The Hackaday Prize: Unofficial Statistics

Hackaday Prize entries over time. You people really know how to procrastinate. Click to embiggen.
Hackaday Prize entries over time. You people really know how to procrastinate. Click to embiggen.

What is the Hackaday crew doing this weekend? Judging Hackaday Prize entries, of course! We need to pare down the hundreds of entries we received to 50 primo entries for the quarterfinals round. We’re going to be slammed the entire weekend, so don’t expect any news on who’s in and who’s out of the competition until Monday.

Each of us has about 15 hours of video to go through (multiply the number of entries by two minutes. It’s a lot), and of course we need to read each entry and rate them. We’re literally looking at more than a man-month of work here, and yes, we’ve all read the book.

Until then, here’s some totally unofficial statistics, courtesy of [Greg Kennedy] and his web scraping skills. The graph above shows the number of Hackday Prize entries over time, from the first announcement of the contest to the cutoff time. You people really, really like to procrastinate. The day with the most entries was August 20th, the deadline to get your project in. The day with the most validated entries (i.e. meeting the requirements of a video and four project logs) was August 19th. Needless to say, it’s been a busy week on Hackaday.io.

As a side note, the rules for THP say you must upload a video to qualify for the quarterfinals. This video may be uploaded to YouTube or Youku. Only one project uploaded a video to Youku. Now you know what to do next time to get some free publicity.

It’s highly unlikely we’re going to publish this many official stats, especially now that [Greg] has it pretty much covered. We’ll get the list of all the quarterfinalists out on Monday. Until then you can entertain yourself by watching nearly 15 hours of Hackaday Prize entry videos, all embedded below.

22 thoughts on “The Hackaday Prize: Unofficial Statistics

  1. Out of curiosity, I scrolled through to see where my project showed up on the list, and found that both my Overview video and one of my update videos are there. I noticed that the GPS clock one is there several times. I also see an EEVBlog post.

    I just want to make sure that someone doesn’t watch the wrong video and disqualify me (or anyone else that is in this situation) because the update video is over 2 minutes or doesn’t do a good job of sumarizing the project. Judges, be aware!

    Thanks!

    1. Hey Michael. I made these playlists by scraping every (valid) THP entry page for Youtube IDs. So there’s unfortunately more here than just the overview videos, it’s any video mentioned in the posts (including some bizarre stuff, like the Marauder’s Map scene from Harry Potter).

      They’re also not official playlists, so don’t worry… I am sure the judges will read every entry on .io and get the proper links from there, rather than sitting down for hours and hours of playlists : )

  2. Well I guess I have no choice than to keep working hard till monday. I’m scared I’ll lose my motivation if I get the boot in round one. Deadlines are great motivators, as shown in that graph.

      1. With that attitude your not going to win anyway most of the judges talked about looking for projects were passionate about what there doing. And thous projects would be finished regardless of the contest.

        1. I hope I didn’t give the impression of having a bad attitude. I will work to finish my project regardless, but I would hate to be out so ealry, and the competition looks pretty good so it’s probably a toss up of what the judges like. Like the graph in the post shows, having tangible, inflexible schedules is a great way to keep yourself moving and achieving goals. Its the accountability aspect. Plus I’d like the win a prize as well.

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