Not only are you competing for that hackathon's prize, you're competing for the reputation of the entire school. I imagine HackRU will be extra competitive.
Don't forget the trophy too. Whatever school has the most points at the end of the season gets to keep it.
Question for HN people: Do you associate the word hacking with computer security? I know I do, and it took me a long time to find that the website was talking about hackathons and not computer security.
Sidenote: rewarding students for travelling seems to bias the scoring in favor of densely populated places like the NE.
Considering the context of being a Y Combinator website, I'd hope most of us understand that this is not a website specifically about computer security.
"Hacking" has long since been appropriated to refer to anything tech startup related. Business growth, usage of an API, even design (http://hackdesign.org/). Essentially, replace verb X with hacking. A pet peeve of mine... but what can you do.
I might be slightly biased, but I think Rutgers has the best shot here with their hackathon being 1 of the 2 remaining. Carnegie Mellon is hella far away, and Rutgers has an enormous community. Strong attendance could put them in the lead.
We'll see :) Remember, Rutgers hackers only earn 1 attendance point for hacking at HackRU since it's at their home school, but other schools will get 2 points. Every hack is gonna count.
You're changing the rules halfway through the contest?
This is awesome - ranking schools by the successes of their extra-curricular hacking is a really interesting way to look at things.
Swift is a pretty cool guy.. keep up the good work.