

MIT Hackathon winners - mgwhitfield
http://hackmit.challengepost.com/

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keyle
Every school in every field need something like this. It's amazing to just
give people a small set of rules and let them compete in a short period of
time. That's better training for life than sitting and listening to a teacher
(don't get me wrong, a bit of that is good too).

There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...

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mkramlich
And of course we're all free every day to "learn by doing" \-- but without
necessarily any competitions, without schools, without universities, without
bureaucracy, rules, hierarchies, paperwork, etc. Just do things. Just learn.
Rinse, repeat.

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MasterScrat
If it actually works well, I'd download "Images as Text" as a Chrome extension
in a blink.

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buss
I'm working on an OCR project at the moment; I'd love to see which library
they used.

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vlahmot
He used Tesseract for the OCR, I don't recall what he used to make it
highlightable. It was quite impressive when he demoed it on a XKCD comic.

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freefrag
What exactly does the winning submission do?

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oliland
I was there. You point the flashlight on your phone at your computers webcam.
The software (Javascript / Canvas I think) lets you draw with the light, while
you can change colours with your phone. The bonus part was where they used the
intensity of the light as a Z-axis, so by moving the phone closer / further
away you could build a 3D light painting in the canvas.

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druphoria
Wow. These were made in two days? Incredible!

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lettergram
Many submissions aren't actually made in the given time period. They usually
will bring either a partially to fully complete project (pretty sure it's
cheating but yeah).

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tstactplsignore
I don't think this is true, actually. I've been to two major hackathons and
had many friends at HackMIT this fall, and this really doesn't occur- in fact,
the culture was the exact opposite, people were strongly discouraged from
bringing in already existing projects and almost nobody did.

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001sky
when are the topics announced, tho? any ideas on that...

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morgante
There aren't really topics for a lot of the hackathons (including HackMIT).
For the "themed" hackathons you'll know the topics at registration (ie.
weeks/months beforehand).

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001sky
Multiple awards seemed to be sponsored or product unique, that is why I wonder
on this point. Certain items I would imaging having a hands on beforehand
would be quite leg up. Excuse my mixed metaphors ;).

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chunky1994
I thought that GTA 6 was really impressive, given that they modeled everything
as buildings, the idea to use the entire world for a video game is exceedingly
clever. A shoutout to the uWaterloo team too. (As an aside they're in velocity
as well.)

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jreed91
The PiVision sounds really useful.

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tylermac1
It was really sweet. They were a little crunched for time so they didn't get
to fully show everyone but they had my vote for winner.

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isawczuk
Student of Warsaw University of Technlogoy here, been there. Check out FitBit
extension for HabitRPG :
[https://github.com/igos/fitbit2habitrpg](https://github.com/igos/fitbit2habitrpg)

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j8hn
SilkSpeak sounds like a great idea.

