elite hackers only.  Only the cream of the crop from HackMIT is good enough to don Dropbox t-shirts with us.#1: Ok, how about this girl?  The side project she submitted under the "Supplemental Materials" section of our application looks pretty good.#2: As IF!  I'd give that side project a 4/10.  No infinite scrolling?  What a waste of my time. And look at that .ly TLD.  It's like, "HELLO, 2012 is calling and asking for its domain name back," am I right?[1] https://medium.com/pennapps-x/pennapps-x-application-stats-6...