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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?

#72
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've cherry picked to say "worthless projects" vs. "exhilarating open source", yet someone could easily cherry pick "world changing projects" vs. "pointless open source." There is no more nobility, in my opinion, in another food delivery hackathon app vs. another 1 of 100 JavaScript frameworks that people don't need.

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

#74

I built a digital bank for refugees that would allow them to set up a bank account, move their funds for safe keeping and also store documents securely. Authentication happened entirely through a 6 digit code and facial and voice recognition through use of video. The idea was that refugees or other displaced persons would be able to access their documents and funds through any device, so that they could easily establ…

We tackled this as well in https://devpost.com/software/the-invisibles and an NGO is working in Greece with this as well as the other needs you mentioned.

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

#75

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…

I'm interested to know more about the tools/techniques you used to scrap the sites and clean the results. I am working on scraping contents from a couple of sites and it seems to be a pain, probably because i don't have lot of experience around it.

If you are familiar with python then try scrapy[1]. You can also scrape websites using beautifulsoup4[2]

[1] https://scrapy.org/ [2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4

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

#76
The company I worked at did a 2 week long hackathon. Another developer and I built a Ruby gem that creates service objects which integrate nicely into the Rail ecosystem. It was a bunch of fun and over time it ended up becoming a big part of our codebase. We open sourced it and it's done pretty well (https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction). In fact, I was at a conference and met a guy who's company was using it. It was really cool to run into someone benefiting from my work.

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

#77
My team won a bank-sponsored hackathon and a $15,000 prize because 4 days before it started, I came across this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lightbulb/comments/43ljd4/a_virtual...

We built a tamagotchi-like app called Piggly that would let you feed and take care of it using money from your bank account. However, instead of treating it like an in-app purchase, the money goes from your chequing account into savings or investments (you decide).

The server is still up if anyone would like to try it: http://138.68.25.230/

You can Register with any 6 digit number.

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

#78

My team won a bank-sponsored hackathon and a $15,000 prize because 4 days before it started, I came across this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lightbulb/comments/43ljd4/a_virtual... We built a tamagotchi-like app called Piggly that would let you feed and take care of it using money from your bank account. However, instead of treating it like an in-app purchase, the money goes from your chequing account into…

Heh, you managed to swing my opinion a 180 in a single sentence.

>We built a tamagotchi-like app called Piggly that would let you feed and take care of it using money from your bank account.

"Wow, that's exploitative as hell. You won't get many players but there are a few who'd get addicted and basically drain their accounts. Immoral - but profitable!"

>However, instead of treating it like an in-app purchase, the money goes from your chequing account into savings or investments (you decide).

"Well, that's just awesome. It encourages people to save by turning it into a game. If they really end up needing that money they can always move it back."

Neat idea. I wonder how a bank would react to someone constantly pushing money between checkings and savings to care for their Piggly without actually saving as if they had a pet.

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

#80

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…

For such an impressive project the Github page is surprisingly sparse!

"space" is the Processing files for detecting the hand, "web" is for showing and reading the data on screen and the .ino for Arduino. If I remember correctly I struggled quite a bit with the hand detection system and then we had to adapt it to the light conditions of the place, finding a good way to do it, etc.

Also of course I was just a couple of years in with learning programming while studying an unrelated degree.

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