201–210 of 229 posts
This is just work! You made eight commercials for a megacorporation for $300 a piece, right? Sounds like you are undercharging! I did a contest once and won $2500. In the end the part I spent 2 weeks on made like $50, and the part I spent 30 minutes on right before the deadline made $2000. Not sure what lesson to take from that... It was way more work than expected, especially because they had us do a peer review tha…
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I agree, that section read as a post-hoc justification given how much effort went into it. If the effort to determine if something is "worth" entering is more than the effort to enter it, it would be better to just enter it rather than wasting time on the verification part. Particularly as there's no reputational downside to entering and failing at such a contest.
You underestimate how much logic takes a backseat when you're feeding an infant at 3am for weeks on end. This project gave me a creative outlet during a time where sanity preservation was paramount. The odds were calculated up front.
[1] https://variety.com/vip/content-owner-lawsuits-against-ai-co...
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Even engineering contests are like this. I remember back in college there was a sustainable dog house competition with a very clearly defined rubric. My partner and I min/maxed the hell out of it and won first prize and $1,000, while everyone else built beautiful dog houses that ultimately missed the point.
what was the rubric they missed?
The rubric also put a ton of points on the technical report which seemed like an after thought for most people but at the end of the day it was an engineering competition so the whole point was the technical portion and the dog house display itself was kind of just the fun bit. We did really well just because we bothered to do all the requested calculations on life cycle cost analysis, heat losses, carbon balance, etc.
Our final product looked like a tank, but it won by a long shot.
I love that 75% of the post was OP checking the math on whether or not he should join the contest.
I'm somewhat skeptical of this amount of validation. There's a solid educational consensus on how to become the best at something: do it a lot. If your goal is to winning contests, you should really prioritize cranking through them: getting practice at getting better. Don't try to make a masterpiece. Instead focus on becoming fast at creating entries, doing them according to the rules, and sending them off. Like thos…
If you're a professional contest-enterer then it seems like a pretty bad idea to produce a detailed write-up which prospective rival contest-enterers may use as training material. If 1k people from HN visit your blog then even 0.5% of readers getting in on the game can cause your expected value to plummet.
It should be noted that the article addressed the question of how to discover contests with a refusal to divulge. This is security by obscurity. If a bunch of people get excited enough about entering contests using these deliberate winning methods then it wouldn't take much for them to set up a Discord channel to coordinate the discovery process. If even 10 people get together to "entry bomb" these contests then the original author's advantage will evaporate.
I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.
Sigh… you know, there's a bit of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" happening here, for sure, but let me be optimistic for a second. This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I genuinely used the tools to tell the story I wanted to tell. There was something about the way friction was removed with the typical narration round-trips that actually made the storytelling better, easier, less painful… and I truly don't believe…
This is just work! You made eight commercials for a megacorporation for $300 a piece, right? Sounds like you are undercharging! I did a contest once and won $2500. In the end the part I spent 2 weeks on made like $50, and the part I spent 30 minutes on right before the deadline made $2000. Not sure what lesson to take from that... It was way more work than expected, especially because they had us do a peer review tha…
For some people it's not all about the money.
So it's two days of work for a chance at two days of pay.
Eh, I think of this hobby more like a video game — fun to play, even if you don't win (but more fun if you do).
I once ran an ultra marathon distance and had no lubricant but getting a bad rash so I sprayed my thighs and balls with WD-40 which I found outside someone’s garage. It lasted me almost 15 miles until I could buy some Vaseline. Off label use probably
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Except the reviewers don't usually read it either
A thousand times this. M******g reviewers who fail to comprehend the instructions for evaluating a proposal is a perpetual pain in the neck.
Also, I don't think you have to censor words here in general.