How to win a hackathon
blog.rumma.ge
blog.rumma.ge
I'm serious. What could possibly make someone work on anything for 30 hours straight (with only one hour break)? I couldn't imagine myself spending 30 hours straight on any activity voluntarily. What about the health implications?
This reminds me of gamers dying of cardiac arrest after spending days on end in front of a computer.
As far as health, yeah – kind of sucks to be taken out of commission for a few days, but a very small sacrifice and completely worth it in our minds.
The importance of this can't be stressed enough. Winning the Facebook Hackathon within a month of starting university was the catalyst to applying to and being accepted at a YC company for the summer as well as a ticket through the interview processes at Google, et al.
More importantly, it also forged connections with local investors and angels that would have taken years to create had I gone through the normal routes, and that wasn't even a large event, so I can only imagine what an AngelHack placing would do
And, beyond that, it was some of the most fun I've had, for the longest time in a single go. Even if I didn't place, it would have been great.
I don't think there are any serious health implication to staying up for ~30 hours, especially if you take short naps once in a while. This is actually gentler than spending about the same time awake in planes and airports, and travelling doesn't seem very strange, does it? If you only do this once in a while, it shouldn't be an issue at all.
You're asking for an objective explanation of why people find things subjectively rewarding.
Why do people climb Mount Everest? Why do they run marathons? I don't want to do either of those things, and both are probably more dangerous than a 30 hour video-gaming session.
It was fun. Got in a real zone for a while. Built something cool. Got to greenfield hack for 12 hours without dealing with any legacy code. There was a reasonable chance at winning. And all the people who would have been playing werewolf were hacking, so what else would I do?
There's more to it than this, but it comes down to it being fun and rewarding.
I found it curious that Startupbus, which I believe is going on right now, seems to never have had much traction on HN, and when it did, it appeared to be astroturf. It seems like an unforgettable and intense experience, but combining a hackathon with cabin fever and gross bathrooms just doesn't seem like a lot of fun.
In addition to building something cool and credible, you got to show that you could handle a lot of challenges (little to no internet connectivity, distractions, etc).
However, in our case we weren't allowed to use the bathroom on the bus.
edit: When I am signed in and 1.) click "Load Craigslist Listings" then 2.) click "Cancel" 3.) I get "We're sorry, but something went wrong."
I'm not sure how frequently users will be clicking cancel or if it happens in every browser but FWIW this is happening in Safari(desktop).
I'm not familiar with a way. Some ideas:
* Have Alexa/etc. report real time data including referrers. This requires that work is done by one of the few companies that gets this data.
* Create a site that just monitors which links show up on a manually created list of popular URLs. This would only be an estimate, though since it wouldn't view actual traffic.
* Have people who run sites that might get killed include some code that checks the logs/analytics and reports heavy activity. This is problematic since it requires each site in question to prepare for getting lots of traffic.
1) How does this get around the Craigslist TOS (if it does at all)? Not being accusatory -- and I doubt this kind of use would be draining on CL -- just interested if that was at all an issue to deal with?
2) It's encouraging to hear that you used Rails 3.2's ActiveStore on a production app. That's a cool feature but I was wondering if it was stable enough to use.
https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5daf07704ad21d8856612162...