Can this be made remote? It'd help us non Americans/American non Californians to apply.
From the application page :-
Important note: This is an application, not a signup form. We have an application instead of a first-come, first-served signup because it helps guarantee a diverse group of participants and that matters a lot to us.
It seems counter intuitive to base this in Mountain View if you care about diversity. Non American Hackers, Americans who aren't in California get disqualified immediately.
+1 to remote! As an east coaster, I've participated in many hackathons in person and I can vouch that none have actually benefited from colocation. Since teams are competing, there is naturally no incentive to associate with peers outside your direct team - which you can do plenty well remotely.
i second this. i just shipped what i started working on during the april hackathon, and it’s been great to keep in touch with people on the channel. awesome event, and great food!
I would love to attend as long as people start fresh projects at that day. Ideally people will find new partners and form new teams around shared idea. Otherwise it will become another YC pich night for mature(ish) products.
Anyone interested in helping build something to check this? That would be a pretty meta hackathon project. Probably not the most promising business idea though...
You start from scratch.
At least that's what I've been following for the numerous hackathons I've attended/won/lost.
Of course no one's going to check if you worked on it last night or whatnot (I know friends who've taken previous hackathon submissions and submit it to hackathons like it's new and actually won) but for the hackathon spirit you shouldn't.
That's the officiallyunofficial rule at all the hackathons I've been to, but also at every hackathon I've been to, the biggest prize winners were teams that were coming in with something they'd obviously been planning and working on for at least a couple weeks ramping up to the hackathon.
I imagine with a ycombinator interview on the line that sort of behavior will only be more prevalent.
Is this for building a startup investors will want to invest in or to make something interesting? I.e., is it basically a YC application in another form? There are many interesting things that are worth hacking on but not appropriate for venture capital-funded startups.
Any chance of a mirror event in NYC? I'm sure a lot of people would be interested but travelling to SF for one night would most likely be very inconvenient.
Hey Craig.
I am an Indian citizen and would like to attend. I get it that there are no travel grants. Would there be some kind of visa assistance? Should I apply for B1?
Sounds amazing. It pains me that I won't be able to go to this. (If it were feasible to join from an intercontinental flight, I would). Are you planning others in the future?
I can do full stack web development, distributed computing, Cloud, IoT, Mobile Dev and a bit of data science. Email me up if you have some interesting to work on. :)
I'm tinkering with the idea of an IoT device which sits at the top of your IoT chain. It has microphone and other potential sensory input, which it processes completely offline and turns into text commands which get sent to other devices over the network.
I don't want 10 IoT devices each with their own mics and cameras. I want one device from a brand I trust, which veritably doesn't phone home other than updates, with a dirt-simple API for integration. All other devices can take commands from this one. The age of Alexa and Google Home and "smart TVs" with microphones needs to disappear.
If tenable, the idea could be extended to other sensitive domains such as payment processing with a token system.
Just a thought. Could be hackathon material if I find a good partner.
Just a thought, my old company ElectricImp could be a good fit. The company itself only provides diagrams for compatible hardware, an OS, and a cloud for deployment and a paired cloud-based VM for each deployed.
The only phoning home is OS updates, and then whatever you program the VM to do. So you could take audio in on the device, send to cloud VM, then send to some sort of homebrew speech to text (or be a total fucking badass and squeeze your own speech to text in squirrel code onto the VM itself).
Yep. Need help with frontend skills. Mostly CSS. Idea is to build a code review site specifically focusing on blindspots in interviews. If interested, email in profile.
