

Show HN: OpenHacker, a weekly competition for hackers - JacksonGariety
http://openhacker.co/

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murtza
I think it would be interesting to shift the focus of OpenHacker to platform
where companies can post challenges and offer prizes.

For example, Netflix hosted a competition for a $1M prize for the "best
collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films." Another
example was the Ansari X Prize, which "offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the
first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into
space twice within two weeks."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize)

Contact big companies and startups to see if there is a challenge they want to
put out there to the global community. The value proposition is that they gain
access to the global talent pool at a relatively cheap price.

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JacksonGariety
Yeah, I've thought of this.

But the site needs a user base first! And the world has problems to be solved!

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murtza
Your first challenge is selling your platform to companies and organizations.
It does not matter if you are selling to the Gates foundation or Netflix. Once
the company/organization buys into the platform, they will do a lot of the
marketing/promotion for you through social media and traditional marketing
channels. Once you sell your platform, focus on getting users for that
competition.

Pitch the various competitions and prizes to journalists. The X Prize
foundation has a lot of media buzz around them. I am sure you could do the
same.

You can make money from both sides. Like Kickstarter, charge companies a
percentage of the prize for listing on your platform. Second, you could also
charge a nominal entry fee like $5 for each submission, which will select for
higher-quality submissions.

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lettergram
My advice would be to make it a monthly competition and add in a donation box
(to increase the possible prize) that would increase quality as well as
interest.

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jmartens
love the idea of a donation box

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orng
I love the idea, but is one week a long enough time limit for anything
substantial?

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JacksonGariety
Would a monthly competition work better do you think?

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cwarrior
Any way to ask question or add comments about the challenges?

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JacksonGariety
It's on the features list on GitHub.

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balsam
Heads-up: you got competition from the YC-backed hackerrank

[https://www.hackerrank.com/](https://www.hackerrank.com/)

~~~
JacksonGariety
I'm a hacker rank member. Cool site.

I'd like OpenHacker to be more about solving real world problems than fun
programming challenges though.

