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How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon
- dd_xplore 2y agoThe irony !
- yzydserd 2y agoWhich part was ironic?
- gukov 2y agoHacking a hackathon itself, maybe.
- bertylicious 2y agoBut there is no irony, because it's two different meanings of the word "hacking": firstly "gaining unauthorized access", and secondly "focused programming". I always hated that there is this second meaning. Especially since IMO it's being used to "steal" some of the glory associated with the original meaning. When did this second meaning emerge anyway? Is this site here partially at fault?
- ifdefdebug 2y agohistorically, "gaining unauthorized access" IS the second meaning.
- bertylicious 2y agoOh nice, I wasn't aware. I always associated hacking with "gaining unauthorized access" and googling for the first definition confirmed that I'm my eyes. Didn't know it was the other way around and the term is actually much older than I assumed.
- pastage 2y agoHackning is what a competent black hat does while hacking. It is also what is done here. The double meaning is over 50 years old now.
- lukan 2y agoHackners?
- ben_w 2y agoBoth are derived uses, but breaking in seems slightly more distant than the more recent usage of hackathon. "Hack job" predates computers. The oldest form known means "to cut irregularly or inexpertly", with industrial revolution era uses similar to to people saying "AI slop" in the last year or two: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211750/where-did-the-phrase-hack-job-come-from https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211750/where-did... "The" jargon file says "[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]", while other sources claim it's the name of a tool that functions much like an axe or a mattock, or such an action as one might use the item for: """In fact, the OED also defines hack as a tool for breaking or chopping up, dating from before 1300: He lened him þan a-pon his hak, Wit seth his sun þus-gat he spak. And hacker follows. From 1620: One good hacker, being a lusty labourer, will at good ease hack or cut more than half an acre of ground in a day.""" - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-the-word-hacking-or-hacker-come-from https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-...
- falcor84 2y agoThey both stem from the more general meaning of hacking as looking for clever outside-the-box solutions to a problem, showing disregard to the intended/expected/typical way of going about that sort of thing. It apparently originated with this meaning in the late 50's at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club.
- Aicy 2y agoHere's a pleasant article on the subject from Richard Stallman, the developer of GNU / Linux. https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
- ngruhn 2y agoAh yes, the four foundational criteria to rate a hackathon application: passionAndInterest, projectAndPracticalExp, techSkillsAndExp, diversity
- falcor84 2y agoI found that jarring too. Diversity can only really be a criterion of a group, not an individual. Otherwise it's just tokenism.
- dmurray 2y agoIt could be a measure of each candidate's difference (in diversity points) from the overall cohort, which is an approximation of how much the diversity of the group will change by accepting/rejecting this candidate. But that seems hard to implement - you'd have to recalculate this for every candidate every time you got a new candidate - so perhaps we can implement an optimization: approximate this by estimating the distribution of the group and measuring differences from some centroid. HR teams, I'm available for techwashing consultancy.
- falcor84 2y ago> HR teams, I'm available for techwashing consultancy. Nice! Especially if coupled with a secondary business whereby you train applicants on how to increase their "diversity points" EDIT: I think I have the appropriate "one weird trick": flood the pool with fake applications grouped together but very dissimilar to you.
- JackDanMeier 2y agoWhat would this realistically be rated on? If anything it seems like racial profiling
- cyrillite 2y agoDon’t forget sex and randomly inferred things too!
- CoolCold 2y agoI'm curios - my naive understanding that instead of using backend which will allow limited subset of actions/validate input, there is some 3rd party DB ( Firebase ?) which works via some sort of per-user API keys to allow fetch directly by frontend devs?
- Anduia 2y agoFirestore's quick setup uses "test mode", which is free and unrestricted. The "locked mode" recommended for production blocks all reads and writes until you set up the rules. So I don't know if they had the site in test mode, or they simply set a rule to allow everything (I've seen that happen) instead handling access based on user permissions.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoWait, firebase allows full access to http connections accessible from a browser? Wtf? Why would you want to give the user direct access to a database to begin with? Is firebase built around the idea of not running your own servers or something?
- sunbum 2y agoFirebase is not a db, its an entire platform as a service. So you don't really create much a backend, it handles it all for you.
- johnecheck 2y agoPretty much. Google manages everything. It handles Auth, which ties into the rules for accessing Firestore (the db), and you've got Functions for any code that needs to run server-side. All with libraries in a lot of languages to make it easy. Pretty solid product with a cohesive experience and a generous free tier. Naturally, you'll pay an exorbitant amount once you start to scale and realize you've been locked in.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
- cbracketdash 2y ago> Passion and interest don't really come across ... What an oblivious statement made by your actual reviewer!
- CalRobert 2y agoA useful reminder of the nature of academia
- organsnyder 2y agoMany corporate cultures are no different.
- moralestapia 2y ago??? Can't see anything. Was the page edited perhaps?
- fastcall 2y agoActually only the first screenshot is a review of my application, I asked some friends for their credentials to test the information disclosure out. (you would only get 1 review per application) Sorry if that wasn’t clear in the blog post!
