Show HN: OpenHacker, a weekly competition for hackers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OpenHacker, a weekly competition for hackers

openhacker.co

I think it would be interesting to shift the focus of OpenHacker to platform where companies can post challenges and offer prizes.

For example, Netflix hosted a competition for a $1M prize for the "best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films." Another example was the Ansari X Prize, which "offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks."

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

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

Contact big companies and startups to see if there is a challenge they want to put out there to the global community. The value proposition is that they gain access to the global talent pool at a relatively cheap price.

Yeah, I've thought of this.

But the site needs a user base first! And the world has problems to be solved!

Your first challenge is selling your platform to companies and organizations. It does not matter if you are selling to the Gates foundation or Netflix. Once the company/organization buys into the platform, they will do a lot of the marketing/promotion for you through social media and traditional marketing channels. Once you sell your platform, focus on getting users for that competition.

Pitch the various competitions and prizes to journalists. The X Prize foundation has a lot of media buzz around them. I am sure you could do the same.

You can make money from both sides. Like Kickstarter, charge companies a percentage of the prize for listing on your platform. Second, you could also charge a nominal entry fee like $5 for each submission, which will select for higher-quality submissions.

My advice would be to make it a monthly competition and add in a donation box (to increase the possible prize) that would increase quality as well as interest.

love the idea of a donation box

I love the idea, but is one week a long enough time limit for anything substantial?

Would a monthly competition work better do you think?

that's my first thought also. competitions that happen too often get diluted in perceived value. cool idea though

Any way to ask question or add comments about the challenges?

It's on the features list on GitHub.

Heads-up: you got competition from the YC-backed hackerrank

https://www.hackerrank.com/

I'm a hacker rank member. Cool site.

I'd like OpenHacker to be more about solving real world problems than fun programming challenges though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com