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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Google said last year that registration would now require a programming challenge. I hope they follow through with this because developer conferences have been over-run with non-developers.

Technical talks are presented to half empty rooms, developers miss out on tickets and have to watch later online while the hallways are full of business people (got nothing against y'all, but there are plenty of other conferences)

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Easy solution, registration for the first 2 weeks should only be through a rest api call (whose required params change every day)

Should weed out the cruft

Other than you could write a curl statement in all of 2 minutes, post it on HN and then it defeats the purpose of said coding challenge. The smart cruft will get in... they'll just do it by piggy backing on those who do the work and post it online.

They'll always be able to get in. Which isn't a problem. The problem is buisness guys outnumbering technical guys. Reducing their numbers is all that's required.

A key problem with Google I/O is that they give you enough free stuff while you are there to pay you back for the price of the ticket multiple times over: this pricing arbitrage creates miserable incentives, and causes a lot of people to register for the conference for the sole purpose of being able to obtain free stuff, after which they either immediately ditch or scalp their ticket.

It looks like they upped the price. We will see if it influences demand.

Yes; however, the result is still less than the resale value of the equipment they gave everyone for free last year (especially if you went to the talk that gave away the Xperia Play): what they really need to do is not make the conference a net-negative "cost" to attend.

Many of the sessions that I attended last year at io were packed. Hopefully the additional day helps alleviate this.

Yeah, there were more than a few instances when I would try to attend a session and got turned away at the door because the room was at capacity.

My experience is from a couple of years ago because I missed out on a ticket last year (I am not very good at having to do something at a very specific date and time).

I also heard that tickets will be non-transferrable this year. Last year people were scalping them on eBay and craigslist because of the free hardware that is usually given away.

"You will need Google+ to register and Google Wallet to pay."

Perhaps this requirement will do a first pass at filtering out non-developers.

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