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MIT Hackathon winners

hackmit.challengepost.com

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21–30 of 32 posts

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#21

Post by yeukhon »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #11
lettergram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many submissions aren't actually made in the given time period. They usually will bring either a partially to fully complete project (pretty sure it's cheating but yeah).

I don't think this is true, actually. I've been to two major hackathons and had many friends at HackMIT this fall, and this really doesn't occur- in fact, the culture was the exact opposite, people were strongly discouraged from bringing in already existing projects and almost nobody did.

I think what he was saying is people already started researching on what ideas to implement prior to the event. Many people brought in their own Pi and hardware hacks so it isn't like they didn't figure out 1/3 of the hard work. But I wouldn't undermine their ability to piece things together in 18, 20 hours.

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#22

Post by feefie »

morgante wrote: post #17
lettergram wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many submissions aren't actually made in the given time period. They usually will bring either a partially to fully complete project (pretty sure it's cheating but yeah).

That's really not the case. I'm a regular on the hackathon circuit and it's extremely rare & frowned upon for people to start building before the hackathon. Plus, if you doubt it, peruse their GitHub's and you can see clear building.

What's the best way to find their GitHubs? Do many/all projects make their source available online for people to learn from?

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#23

Post by awa »

MasterScrat wrote: post #6

If it actually works well, I'd download "Images as Text" as a Chrome extension in a blink.

You can use something like Onenote to save the image, which will OCR the image and make it searchable and also gives an option to Copy text on right click.

Disclaimer: Microsoftie

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#24

Post by vlahmot »

buss wrote: post #14
MasterScrat wrote: post #6

If it actually works well, I'd download "Images as Text" as a Chrome extension in a blink.

I'm working on an OCR project at the moment; I'd love to see which library they used.

He used Tesseract for the OCR, I don't recall what he used to make it highlightable. It was quite impressive when he demoed it on a XKCD comic.

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#25

Post by PlaidHacks »

feefie wrote: post #22
morgante wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not the case. I'm a regular on the hackathon circuit and it's extremely rare & frowned upon for people to start building before the hackathon. Plus, if you doubt it, peruse their GitHub's and you can see clear building.

What's the best way to find their GitHubs? Do many/all projects make their source available online for people to learn from?

Most of the teams I talked to, mine included, were using private repos. As much as I trust the community and my peers, it would be interesting to require public git projects during a hackathon. Not only would they be a fantastic learning tool, the potential data visualizations would provide a really cool postmortem.

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#27

Post by mkramlich »

keyle wrote: post #20

Every school in every field need something like this. It's amazing to just give people a small set of rules and let them compete in a short period of time. That's better training for life than sitting and listening to a teacher (don't get me wrong, a bit of that is good too). There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...

And of course we're all free every day to "learn by doing" -- but without necessarily any competitions, without schools, without universities, without bureaucracy, rules, hierarchies, paperwork, etc. Just do things. Just learn. Rinse, repeat.

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#28

Post by morgante »

feefie wrote: post #22
morgante wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not the case. I'm a regular on the hackathon circuit and it's extremely rare & frowned upon for people to start building before the hackathon. Plus, if you doubt it, peruse their GitHub's and you can see clear building.

What's the best way to find their GitHubs? Do many/all projects make their source available online for people to learn from?

It depends on the project, but in my experience many (if not most) people end up making their repos public.

As for finding them, I'll often just look up the hackers on GitHub and check if they have new repos.

Though that's not always the case. I kept the repo for the hack I made this weekend (http://socialsecurity.io — antivirus for Twitter) private because I'm commercializing some of the machine learning.

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#29

Post by morgante »

001sky wrote: post #18
tstactplsignore wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true, actually. I've been to two major hackathons and had many friends at HackMIT this fall, and this really doesn't occur- in fact, the culture was the exact opposite, people were strongly discouraged from bringing in already existing projects and almost nobody did.

when are the topics announced, tho? any ideas on that...

There aren't really topics for a lot of the hackathons (including HackMIT). For the "themed" hackathons you'll know the topics at registration (ie. weeks/months beforehand).

Re: MIT Hackathon winners

#30

Post by morgante »

PlaidHacks wrote: post #25
feefie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best way to find their GitHubs? Do many/all projects make their source available online for people to learn from?

Most of the teams I talked to, mine included, were using private repos. As much as I trust the community and my peers, it would be interesting to require public git projects during a hackathon. Not only would they be a fantastic learning tool, the potential data visualizations would provide a really cool postmortem.

Somebody actually did just that at hackNY this fall: http://committing.jit.su/
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