How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon
fastcall.dev
fastcall.dev
What an oblivious statement made by your actual reviewer!
Can't see anything. Was the page edited perhaps?
Sorry if that wasn’t clear in the blog post!
Very grateful I'm nowhere near conferences or academia, but equally grateful others are doing the work filtering the bullshit out for me.
Admittedly, "passion and interest don't really come across" might've been a valid impression, since the post after sounds like it wasn't the top priority:
> I decided to apply even though I was pretty busy that weekend, hoping my schedule would clear by the time the hackathon came around.
However, this could be yet another instance of gatekeeping that has sprung up, now that there's tons of money involved, and a whole lot of petty posturing and maneuvering.
When I was a kid, from a non-affluent family, who was fortunate to be able to start programming computers, I could just do things.
I'm not aware of anyone ever being appointed arbiter of whether I had enough "passion and interest" to participate in some activity or venue.
You'd just show up, and other enthusiasts would be reasonably encouraging and supportive.
Too much nowadays in our field has a whiff of being about classism and collusion, to create barriers to joining the clique.
Don't get me started on the obviously frat-pledging interviews that Google popularized, and then way too many newcomers mimicked that gatekeeping baggery, as if it was good and reasonable, rather than bro snobbery.
A recent highly advertised hackathon rejected my application.
I DM'd an organizer and got told there was no space at the venue.
I showed up anyways and security was checking names before allowing entrants in.
Walk in with a box of "stuff" and shuffle over with a look of friendly inconvenience, and as they're scouring the list for my name: "Oh uh sorry I was a really late application so I might be towards the end or something".
"Ah thanks for letting me know!", and after some half hearted searching security pens in my name, and off I go. My team ended up being finalists.
The room was probably half empty btw. I get fire codes are a thing but as someone who's helped organize hackathons, organizers are notorious for overestimating the conversion rate from "accepted" to "actually shows up"
I remember the days when one could just show up to a hackathon and do cool hacks. Now it feels like they only exist for serious reasons.
You're proposing the alternative "let people live in the US without being tied to a specific employer." But realistically, the alternative on offer is "don't let people live in the US at all."
Being a judge in a hackathon is one of the criterion for O-1 visa.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/getting-o-1-visa-easier-than-...
Actual regulation is:
Evidence of the alien's participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in an allied field of specialization to that for which classification is sought;[1]
is one of eight criterion (of which meeting three is required).
Examples given by USCIS[2] are:
Examples of relevant evidence may include, but are not limited to:
Reviewer of abstracts or papers submitted for presentation at scholarly conferences in the respective field;
Peer reviewer for scholarly publications;
Member of doctoral dissertation committees; and
Peer reviewer for government research funding programs.
Which seems to indicate rather more prestige than “judging a hackathon” is the intent of the regulation.
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
[2]: https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-m-chapter-...
Also hackathons are really easy to host if you keep them under 50 people. All you really need at that size is a co-working space and some pizzas.
So if you don't like the vibe at your local hackathons, why not host your own one weekend?
I think the key is really the size of the thing. Giant hackathons with big sponsors and prizes are always going to be more "serious" feeling than your local self-organized hack-days.
And for the record.... PIZZA is not an appropriate compensation. Especially if someone is lactose intolerant!
Amazon eventually arranged a weekend hackathon with someone from the elevator company. Whole bunch of engineers tried their hardest to do a better scheduling job, and failed. Almost like engineers at elevator companies have had decades to experiment and refine things.
It did shut down all the complaints.
1. The kind where you have to advertise all over and work hard to convince people to come to. You're happy with whoever shows up.
2. The kind where you have so many entries that you need to filter out the non-serious people and save your limited space for people with the actual skills and motivation to show up and contribute.
The second kind is usually associated with some big institution or influencer. It might have a history of participation from people who went on to be successful.
In this case, it's associated with universities. Different universities probably encourage their students to apply and compete.
So I don't know if they had the site in test mode, or they simply set a rule to allow everything (I've seen that happen) instead handling access based on user permissions.
All with libraries in a lot of languages to make it easy. Pretty solid product with a cohesive experience and a generous free tier.
Naturally, you'll pay an exorbitant amount once you start to scale and realize you've been locked in.
Crazy giving up that much control of your product to a third party. I can definitely see the appeal to spike realtime/chat projects, though—they really leaned into that api design well. Selling out to google was a mistake.
As a product with a ton of appeal to the least experienced developers, lots of mistakes happen.
My understanding is that (assuming you trust google) there's no reason you can't build a secure application on firebase.
https://decapcms.org/ is a nice front end CMS admin if you're looking for one.
I didn’t get any feedback or even a reviewer name, oddly enough.
But that seems hard to implement - you'd have to recalculate this for every candidate every time you got a new candidate - so perhaps we can implement an optimization: approximate this by estimating the distribution of the group and measuring differences from some centroid.
HR teams, I'm available for techwashing consultancy.
Nice! Especially if coupled with a secondary business whereby you train applicants on how to increase their "diversity points"
EDIT: I think I have the appropriate "one weird trick": flood the pool with fake applications grouped together but very dissimilar to you.
Even if the writer did, it still isn't reasonable for a million readers to presume that a writer meant anything other than what they wrote, according to the consensus usage of the the words/phrases in the given context.
It only makes sense to assume the writer meant what most readers would interpret they meant, and don't move off of that assumption unless the writer issues some update or correction.
So they artificially skew the participants by granting bonus points for any minority groups.
[1]in soul if not title
Given all these recent articles where people have been finding vulnerabilities in Firebase apps, should I be careful to open source it? The data in my app isn't super sensitive (e.g., social security or bank info), but does contain PII like names, emails, passwords.
If you release the app as open-source make sure you remove references to your specific Firebase instance.
I'll also say that the app being open-source isn't the problem. As you can see from the blog-post, there's a LOT you can do just from looking at the frontend code delivered to your browser.
> 09/03/2025 - vulnerability disclosed
a security vulnerability and time travel to go with it!
I always hated that there is this second meaning. Especially since IMO it's being used to "steal" some of the glory associated with the original meaning.
When did this second meaning emerge anyway? Is this site here partially at fault?
"Hack job" predates computers. The oldest form known means "to cut irregularly or inexpertly", with industrial revolution era uses similar to to people saying "AI slop" in the last year or two: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211750/where-did...
"The" jargon file says "[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]", while other sources claim it's the name of a tool that functions much like an axe or a mattock, or such an action as one might use the item for:
"""In fact, the OED also defines hack as a tool for breaking or chopping up, dating from before 1300:
He lened him þan a-pon his hak, Wit seth his sun þus-gat he spak. And hacker follows. From 1620:
One good hacker, being a lusty labourer, will at good ease hack or cut more than half an acre of ground in a day."""
- https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-...
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