Ask HN: Ensuring hackathon fairness?
How do hackathon organizers ensure that the finished projects are actually completed during the allotted time period as opposed to having developers make progress before the event actually starts?
If you do care about that, there are a couple ways you could structure the hackathon to eliminate some cheating (but a smart, talented, determined hacker probably can thwart them). Things like requiring submission of source code (then look at the git logs. what are the dates? are the first commits huge piles of work?) or structuring the contest around an unknown that gets revealed when it starts, like a theme (e.g. music-based apps).