Tell me how is this hackathon even fair, just look at the few winners | Hacker News Reader

Tell me how is this hackathon even fair, just look at the few winners

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8 pointsNishan_nb6 comments

Hackathons are generally pretty superficial.

I attended lots of hackathons in university and learned pretty quickly that I should spend 9/10ths of my time on the dashboard or an impressive demo.

I once won a prize for scalability by using a serverless end point.

Nobody’s checking, nobody really wants to judge in detail, so you need to make it easy.

No I myself am in community where we organize hackathons for likes of Alibaba, Sony in Japan, we never let anyone bend rules and tech explanation is must. It depends upon the organizer

What kind of hackathon is this?

I suspect a lot of them is just to get folks to do some things and people with the skills to investigate in detail aren't all the interested in investing the time.

It was a vibe coding hackathon, but many were industry professionals. Winner was a senior engineer from Intuit, but the product does not even work. Everything faked in Video, product does not even navigate from one page to another without error crash, but still the guy won. Some did not even submitted the hosted url of project, yet won. Another winner is literally mock data dashboard, everyone says either its rigged or organizers were very reckless, just randomly choose those projects. Organizers don't wanna admit it so, they are banning critics from everywhere they can control. Total amount on prize is $1M, winner get 100k.

I mean I know right? I just decided not to give a f*. Felt so rigged af. In my category, nothing worked for the winner's platform. While I had the full flow working, the subscriptions etc. Like what? I don't mind losing, but you know the winner with ai generated video with 0 working product shown feels kind of mildly not it.

TL;DR Bolt hackathon was run so unfairly it felt rigged. I worked every day after work for a month, making sure my project was competitive, only to face reckless unfair judgment. The winning project in my track was broken: half the UI didn’t exist, the website itself did not worked, full of errors if checked console. Dashboard projects with mock data won prizes. My track felt like a joke, so I’m writing this hoping a tech blog like TechCrunch might pick it up, like the Salesforce rigged hackathon case. If you know someone, please share this and the X thread: https://x.com/NishanBaral8/status/1949242543088283853

Before judging me, check both winning project and my project in the link. It’s shocking how openly Bolt rigged the results.

I also checked numbers: 17/20 main prizes went to US/Canada/EU projects, even though they were hardly 25% of total projects were from there. Most prize money went to five cities. It’s not about project quality, many projects on Devpost Gallery are far better. This feels like classic bias, maybe they didn’t like our accent or didn’t watch our video. Yet they called it a “Global Hackathon” while collecting paid users.

The winning project doesn’t work. It’s a video editor that doesn’t show video editing. The demo on localhost has errors shown, demo video seems to be fabricated by AI, doesn’t link to Bolt website as must required rule to qualify. When asked why, Bolt said it was a late submission. But are rules not for fair judgment? Most importantly does not work, and no one is able to test it yet. Some times webhook error, sometimes upload error, some times random crash,

When I raised concerns, Bolt moderated me off/blocked me and others to posts on Reddit/Discord. No discussion allowed, so on hacker news

Then their CEO tweeted how they gave us $1K worth of tools to win $100K. But most of those were trial credits, people like me had to buy more tokens just to build properly.

Honestly, I feel terrible. I trusted this hackathon to be fair. I can’t stop thinking about all the time I spent building for this hackathon. I’ve joined another 1-month hackathon (RevenueCat), but can’t even motivate myself. Our community is hosting the kickoff for Tokyo, but Bolt just poisoned my excitement for public hackathon. Rotten potato!

Maybe we’ll never prove it was rigged or irresponsibly judged. But this should be on Hacker News.

Bolt claims all winners’ projects worked, but dev tools show uncaught errors, mock data, CORS issues, even dev themselves consoled log “using mock data” in console. They still blamed traffic. Don't forget winners project is still not running properly. Not a single video has been edited from that website.

One winner didn’t even submit a deployed URL, yet still won. Public URL was clearly marked as “must needed” under submission rules. How was it judged when hosted url itself was not given?

It’s Sunday.So, I was able to documented it all in this thread: https://x.com/NishanBaral8/status/1949242543088283853

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