Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 89 posts

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

#61

Post by eeZah7Ux »

superplussed wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not to be too contrarian, but I'm a 45 year old developer whose (basically) only code that is currently in production is what I've made in the last year. Code is generally eventually thrown away, whether it's garbage or not.

> Code is generally eventually thrown away

Some code is doing useful work after 30 years, some after 10. Hipster stuff is called "ancient" after 1 year. Most hackathon stuff is dropped after 2 days.

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

#62

Post by subcosmos »

I attended a machine learning hackathon and built a food-recognition model in caffe that eventually became a mobile food logging app. Discussed here over a year ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712751

Now that we're in the post SeeFood hotdog/nothotdog era, things have changed ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJsOA4Zl6Io

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

#63

Post by hello_newman »

codefined wrote: post #48

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, mat…

That sounds like an awesome tool! If you don't mind me asking, is it publicly available to view anywhere? What language is it in?

To second another comment, I am also working on scraping but for articles. In this particular example I am trying to figure out how to get the scraper to start on the first headline all the way down to the bottom, and not touch anything else. Any tips for how to get it to find the first heading on a page?

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

#64

Post by wmichelin »

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…

You must be fun at parties

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

#65

Post by eeZah7Ux »

panphora wrote: post #49

https://swarmation.com/ Our team of 3 won the first Node Knockout by a slim margin with this realtime, multiplayer, pixel formation game. Edit: Thank you for your positive feedback! Send me suggestions and ideas if you have any. Tip: press spacebar.

Most of the time nobody gets the shape right. Could it be lag or server issues?

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

#66

Post by detaro »

moron4hire wrote: post #35
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…

Yeah, my problem with hackathons is that too many people treat them like they are a beginning point of a startup. Hackathons are to startups as martial arts tournaments are to the martial arts. You get good at the tournament by training for tournaments. But that's maybe 5% of what it takes to be really good at the overall practice. And in most cases, to get really good at the tournament, you have to do things that ar…

Yes, the "make a product" and "COMPETITION" aspects of hackathons sadly have become widely dominating. I always liked the more low-key events more, where it was just an excuse to come together with others interested in the same space and do something.

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

#67

Post by ollerac »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #65
panphora wrote: post #49

https://swarmation.com/ Our team of 3 won the first Node Knockout by a slim margin with this realtime, multiplayer, pixel formation game. Edit: Thank you for your positive feedback! Send me suggestions and ideas if you have any. Tip: press spacebar.

Most of the time nobody gets the shape right. Could it be lag or server issues?

Sometimes people move around at the last second and that can confuse things. But, ya, I've noticed some bugginess with the formations too. I'll look into it.

I didn't engineer the back-end, that was all @steadicat, but the way I think it works is if 3 or more clients confirm a formation they're a part of as correct, it's marked as correct. That way the server doesn't have to check every pixel on the board. But it can cause some issues if some of the clients are laggy.

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

#68

Post by matt_m »

Well, I'm not sure a technically impressive hackathon project is a plus past a certain point.

Not everyone follows the rules of the hackathon and works only during the time period. I was on a team that was a finalist at one of the startup festivals and won a few thousand dollars. Talking with the prize sponsor afterwards, they said something along the lines of "you don't have to pretend you did this all at the hackathon, I know how these things work". When they realized that we did, I think they were disappointed!

It worked out for us that time, but in most hackathons they don't have time to vet all the projects thoroughly, and if you do too much there will be a strong suspicion that you are cheating and just using it as a pseudo startup pitch and that can be held against you.

If you want to win, I think the best strategy for productive teams is to do more than one project since it's hard to know what any particular judge will like.

Anyway, to answer the question, the most impressive was probably a UI layout app (Mac) that synced the layout in real time with native iOS and Android apps using native widgets (this was before react native was popular). Where it was only a 24 hour hackathon and I ended up doing all 3 apps from scratch. I'm still pleased about getting horizontal and vertical snap alignment in! I'm sure the judges (reasonably) thought it was not from scratch but it can be fun to push once in a while, and people you hack with will know you did it.

It's best not to take it too seriously though. Rather than be impressive, it's probably better to be creative and do lots of stuff (and have fun too!).

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

wmichelin wrote: post #64
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…

You must be fun at parties

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by vocatus_gate »

Either Tron, a small one-off hacky script I made to automate the annoying process of cleaning up an infected Windows computer and which unexpectedly spiraled into a major open-source project:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript

or...this bad boy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/24e5xq/my_proudes...

Hideous but it worked.

Post reply on HN