That's exactly my point. I've read the hacker school manual. I'm suggesting that they are not very good at practicing what they preach, at least in my experience applying to hacker school.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I've applied to Hacker School twice and found them to be short, impersonal and sometimes even rude to me during the interview process. They asked questions that struck me as inviting me to participate in "dickwaving" rather than talking about the nuance of my work or the problems I've engaged with. Such as "what's the hardest thing you have ever done?"
I've never seriously thought about the work I've done on any continuum of what's hard and what's not, I think about my code in terms of the other people that have to work with it, and whether it addresses the problem. And for me personally, what I have learned from individual projects. Sure some things are more challenging than others, but what do you really learn from the answer to that question? It's also an intimidating starting point coming from someone putting themselves in a position of authority to decide whether you are "good enough" for their program. And surprising from a group of hackers who in their pitch to potential applicants emphasize that your experience isn't as important as your love of programming and attitude about learning. I'm usually eager to try out new things and look forward to new stuff to learn rather than dwelling on what my "conquests" are. It struck me as the engineer bro equivalent of "what's the hottest girl you've ever hooked up with?" Maybe the point isn't to do "the hardest thing" but to learn and to do cool stuff that serves the people who interact with your software?
Also one of their interviewers called my code "shaky" after pairing, which could be true, but it's not very constructive or specific is it? It could be that I got extremely unlucky because the things they write on their blog are very uplifitng and intelligent. And one of my friends did Hacker School and generally had positive things to say. But I really felt like I was treated terribly as an applicant, and the facilitators came off as having a high regard for themselves and engineering arrogance rather than being interested in helping people and being constructive.