GitHub Contest Winners

github.com

29 points·tolmasky··5 comments

http://contest.github.com/ no longer explains what the contest actually is/was.

Can someone summarize?

i had the same problem.

checking the READMEs of the entrants, it seems to be a GitHub Project Recommendation contest. for example, check out http://github.com/jeremybarnes/github_contest/tree/master

The original description is here: http://github.com/blog/466-the-2009-github-contest

"Today we’re announcing our 2009 GitHub Contest. Since the Netflix prize is now over, we figured you guys needed something to do. Here is your chance to contribute to the open source canon, make GitHub better, and possibly win some of the best prizes probably ever offered by a contest ... the problem is that we want to recommend repositories to you when you log into GitHub that you’ll love...we figured perhaps you can do this better than we can. I extracted a dataset of all the repository watches in our database – close to half a million – and withheld a sample of them. I then created a test file listing the users I held watches back from. If you can write a program to analyze our dataset and best guess the watches we held back, you win our amazing prizes."

The contest winners are just awesome, their right guesses achieved as high as 56.91%. See http://contest.github.com/leaderboard

this is awesome. i recently tried to use GitHub for finding fun hacks, but i just couldn't find stuff very well. i'd like to find a community of hackers and startupy folks actually working on open source code, and i think this will help. more community connections would help, too.

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