This doesn't square with several team's assertions that, according to their analytics, their videos had never been viewed by the judges. I wish they (saleforce) had addressed this issue in their response.
I already commented on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784782), and so far I can find only one person that is claiming that their video was not shown (@colabi). While every complaint deserves to be investigated, I think colabi's has been heard multiple times already and I'd like to see if there is some other cause for concern.
Since you are confidentially asserting that you believe that salesforce employees are lying, it would help everyone if you could identify just a couple of the dozens of developers that you reference.
If you do so, I will investigate their specific situation directly.
Put another way, I look at a lot of resumes that have personal links/CVs on them. 90% of the time I've decided no before I get to them, making their inclusion irrelevant. Could this not have happened?
So, the assumption is that judges' computers don't block phone-home and other tracking/analytics services? That'd be a very poor and dangerous assumption to make.
"We instructed both our first and second round judges to evaluate the submissions using the apps’ description, screen shots and the demo video using the same four criteria"
Lock-step global counters, even when you play games like sharding and summing to reduce contention, can still introduce latency and SPOF. But then again, I would have expected any probabilistic counter to only kick in after a certain popularity threshold.
I would hesitate to make any claim that something definitely was not viewed based on anything less than the full HTTP access logs of a self-hosted video.