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Comment by codeoclock | Hacker News Reader

If developers are incentives by the possibility of winning $1m, they would start working months in advance. That's why it's not ok to offer $1m as a hackathon prize, as it's not in the spirit of hacking.

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I think you could offer 1million but it has to be a competition where the teams that enter solve a single problem. That way accurate scoring metrics can be developed and used.

It doesn't make sense to say "Hackathon, 1 million dollars, Go!".

edit: To add. The problem should be announced the day of!

I guess that it's better to allow much more time for bigger prizes. Like the Netflix prize. That was a great mix of marketing and feeding the recommender system.

The prospect of a $1M prize wasn't announced until Oct 25th: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/25/salesforce-offering...

That's kind of nitpicky. My point was that if there is a hackathon with a highly desirable prize, and you know about it in advance, there is a direct incentive for you to spend time between the time you learn of the hack and the time when the hack officially begins working on ideas, designs, business strategy, and even code, and that that effect is the reason that it's not a good idea, or in the spirit of hacking, to offer high stakes prizes in hackathon style situations.

Apologies for the very long sentence, I love commas and am the arch-nemesis of conciseness.

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