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I kinda feel we both read two different blog posts here?

What I took from this was:

1) Choose contests with well defined judging criteria, not subjective or popularity contests. Ideally ones where there are specific weightings for requirements and where some of the heaviest weightings are both a) things that'll be overlooked by a lot of entrants, and b) things you're personally very good at. (in this case video content and production)

2) Choose contests where there are sufficient prizes that it's worthwhile entering even if you don't win first place.

3) Choose contests where you are allowed multiple entries, and allowed to win multiple prizes.

This is all backed up with some javascript, webscraping, AI, and math - presumably to meet all the judging criteria and improve their chances of winning the HN front page contest. My suspicious is that this is what most of that validation you're skeptical about was for - not a beautiful vase, but a checkbox ticking exercise in ranking on HN.

Then don't bust a gut trying to produce the best possible entry, just use your subject matter expertise (in this case video content production) to produce "good enough" entries that are above the level that most of the public can create but without striving to surpass Ridley Scott or Quentin Tarantino levels of production.

Don't "make 1000 vases" to practice contest entry and enter 10 contests a day. Instead carefully choose only the contests who's requirements include something important that you've already "made 1000 vases" for (like, whatever you do as a day job) and only bother entering those.

To be fair, the criterias to decide on joining a contest were presumably developed by joining contests. At least, that's how I interpreted his ramblings through code and so on. I am more skeptical towards contests showing you the submitted jobs. Surely that is less frequent and an error (e.g. if a submission looks like copied, you'd assume it was but having shown these was on you as organizer)

I got pretty good at "Makers Competitions" in my University years, to the point where my technical peak wasn't when winning a NASA competition, but ~2 years later when we released a technical product within a weekend in another competition.

I remember wrapping up the competition, winning all the prices we could win except one (1st place, and "best of" for 3 out of 4 categories), and the feeling that we had demolished the competition all around and that felt somehow a bit unfair for the rest. That was the last time I participated in a competition of this kind.

How did we do it? I had the network of contacts already (co-created a Maker group at my University) so I could literally hand-pick a team of 5 with the best maker in each sector; I called my previous co-winner who is great at tech presentations, and called the best designer+3D artist, the best App programmer, the best electronics person I knew, (and me). I got a stomach infection and spent a third of the competition in the toilet, but I ended up doing mainly programming and organizing: 1-2 hours to decide on the theme and solution, then split the work efficiently, and then let each person work on their own thing while continuously checking for sync between them. We ended up with a product and UI that seemed like a commercial product.

And this is, essentially, being a manager. And/or founder. Which is incredibly valuable, albeit often hated by many engineers.

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.

Fair enough, I haven't had that experience, it was a fun read in any case.

They aren’t trying to become the best at something, they are trying to maximize the ROI of their time.

But then, if you're a professional contest-enterer, that's got do a lot to boost your chances - especially over time, right? At the 1 year mark, I would expect you could raise your chances to 10% of a win of some type per contest (being conservative here). You've specialized in this. You'll always be a contender.

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.

You neglected that time is the most important variable here.

It's better to enter a winnable completion rather than one that cannot be found without disproportionate effort.

Hackathons are a good example. Global, online ones tend to be long, time consuming and near impossible to win any prize. Compare that with local only, now there's a chance as the number of competitors is limited to the geographical region.

I suspect the value derived here was enjoyment, not monetary.