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)
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"
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.
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.
They did a great one at Amazon several years ago. Engineers had been loudly complaining about the elevators in one building, and how long it could take at lunchtime to get one. All sorts of crap about how the elevator algorithm sucked, etc.
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 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.
Ah now it makes sense why some of my colleagues were judging hackathons like crazy. TBH the number of O-1s being handed out is a joke. People 2 years out of college are getting O-1s for being able to call chatgpt APIs. I mean given the number of reviews I do on a regular basis for academic journals I guess I would qualify.
rofl I didnt know this was a thing, why are people so intent on gaming the system? I was judging thing in person and even during covid I did it via Discord for some events (Discord hackathons were a different culture of their own and were great) even the physical ones I did had certain traditions depending on which universities you were judging at, I do peer reviews for the research lab that I help out with sometimes so maybe that counts, but the thing is I am just doing all this because I think its fun to do. Knowing that other people have potential nefarious reasons or trying to game things or even "cheat" the system was like one of the reasons why I quit Pokemon Go initially or certain games that put everyone on the same leaderboard.
wait what I didnt know this I mentored and judged at various hackathons in the USA, do people really care about what type of visa they get? Is this a thing in 2025?
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.
If 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.
Not just a US thing, Ireland did this to critical skills employment holders for years. Worse, they pretended your spouse could work, but then made the process so cumbersome it was almost impossible to comply.
Gives 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
I think they'll gladly keep the holders of these visas as long as they're desperate. It's not about length of time, it's about keeping them tied to a single employer, working like a rented mule, afraid to speak up. These visas make people good, docile employees because if they aren't they get removed from the country. It's kind of wild that they are so casually accepted.
I think if you make it a moral violation to give people nice things with attached conditions, this will not result in more people having nice things.
You're proposing the alternative "let people live in the US without being tied to a specific employer." But realistically, the alternative on offer is "don't let people live in the US at all."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Huh! I just spent an hour diving in and I see now.
Crazy giving up that much control of your product to a third party. I can definitely see the appeal to spike realtime/chat projects, though—they really leaned into that api design well. Selling out to google was a mistake.
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.
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.
In Stalinist and Maoist countries you’d get extra points for uni when coming from a worker or farmer family. Times change, ideologies change, but some things don’t.
That actually makes sense from the perspective of a state managing its labor force, though. That's just smart. "Diversity" for its own sake is just meaningless centrist bullshit.
There 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
Slightly 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.
You 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.
oh 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
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?
They 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.
Oh 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.
Both 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" 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."""
What an oblivious statement made by your actual reviewer!