MIT Hackathon winners | Hacker News Reader

MIT Hackathon winners

hackmit.challengepost.com

82 pointsmgwhitfield30 comments

Every school in every field need something like this. It's amazing to just give people a small set of rules and let them compete in a short period of time. That's better training for life than sitting and listening to a teacher (don't get me wrong, a bit of that is good too).

There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...

And of course we're all free every day to "learn by doing" -- but without necessarily any competitions, without schools, without universities, without bureaucracy, rules, hierarchies, paperwork, etc. Just do things. Just learn. Rinse, repeat.

If it actually works well, I'd download "Images as Text" as a Chrome extension in a blink.

I saw it in action at hackMIT and it seemed to work really well.

I'm working on an OCR project at the moment; I'd love to see which library they used.

He used Tesseract for the OCR, I don't recall what he used to make it highlightable. It was quite impressive when he demoed it on a XKCD comic.

You can use something like Onenote to save the image, which will OCR the image and make it searchable and also gives an option to Copy text on right click.

Disclaimer: Microsoftie

What exactly does the winning submission do?

I think it depends on your notebook's webcam: Webcam recognizes your smart phone's flash (flash = cursor location) and allows you to draw on a virtual surface...

I was there. You point the flashlight on your phone at your computers webcam. The software (Javascript / Canvas I think) lets you draw with the light, while you can change colours with your phone. The bonus part was where they used the intensity of the light as a Z-axis, so by moving the phone closer / further away you could build a 3D light painting in the canvas.

Reminds me of this awesome project that a buddy of mine at Google did:

https://www.justareflektor.com/

Wow. These were made in two days? Incredible!

About 22 hours, actually. Hacking started about 11am Saturday, and ended 9am Sunday. It was a really short one!

Many submissions aren't actually made in the given time period. They usually will bring either a partially to fully complete project (pretty sure it's cheating but yeah).

I don't think this is true, actually. I've been to two major hackathons and had many friends at HackMIT this fall, and this really doesn't occur- in fact, the culture was the exact opposite, people were strongly discouraged from bringing in already existing projects and almost nobody did.

when are the topics announced, tho? any ideas on that...

There aren't really topics for a lot of the hackathons (including HackMIT). For the "themed" hackathons you'll know the topics at registration (ie. weeks/months beforehand).

Multiple awards seemed to be sponsored or product unique, that is why I wonder on this point. Certain items I would imaging having a hands on beforehand would be quite leg up. Excuse my mixed metaphors ;).

I think what he was saying is people already started researching on what ideas to implement prior to the event. Many people brought in their own Pi and hardware hacks so it isn't like they didn't figure out 1/3 of the hard work. But I wouldn't undermine their ability to piece things together in 18, 20 hours.

That's really not the case. I'm a regular on the hackathon circuit and it's extremely rare & frowned upon for people to start building before the hackathon. Plus, if you doubt it, peruse their GitHub's and you can see clear building.

You can, of course, edit your git history. The whole thing works on an honor system. Since the community is pretty tight-knit, it works.

What's the best way to find their GitHubs? Do many/all projects make their source available online for people to learn from?

Most of the teams I talked to, mine included, were using private repos. As much as I trust the community and my peers, it would be interesting to require public git projects during a hackathon. Not only would they be a fantastic learning tool, the potential data visualizations would provide a really cool postmortem.

Somebody actually did just that at hackNY this fall: http://committing.jit.su/

It depends on the project, but in my experience many (if not most) people end up making their repos public.

As for finding them, I'll often just look up the hackers on GitHub and check if they have new repos.

Though that's not always the case. I kept the repo for the hack I made this weekend (http://socialsecurity.io — antivirus for Twitter) private because I'm commercializing some of the machine learning.

I thought that GTA 6 was really impressive, given that they modeled everything as buildings, the idea to use the entire world for a video game is exceedingly clever. A shoutout to the uWaterloo team too. (As an aside they're in velocity as well.)

The PiVision sounds really useful.

It was really sweet. They were a little crunched for time so they didn't get to fully show everyone but they had my vote for winner.

Student of Warsaw University of Technlogoy here, been there. Check out FitBit extension for HabitRPG : https://github.com/igos/fitbit2habitrpg

SilkSpeak sounds like a great idea.

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