Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Knowledge olympiads are events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

They are financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.

Hackathons are useless.

If you have a useful project, why would you ever restrict its development to a specific timeframe and with a specific set of contributors?

Just put your project on GitHub and promote it to try and get users and contributors instead!

Instead of announcing organizing hackathons, people should just curate forums where people with similar interests can talk to one another instead, to find new projects that might interest one another.

Restricting intensive development to a few days tends to produce crappy code and not reach real goals.

If your kids are about to starve, fine, do it.

But otherwise, Ciro Santilli will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company, life is too short for that.

Life is too short for that. Companies must either notice that you can make amazing open source software projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

Companies must either notice that you can make amazing projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.