- ForTheKidz 2y agoTbh, if I could go to a conference that guaranteed all signs of passion and interest would be banned, it would be depressing.... but far more useful. Passion is something best saved for happy hour. The best advice I've received is not from passionate people but rather people who have resigned themselves to the work. Very grateful I'm nowhere near conferences or academia, but equally grateful others are doing the work filtering the bullshit out for me.
- byyoung3 2y agou should maybe focus on security instead of AI haha
- nusl 2y agoFirebase again.
- sureglymop 2y agoYour blog seems cool but it doesn't seem to provide an RSS feed... I think that would make it much easier to discover the posts.
- jackwilsdon 2y agoRSS feed is here, just doesn't seem to be linked anywhere: https://fastcall.dev/index.xml https://fastcall.dev/index.xml
- fastcall 2y agoI just added a icon to the main page, thanks for the feedback!
- SquareWheel 2y agoYou can also slap this in your head to make it discoverable by readers. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="fastcall's Blog" href="/index.xml">
- sureglymop 2y agoGreat! Thank you :)
- accurrent 2y agoNice catch. I remember the days when one could just show up to a hackathon and do cool hacks. Now it feels like they only exist for serious reasons.
- paradite 2y agoO-1
- Etheryte 2y agoThe O-1 visa is appealing otherwise, but the fact that it doesn't give your spouse a right to work is an absolute no starter as far as I'm concerned. So it only really makes sense if you're single or if your other half qualifies for a separate visa.
- setopt 2y agoThat’s ridiculous. So if your SO doesn’t qualify for their own work visa, they can immigrate but not work? Or they can’t join you at all?
- Etheryte 2y agoIf you have an O-1 visa, your significant other can get an O-3, which allows them to join you, but not work. Their whole presence is tied to your visa, if you lose your O-1, they lose their O-3 too. I was looking into getting an O-1 at one point, but stopped once I came to learn this.
- igleria 2y agoGives the impression of it being by design: They want talent but only for so long, they don't want the talent to "overstay their welcome" thus they complicate things, like not allowing the spouse to work
- bombcar 2y agoExactly. It’s designed to allow you to work for a time and then return. They’re nice enough to allow a spouse to accompany, but not to work or remain.
- wodenokoto 2y agoSo, was he accepted after the bug was fixed?
- fastcall 2y agoI was lol, my application is actually the 1st one in the information disclosure section. I didn’t get any feedback or even a reviewer name, oddly enough.
- szszrk 2y agoSo... what was the full commend of the reviewer? :) You made us curious.
- belter 2y agoNetflix cancelled the second season...Not enough interest...
- pwillia7 2y ago+1 Hugo + Papermod -- Same setup I use for my blog! (reticulated.net) https://decapcms.org/ https://decapcms.org/ is a nice front end CMS admin if you're looking for one.
- peterarmstrong 2y agoWhat, hackathons require admission applications these days? Holy crap I'm getting old...
- Aurornis 2y agoThere are two types of non-corporate hackathons: 1. The kind where you have to advertise all over and work hard to convince people to come to. You're happy with whoever shows up. 2. The kind where you have so many entries that you need to filter out the non-serious people and save your limited space for people with the actual skills and motivation to show up and contribute. The second kind is usually associated with some big institution or influencer. It might have a history of participation from people who went on to be successful. In this case, it's associated with universities. Different universities probably encourage their students to apply and compete.
- adibvafa 2y ago[dead]
- koakuma-chan 2y agoBuzz online where? I haven't heard about it, feel like I'm missing out.
- joshdavham 2y agoSlightly tangential: I'm currently working on a web app that uses Firebase and I'd like to potentially open source it in the future. Given all these recent articles where people have been finding vulnerabilities in Firebase apps, should I be careful to open source it? The data in my app isn't super sensitive (e.g., social security or bank info), but does contain PII like names, emails, passwords.
- henryfjordan 2y agoYou should triple-check the configs for your Firebase instance, make sure you understand all the security implications. If you release the app as open-source make sure you remove references to your specific Firebase instance. I'll also say that the app being open-source isn't the problem. As you can see from the blog-post, there's a LOT you can do just from looking at the frontend code delivered to your browser.
- chinabot 2y agoThere used to be a local hackathon where I used to live in London. Amazingly talented people used to attend, great social, I really miss going to these events
- xavdid 2y ago> disclosure timeline (mm/dd/yyyy) > 09/03/2025 - vulnerability disclosed a security vulnerability and time travel to go with it!
- fastcall 2y agolol fixed :p
- appleaday1 2y agocool wanna give me a reference so I can get in, do I have to phyiscally show up?
- appleaday1 2y agooh no applications are closed, bummer I was working on some ai stuff last week and on the weekend, its a shame that people that are working on AI stuff are too busy to notice events like this where some publicity or peer review or criticism might come handy
- alcor-z 2y ago[dead]