Introducing Battle Hack | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Battle Hack

battlehack.org

44 pointscbetta33 comments

'We have a tradition at PayPal of supporting hackers' Yepp, just like you've given the deserved prize to this teen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779719 when he found a serious bug in your site.

That's a way to recover PR I would guess :)

A better way would be to make good on your promise and fix the mistake, not pretend it didn't happen.

Although, in real life, for the majority of people... maybe the opposite is true.

Same exact thought I had, after reading just that I closed the tab.

Last 3 or 4 paypal related mails on the full disclosure mailing list also report that paypal is either not responding, not cooperating or weaseling their way out of paying bounties all the time. I'm not sure how seriously I can take this.

Looks like a fun idea to start, but it's being pitched so badly given paypal's history and the site is actually shockingly bad. The major branding is Twitter's! The links don't work! The design is horrible! It's hosted on Github!

This seems to be some muddle of an organization that previously organized something called Charity Hack and Paypals dev evangelists, probably why the whole message is coming across so jarringly at odds with the reality of developing with paypal.

At first I thought they had a cool, if out-dated, easter egg, but they seem to have lifted the code without any credit:

(enter the konami code or open your console and enter goApeshit(), warning, loud)

http://battlehack.org/javascript/ie5.js

https://github.com/moovweb/harlem_shaker

The Twitter logo at the top left is very disconcerting. It looks as if the website was made by Twitter, but it only points to the BattleHack Twitter account.

Who cares about a trip to Silicon Valley and $100,000 USD - I'm after the shiny axe!

So are we. Imagine how I feel having to give that thing to the winning team instead of being able to keep it.

No southern hemisphere city? :(

Why we down here are always forgotten?

Annoying, isn't it? Google has offices in multiple southern hemispheric cities -- still no "Summer of Code" for half of the planet.

I should however single out AWS. Amazon have two sales engineers here in Perth.

Perth, of all places! Kudos, Amazon.

Earth's northern hemisphere contains most of the planet's land, and roughly 90% of its human population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere‎

Oh, good point. There's only twice as many of us as there are Americans.

You can't blame your location on the planet on the Americans.

Perth, of all places!

How far the legendary galactic center of .sigs must have fallen, if even its own residents disparage it so!

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/#perth

I'd love to do Perth. Good tech scene there?

Small but enthusiastic. We have a sprinkling of tech service / consulting firms and startups, two VCs and some meetup groups, but that's about it.

Realistically, any such contest held in the Southern hemisphere would be held in Sydney, maybe Auckland or Wellington and maybe, maybe, Cape Town.

Again would love to do it. Will keep it in mind for next year. I mainly was wondering re Perth as I have family there :)

We hope to get around to that next year. Not forgotten, just a lack of resources :)

Lack of resources is rarely a problem. I remember a teacher tell me that "not enough time" is rarely an excuse for not doing homework because at every waking moment we're prioritizing one task over others. Thus, companies do not lack people or money. They are deliberately prioritizing the rest of the world over you.

That really is not true. This year's edition scaled up from 1 event to 10. We want to take care of each event and make it awesome and not just organize a ton of events that are not fun at all.

In fact, almost all the World was forgotten, they have only Europe and USA cities. :(

Wufoo held an API contest in August 2010. First prize won a battle axe. http://www.wufoo.com/2010/08/02/win-a-real-battle-axe-in-the...

Try to bring that battle axe on the plane after you win...

Good luck flying home with that trophy!

They thought of that:

> Yep, it’s an axe trophy.

> Good luck clearing airport security

http://battlehack.org/berlin/#prizes

Just didn't have a solution obviously ;)

Don't check in your ax, at least not with United. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars

"We have a tradition at PayPal of supporting hackers. " Really?

Just make sure you are at least 18 years old... http://www.pcworld.com/article/2039940/paypal-denies-teenage...