Students work on big ideas at Harvard's 'hack night'

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Ask someone to picture a Harvard University computer hacker plotting the next gangbusters Web app, and chances are he will conjure Jesse Eisenberg's take on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network: duplicitous, territorial, all-knowing, and ultimately alone.

Visit the Harvard campus just before midnight on a Tuesday and you might see something different. About a dozen student hackers convene in a cozy room near the northern edge of campus, talking and tapping at their keyboards. An episode of Family Guy plays on a flat-screen TV on one side of the room. There is a Foosball table in the corner, next to a pile of black and orange beanbag chairs. But most of the hackers are gathered around tables in front of their screens, eating pizza and talking in a jargon-heavy patois.

Some are coding applications they hope could become the next Facebook, Blackboard, or Dropbox. But the students are hardly being coy about their ideas, nor are they reluctant to admit if they lack the coding skills to turn their ideas into working applications — the fatal flaw of Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, who lacked the programming skills to code their networking site and thus enlisted Zuckerberg, whom they later accused of stealing their idea. Soon these burgeoning hacker-entrepreneurs will move into a classroom in the Maxwell Dworkin Laboratory, where they will take turns giving demos of their unfinished projects and getting feedback from their would-be competitors.

This is no battle royale for the next billion-dollar idea. It's "Hack Night" at Harvard, and the students are here to help each other.

"We personally believe that if you have an idea, you should share it and find out as much as possible," says Julia Mitelman, one of the leaders of HackHarvard, the student club responsible for the weekly Hack Night.

Later that evening, Mitelman, a junior majoring in psychology, will put her money where her mouth is, soliciting feedback on an idea she has for a website that lets students review and recommend summer internships to friends and classmates online.

Mitelman says she has fielded e-mails from students who are interested in the club but anxious about sharing their ideas with other coder-entrepreneurs. But caginess is not welcomed at Hack Night. "Our belief is the people who keep those things hidden will not be as successful," Mitelman says.

HackHarvard, which is in only its second semester, operates on two premises: that most students cannot turn good ideas into operational apps, nor operational apps into successful businesses, without help; and that there are plenty of good ideas to go around. The club's leaders describe it as an incubator where students can get feedback on their ideas, learn the nuts and bolts of building Web applications, and meet with like-minded peers and potential collaborators.

If Narendra and the Winklevoss twins were searching for a classmate to code HarvardConnection today, HackHarvard is probably where they would look. If they had gone to a Hack Night, they might have even learned to code the site themselves.