Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a lot of fun running the Community Voting for The Hackaday Prize. We’ve been offering up a $1000 gift card for The Hackaday Store to a random person on Hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of community voting. Unfortunately all of our weekly random drawings for someone on Hackaday.io has come up empty-handed.
Now we’re changing it. Due to popular demand, someone who has voted in the latest round of Community Voting will win a $1000 gift card. We will draw a winner this week! We’re giving away a thousand dollar gift card to a random person who has voted in the latest round of community. It’s the change you’ve asked for.
Next Wednesday, July 8th at around 22:00 UTC, I’m going to find a random person on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted, they get $1000. If not, I’m going to choose someone who has voted and give them a $1000 gift card. It’s really that simple. If you vote in the current round of Community Voting, you have a good chance at winning a thousand dollar gift card for the Hackaday Store.
What do you need to do to get in on the action? Go here and choose the most Amazingly Engineered project. You will be presented with two projects. Pick the project that is the more ‘amazingly engineered’ project. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Show up and vote!
I love the title Brian. There shouldn’t be any arguments or confusion this time- right?
I still don’t understand how this voting-system works… is it like “Hot or Not”? Where do I click?
Here’s nice video they made that teaches people how to vote-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeEf_VLKUl4
It’s for an older round of voting, but the procedure still applies.
BINGO. What a perfect analogy. The voting is exactly Hot or Not, with the same method of “winners” rising to the top.
Seriously awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Folks would just be foolish not to go click off some votes for a shot at 1000$ store card…..
This is how it was last year, I was wondering why they weren’t doing it the same way this year too. And what about those sponsor prizes? I’m anxiously awaiting the announcement
No, this isn’t how it was this year. We did the ‘pick from the set of hackaday.io users, see if they voted, if they did, award prize’ thing last year. This is a change from last year.
Sponsor prizes? We figured that out, announcement coming soon. Until then, Here’s GWAR covering Billy Ocean. Enjoy.
Thank you for that dose of random at the end there (or is it psudo-random, I can never tell the difference).
well worst case scenario you can just create a symlink…
I wonder if you could keep the old system, but somehow track the user activity and only pick from the users who actually used their accounts in, say, a year back from now. There are always going to be a growing number of “zombie” accounts from people who forgot their password and just created a new account, lost interest or simply died in a spectacular explosion. So the chance for actually picking someone grows thinner with time.
Selecting only from the people who voted of course solves that too, but removes a good deal of a thrill, not to mention that it means there is a smaller pool for other prizes (I assume). Oh well, it’s your money (or the sponsors’) and you decide what to do with them. It’s nice that you want to give them to us anyways.
Only the people whom actually voted get the $1000 prize.
Thanks Brian :P Hackaday really going all out with the prizes this year!
Amazing how things change. Last week Brian said nothing would change in the random pick system stuff, and now it changes (for the better, of course). Thank you hackaday for being flexible
From information posted last round, we estimated that the number of voters as 22541/50 = about 451 people. (I’m sure many people didn’t vote the full 50 times, but this is an estimate.)
With around 77000 registered users, the chances are 1 in 171 that the prize would be awarded in any single round, and the chances of any individual voter getting the prize is 1 in 77000.
The expected return on voting is thus $1000/77000, or a little over a penny.
With the new system, the expected return on voting is $1000/450, or about $2 per voter. Assuming that there isn’t a huge uptick in voters.
I’d like to see the prize given to voters who use their entire 50 votes. If someone wins who only voted once in the round, it would seem a little like gaming the system.
Why not pick a random vote? That way, you can increase your chances of getting picked by voting more.
The system is not supposed to show you the same project on both sides, is it? http://imgur.com/4XYDjSP
The links point to the same project id.
Ha! Which one did you pick?
I went with the one on the left side. Seemed to fit the theme better than the one on the right ;)
So you would say it was “Amazingly Engineered” ?
Since we are only supposed to pick the one that is more “amazingly engineered”, picking an empty project doesn’t mean I think it is “amazingly engineered”. Either way, I both picked the right one and the wrong one…
Or, we can keep the last two weeks system, but if the user didn’t vote, then organize a themed small competition with those $1000, like the sponsor’s or the moving parts competitions.
That way, everyone is incentivised to come up with their ingenious projects/ideas.
This will also level up a little the unfairness of HaD Prize contest.
Don’t get me wrong, HaD Prize is great, but is only for a small niche of makers, or for teams.
Most of the people could not afford to put thousands of men-hours in one project.
A lot of the smaller cometitions/prizes they’ve run so far this year haven’t needed thousands of man hours. In fact, I got my hands on a few vendor prizes before I’d even put up much more than an idea! I think about 40% of entered projects had recieved a prize at one stage, but that could be way off. So although the top prize may seem a little out of reach, there are lots of low hanging fruit – no reason to to have a go :)
1 votes remaining? After all the grammar nitpicking HaD posters do, 1 votes remaining?
Amazing how that simplest of coding tasks to check if a quantity is 1 or not to display a singular or plural word rarely gets done. Odd how 1 and only 1 (or -1) gets the singular. 0 goes with plural, 0 votes remaining or 0 elephants in the room but if one shows up it’s 1 elephant.
Only in English. I assure you that other languages have much more enjoyable numerals. For instance, there are two plurals in Polish, one for numbers ending in 2, 3 an 4, and other for 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0. Plus they are different for different genders. Other languages have even more plural forms. Japanese has different numerals depending on the kind and shape of things you are counting — long things have one, round things another, days and months each have their own, etc. Lots of fun there.