How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon
65 comments
·March 20, 2025cbracketdash
fastcall
Actually 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!
CalRobert
A useful reminder of the nature of academia
moralestapia
???
Can't see anything. Was the page edited perhaps?
szszrk
It's still there on one of the last screenshots:
Twisol
It's in one of the screenshots, in the part about how they could fetch their reviewer's full name and comments.
ForTheKidz
Tbh, 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.
accurrent
Nice 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.
non-
You definitely still can just show up and do cool hacks.
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.
paradite
O-1
paradite
Ok looks like people are not getting my comment.
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-...
jrmg
It might work in practice, but it really does not seem to meet the spirit to me. It’s definitely not true to just say “being a judge in a hackathon is one of the criterion” directly.
Actual regulation is:
Evidence of the alien's participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in an allied field of specialization to that for which classification is sought;[1]
is one of eight criterion (of which meeting three is required).
Examples given by USCIS[2] are:
Examples of relevant evidence may include, but are not limited to:
Reviewer of abstracts or papers submitted for presentation at scholarly conferences in the respective field;
Peer reviewer for scholarly publications;
Member of doctoral dissertation committees; and
Peer reviewer for government research funding programs.
Which seems to indicate rather more prestige than “judging a hackathon” is the intent of the regulation.
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
[2]: https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-m-chapter-...
Etheryte
The 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.
kevin_thibedeau
They can work in your country's consular offices if one is nearby.
setopt
That’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?
CoolCold
I'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
Firestore'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.
pfg_
In this case they had permissiona set up - but your application status was stored in the same object as the rest of the info you could modify, and you were allowed to read and write to it.
ForTheKidz
Wait, 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
Firebase 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
Pretty 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.
reportgunner
Yeah you can't really run it on-site so you just debug in the open.
pwillia7
+1 Hugo + Papermod -- Same setup I use for my blog! (reticulated.net)
https://decapcms.org/ is a nice front end CMS admin if you're looking for one.
wodenokoto
So, was he accepted after the bug was fixed?
fastcall
I 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
So... what was the full commend of the reviewer? :) You made us curious.
belter
Netflix cancelled the second season...Not enough interest...
ngruhn
Ah yes, the four foundational criteria to rate a hackathon application: passionAndInterest, projectAndPracticalExp, techSkillsAndExp, diversity
falcor84
I found that jarring too. Diversity can only really be a criterion of a group, not an individual. Otherwise it's just tokenism.
dmurray
It 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
> 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
What would this realistically be rated on? If anything it seems like racial profiling
9dev
Pretty obvious—"Guys, this year we need a few people of color and especially women on the hackathon, I don't want another white wiener party!"
So they artificially skew the participants by granting bonus points for any minority groups.
kimixa
Could be diversity of proposal - if they don't want 50 people all trying to solve "the same problem"
Brian_K_White
No one uses the word diversity by itself to mean that.
Even if the writer did, it still isn't reasonable for a million readers to presume that a writer meant anything other than what they wrote, according to the consensus usage of the the words/phrases in the given context.
It only makes sense to assume the writer meant what most readers would interpret they meant, and don't move off of that assumption unless the writer issues some update or correction.
cyrillite
Don’t forget sex and randomly inferred things too!
byyoung3
u should maybe focus on security instead of AI haha
nusl
Firebase again.
dd_xplore
The irony !
yzydserd
Which part was ironic?
gukov
Hacking a hackathon itself, maybe.
bertylicious
But 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?
sureglymop
Your 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
RSS feed is here, just doesn't seem to be linked anywhere: https://fastcall.dev/index.xml
fastcall
I just added a icon to the main page, thanks for the feedback!
SquareWheel
You 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
Great! Thank you :)
> Passion and interest don't really come across ...
What an oblivious statement made by your actual reviewer!