What an oblivious statement made by your actual reviewer!
Sorry if that wasn’t clear in the blog post!
Admittedly, "passion and interest don't really come across" might've been a valid impression, since the post after sounds like it wasn't the top priority:
> I decided to apply even though I was pretty busy that weekend, hoping my schedule would clear by the time the hackathon came around.
However, this could be yet another instance of gatekeeping that has sprung up, now that there's tons of money involved, and a whole lot of petty posturing and maneuvering.
When I was a kid, from a non-affluent family, who was fortunate to be able to start programming computers, I could just do things.
I'm not aware of anyone ever being appointed arbiter of whether I had enough "passion and interest" to participate in some activity or venue.
You'd just show up, and other enthusiasts would be reasonably encouraging and supportive.
Too much nowadays in our field has a whiff of being about classism and collusion, to create barriers to joining the clique.
Don't get me started on the obviously frat-pledging interviews that Google popularized, and then way too many newcomers mimicked that gatekeeping baggery, as if it was good and reasonable, rather than bro snobbery.
A recent highly advertised hackathon rejected my application.
I DM'd an organizer and got told there was no space at the venue.
I showed up anyways and security was checking names before allowing entrants in.
Walk in with a box of "stuff" and shuffle over with a look of friendly inconvenience, and as they're scouring the list for my name: "Oh uh sorry I was a really late application so I might be towards the end or something".
"Ah thanks for letting me know!", and after some half hearted searching security pens in my name, and off I go. My team ended up being finalists.
The room was probably half empty btw. I get fire codes are a thing but as someone who's helped organize hackathons, organizers are notorious for overestimating the conversion rate from "accepted" to "actually shows up"
Can't see anything. Was the page edited perhaps?
Very grateful I'm nowhere near conferences or academia, but equally grateful others are doing the work filtering the bullshit out for me.
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.
Also hackathons are really easy to host if you keep them under 50 people. All you really need at that size is a co-working space and some pizzas.
So if you don't like the vibe at your local hackathons, why not host your own one weekend?
I think the key is really the size of the thing. Giant hackathons with big sponsors and prizes are always going to be more "serious" feeling than your local self-organized hack-days.
And for the record.... PIZZA is not an appropriate compensation. Especially if someone is lactose intolerant!
Amazon eventually arranged a weekend hackathon with someone from the elevator company. Whole bunch of engineers tried their hardest to do a better scheduling job, and failed. Almost like engineers at elevator companies have had decades to experiment and refine things.
It did shut down all the complaints.
Being a judge in a hackathon is one of the criterion for O-1 visa.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/getting-o-1-visa-easier-than-...
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.
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.
https://decapcms.org/ is a nice front end CMS admin if you're looking for one.
I didn’t get any feedback or even a reviewer name, oddly enough.
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.
So they artificially skew the participants by granting bonus points for any minority groups.
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.
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.
> 09/03/2025 - vulnerability disclosed
a security vulnerability and time travel to go with it!
