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Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#41

Post by 2_listerine_pls »

franciscop wrote: post #17

I won a NASA world competition by building a Heads Up Display (AR) and motion tracking software in ~36h with a classmate. Around 1 year before the Hololens and similar solutions existed. As my classmate and I were talking through Skype the night before the competition started, I looked through my window and could see the stars. However, I could also see my face dimly lit from my laptop screen overlapping. So it came…

> Around 1 year before the Hololens and similar solutions existed

HUDs have existed for a long time...

And Hololens uses tracking and other technologies that make it useful for AR.

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#42

Post by franciscop »

2_listerine_pls wrote: post #41
franciscop wrote: post #17

I won a NASA world competition by building a Heads Up Display (AR) and motion tracking software in ~36h with a classmate. Around 1 year before the Hololens and similar solutions existed. As my classmate and I were talking through Skype the night before the competition started, I looked through my window and could see the stars. However, I could also see my face dimly lit from my laptop screen overlapping. So it came…

> Around 1 year before the Hololens and similar solutions existed HUDs have existed for a long time... And Hololens uses tracking and other technologies that make it useful for AR.

Ah I know, and I think unconsciously I was inspired by Ironman, what I mean is that the new age of AR came after that so at that point it was kind of fresh (even though there were previous ages long time ago).

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#43

Post by r3bl »

wyldfire wrote: post #20
qrv3w wrote: post #19

A Harry Potter style "Maruauder's Map" which tracks people in a business/location in real-time. [1] [1] https://github.com/schollz/find-maraudersmap

I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Do the footsteps gradually fade in and out like the movie FX?

Damn, I remember another Marauder's Map that was just genius!

Long story short, Facebook's Messenger automatically geotagged users by default. People reported it to their security program, Facebook said it was intended. Then someone made a browser extension that looked up location of active Messenger friends and showed their location on a map. It got increasingly popular. Facebook decided to switch the location from opt-out to opt-in.

Some sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/28/marauders...

https://www.quora.com/Can-I-still-download-the-Marauders-Map...

https://github.com/arank/marauders-map

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#44

Post by dahart »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10
gue5t wrote: post #5

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…

Love your comment! Less hackathons, more open source summits. Build foundations, not garbage to be thrown away.

Is it one or the other? You can do both, right? Open source is great; as is building for the future. That is no reason you can't write something fun during a hackathon once in a while.

In my 20 years of professional coding, I've seen a lot more problems with people promoting code to shared status, attempting to build a foundation, before it's been used and before it's even remotely ready than I've ever seen with people throwing away good code. We're taught in CS school to always abstract and generalize, way too many people run with that and write code that abstracts away their specific problems, and build foundations that aren't sitting on the bedrock of solving a real problem. Almost all open source projects that start with the aim to build foundations are thrown away.

On the flip-side, one of the common goals of a hackathon is to build the best and most useful idea you can, quick and dirty, without getting mired in foundation building. The utility of that is to prove the idea is useful first, and if that succeeds for someone, what better starting place is there for building a foundation?

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#45

Post by qrv3w »

wyldfire wrote: post #20
qrv3w wrote: post #19

A Harry Potter style "Maruauder's Map" which tracks people in a business/location in real-time. [1] [1] https://github.com/schollz/find-maraudersmap

I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Do the footsteps gradually fade in and out like the movie FX?

We were planning on it but ran out of time ;)

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#47

Post by NikolaeVarius »

hellofunk wrote: post #15
gue5t wrote: post #5

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…

I really disagree. I've participated in a few hackathons and they are among the best ways to quickly accomplish and learn new things while feeling some of the joy we all ultimately want from programming. Being able in one day or weekend to go from scratch to a working prototype is just a great way to kick yourself into gear and remember what is possible in programming. I've participated in hackathons for embedded dev…

I disagree in that most hackathons aren't "hackathons". They're events where companies want you to use their product to "advertise" how awesome their product is to the community. Sure you learn things, but most of the shorter hackathons, you're learning very very shallow things that you didn't need to go to a hackathon to know.

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#48

Post by codefined »

My team (5 others) and I built an application that would help you revise or learn a subject by testing you about it, where that subject could be anything, from mathematics to Shakespeare.

It worked by scraping the top 1000 Bing results and then scraping several levels deep from each of the results to generate a "map" of knowledge. This in turn could be used to ask the user questions, generated fill-in-the-blanks, matchups & whatever else you could think up.

It worked after the five-day hackathon, which was truly surprising, but unfortunately, it used too much computing power so we never released it to the world.

Re: Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

#50

Post by yeldarb »

My devpost profile: https://devpost.com/yeldarb

I tend to work solo at Hackathons.

My favorite project was a presentation remote for Google Glass[1]. You could control your presentation with the touch bar on the side of the glasses, see your current slide in the HUD, and it also included a timer so you could make sure you didn't run over your talk's time limit.

Second favorite was Cardwolla[2]. A system where you could register your credit card and your dwolla account and a corresponding API for websites. If user and site had both opted in to taking dwolla it would route around the credit card system using the dwolla api to avoid to avoid the 2.7% credit card processing fees.

[1] https://devpost.com/software/presentation-remote-for-google-...

[2] https://devpost.com/software/cardwolla

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