SeanHodgins
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2024
11:44 · 311K views · Dec 17, 2018
Sean Hodgins shows the build of the Arduino-based glitter bomb package-theft trap he made with Mark Rober, covering the electronics and the problems that came up. The code and schematics are on GitHub.
HN mostly cites it as evidence that Hodgins built the glitter bomb Mark Rober presented as his own, and says he deserves credit.
4 comments from Hacker News
This is clearly marketing, and clearly good one. From what I can tell, it's a course that was mostly produced by someone else and will be delivered by someone else, but they recorded Mark Rober - the guy famous on YouTube for glitterbombing people - as the instructor. But their FAQ already states that he will "be able to" look at what students are doing and "may occasionally [..] give feedback", so most likely he won't be around to run the course. Also, from watching the videos, I had the impression that the technical work is mostly done by other people, e.g. the famous glitterbomb was built by Sean Hodgins: this video So first and foremost, it appears that Mark Rober is a great showman and a great narrator. Plus he's collaborating with people like Mr Beast who have the power of a skilled agency behind them (nightmedia.co) to produce just the right narrative to go viral. And his first videos appear to be sponsored by a marketing agency. So I'm not surprised that this course is hyped up and not actually done by Mark Rober. I'd treat this more as a case study on how to perfect your social marketing ;) That said, their core promise of building 3 own projects within 30 days sounds reasonable if they have skilled instructors running the course. And the price seems reasonable for such a learning experience. When I was younger, my dad built some technical projects with me. Over the course of a weekend, I would learn more about electrics and physics than in a year in school. And once yo
Link to the other video: this video Its disappointing that Sean is getting absolutely zero credit. Mark Rober just keeps saying “I built”. There’s a link in the description but just suggests Sean has more build details. He could have at least brought Sean into the original video for some credit. Who knows, maybe this was the deal and Mark is giving Sean all of the ad revenue in exchange for the views/subs/credit...shrug
Mark Rober doesn't do any engineering himself, he's the CEO who claims credit for what other people do. For example, he didn't create the glitter bomb, his most viewed video. That was done by Sean Hodgins (making-of video: this video ). Sean's name was not mentioned at all in the glitter bomb video. Instead, Mark Rober claimed he built it by himself.
I think he's lying and making up excuses because he got caught. He also misrepresented his role in the creation of the device (i.e. he didn't create it, someone else did, you can view their youtube channel here this video ). IMO there is no reason to trust anything that guy says.