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Comment by ivansavz | Hacker News Reader

    While the Upshot mobile app used some pre-existing code, 
    this did not violate the rules. Use of pre-existing code 
    was allowable as long as the code didn’t comprise the 
    majority of the app and didn’t violate any third party’s rights.

IMHO, the whole idea of a hackathon is to see what teams can come up with on the spot. Any pre-existing code you bring is an unfair advantage. But if the rules say pre-coding is OK, then it is OK ;) disclaimer: I am not familiar with the specifics in this situation, just commenting on hackathons in general.

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Hey, I remember doing this in school! It was called show and tell.

I don't understand how someone can use pre-written code written specifically for use in this hackathon. It's one thing to write some generic libraries, but they had the product made beforehand, they even demo-ed the app on the 8th! (according to the meetup post)[1]

This doesn't even touch on the allegations that some contestants' apps weren't run and videos weren't watched.

What a sham of a contest ...

1 : http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...

> The whole idea of a hackathon is to see what teams can come up with on the spot.

Full stop. That's it. Hackathon's with prizes are their own beast, and have their own rules. But hackathons themselves are purely about seeing what you can do. I hate the idea of turning Hackathons into something that destroys that fundamental piece, and money does that.

Technically what you're saying is you can't use Rails, you'd have to use Ruby, because Rails is pre-existing code built on top of Ruby.

That also throws out jQuery and any of its libraries.

The beauty of hackathons is they force you to think about the deliverable and attempt to mitigate reinventing the wheel by using as many plugins as possible to deliver your concept.

Pretty obvious condition would be that it's pre-existing code you wrote. I'm sure that's what the OP intended.

So, someone who is a prolific FOSS contributor is screwed?

Where do you draw the line? Let's say I'm a core developer on Rails, am I not allowed to use Rails then? What happens if I contributed 1 line of code to Rails, does that negate it then?

The obvious place to draw the line is the point where the code you wrote isn't equally available to you and all the other competitors.

This, coupled with a requirement about being clear what pieces are new.

And obviated by the judges having no easy way to learn and isolate which "part" of the app they're testing, and how such compartmentalization goes strongly against human psychology.

I don't pretend it'll be "perfect", but it should let decisions fall (noisily) around what we think of as "fair" (since we're all running that assessment through the same hardware) which is really what we're looking for.

<rules-lawyering-participant>So I get my buddy/silent-partner to develop my cool and unique API beforehand and sneak it unannounced onto a relatively anonymous public Github account before the comp starts, but close enough to the start date that no-one else will have even heard of it yet.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

It is fun to consider extreme cases, but I am sure this has never come up before.

If source you previously wrote is available on Github for anyone, would that pass? What if you built an incredibly successful plugin, like lightbox?

I think there's a slight distinction between using Rails and entering into a hackathon with the intention to port a recently developed app into a 'mobile' version?

And you didn't write the Ruby(|node|php|python|golang) interpreter either, or gcc/clang that compiled the interpreter, or the kernel that gcc relies on. (or the cpu microcode - it's turtles all the way down).

Personally, I think the Upshot approach was a sleazy hack of the competition rules. On the other hand, with a $1 million prize, you'd have to be an idiot not to expect rules-lawyering to be at least as important in winning as a good idea…

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