Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

I have been to couple of hackathons. My second favorite is

WikiNomad: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wikinomad , https://www.wikinomad.com

I improved on this after the hackathon too.

My personal favorite was predicting depression before it occurs in a person using just his cellphone. We worked on Stanford thesis that was able to predict depression based on the number of wifi points a user connected to variances to the wifi points.

We increased the data points to GPS, wake times, bluetooth connections, text sentiment analysis and amount of facebook + instagram apps usage and using neural networks trained to classify a user as depressed with a probability value.

In general hackathons are based on the idea of programming as producing objects/products/services (which all decay over time), rather than seeing programming as the act of codifying understanding of a formal (or informal) system into an executable representation (which its users continue updating to match their mental model for as long as they find it useful). The purpose of many hackathons being "build apps/widgets on top of our service for us!" presupposes the former view.

Looking at programming this way is harmful to all of us (because it encourages us to spend time building things designed to decay out from under their users, or that could be built as contributions to open-source libraries, but which wouldn't be a "startup idea", "product" or "mvp" anymore), and it would be nice if folks in this thread took a moment to step back from the things they've built (which are fun and useful, most of the time!) to think about working on ideas as contributions to open-source infrastructure libraries rather than standalone programs or services.

Programming toys is fun; programming universally accessible, near-permanent extensions to human capability is exhilarating.

I'd like to pre-empt the response of "people should be able to write apps and toys and services if they want!". Of course they can. I just want to make sure people have considered an alternative point of view, since it's easy to never step outside apps culture.

Can you elaborate on some of the tech you used to make this? Pretty cool to be able to hear a word and provide another word which rhymes.

My friend and I built a safety bracelet for women which had a GPS, GPRS chip and an inbuilt pepperspray which when sprayed triggered an alarm to volunteers nearby through the app.