Stuff The Ballot Boxes For The Best Hackaday Prize Entry

Last week we started the first round of community voting for The Hackaday Prize, where everyone on Hackaday.io has a voice in choosing the best project for the current theme of the week. To encourage people to vote, we’re giving away a $1000 gift card to The Hackaday Store to one person on hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of community voting. How are we doing that? A very, very large die and SQL queries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kbwU76wwA

No, no one won this week. That’s okay, because we’re giving t-shirts away to three random people who did vote. This week, [cgapeart], [Jeff], and [devonelliott] are getting t-shirts from the Hackaday Store, just because they were cool enough to vote.

We’re going to keep this round of community voting going for another week. Everyone registered on Hackaday.io gets 50 votes for each round of voting, and every Friday (around 20:00 UTC), we’ll randomly select one person registered on Hackaday.io. If that person has voted, they get a $1000 gift card for The Hackaday Store. If they haven’t voted — a t-shirt. They’re nice t-shirts, but I’d rather have the gift card.

All you have to do for a chance to win a $1000 gift card is head over to the Community Voting Page and pick which project is most likely to be widely used. There’s no wrong answer; all you have to do is decide between two projects. If you only use up one vote, you’re in the running for a $1000 gift card.

I’ll be doing another round of random, fair die rolls and SQL queries next Friday. Until then, VOTE!

24 thoughts on “Stuff The Ballot Boxes For The Best Hackaday Prize Entry

  1. Tried to vote… voting hasn’t been reset from last week.

    Can you reset the voting thing so we can vote again?

    Also, statistics on the voting would be interesting. How many people voted, and how many people are registered?

    1. You’re this guy, right? You voted 50 times.

      We’re not resetting the votes this week. Votes from last week will carry through this week.

      If you haven’t already voted, go here and choose the ‘most likely to be widely used’ project. Each vote is a decision between two projects, and you’re deciding between two projects on the basis of which project ‘is most likely to be widely used’. If you’re expecting to vote for your favorite project, prepare to be disappointed. This is the way we’re doing the rounds of community voting, because it’s the most fair way to do it.

      Here’s how we’re tallying the votes. For the gamers, it’s pretty much the ranking system used in Counter Strike: GO and the first season of League. Stats for each round of voting will be available after the round has completed.

      1. You don’t understand: i can hit refresh/vote 100000 times and I will still see the same ~20 projects over and over again. That means that the rest of the N-20 projects don’t stand a chance because nobody is ever asked to vote for them.

        1. It makes no difference, pretend you’re a referee. You decide the winner in 50 matches, other refs decide the others. Like in sports, more matches doesn’t raise your ranking, a world number one will hardly play, but win every time. But a ref shouldn’t decide they don’t want to decide because they are not a fan of the teams, or just ref the games that their favorite team is playing in.. I.e. don’t refresh, just judge fairly.

          1. but in sports, you start with ALL teams playing, not having some simply not included because of randomizing algorithm issues.
            Your argument would make sense, we each get 50 votes, so ideally we would see 100 projects. if the projects are random and everyone sees different 100 projects, then overall we get good ranking of the 500+ projects. But prove me it works if everyone sees the same 20 projects over and over.

          2. @Bogdan:

            Overall, we’re looking to get the same, or similar, number of ‘presentations’ for each project. For a single voter, it may not appear this way, because the voter isn’t working with information the backend has. This is the fairest voting method. I doubt it can be done *more* fairly.

            Anyway, all you need to do is pick the project that best matches the week’s theme. If you’re refreshing constantly, of course you’re going to be be seeing the same projects over and over again. You’re hitting the backend cache, which hasn’t been updated, because all anyone has been doing is refreshing.

          3. @Brian,
            Maybe it makes sense to put some numbers “If you’re refreshing constantly, of course you’re going to be be seeing the same projects over and over again. You’re hitting the backend cache, which hasn’t been updated, because all anyone has been doing is refreshing.”
            Me: refresh/vote ~30 times. Number of unique projects I should see: ~60. Number of projects I see: 7. Is this the way it is intended?
            (It did not appear this way lately, it appeared as I was expecting).

          4. @Bogdan:

            Is it intended? No. We intended people to vote – to decide – which project best meets the theme. The theme this week is, ‘Most likely to be widely used’. You’re supposed to choose which project, of the two presented, best meets that theme.

            Is the behavior you’re experiencing abnormal? No. When people don’t vote, this is what happens. It is a consequence of refreshing over and over again.

          5. I think part of the problem might lie somewhere within the “apples and oranges” scenario… some of us know more about apples, so refresh ’till we see a Braeburn compared to a Granny Smith. May not’ve been the intention behind the system, but I do see a bit of user-blaming here. Hey, even 1337 h4x0rs have a KAC for a P to EB; often that “P” is thinking quite a bit about that which others don’t think about at all. Is that really a problem? Or is the problem that this site is aimed at those sorts, yet the voting-system seems to be aimed at the sorts who regularly partake in “hot-or-not” style single-click/don’t-click-through-for-details facebook-poll-like popularity-contests?

          6. @duh: It effectively is hot or not, where ‘hot’ is defined as ‘best meeting the requirements of this weeks theme’. then we put another project on the page and do the elo ranking so we’re tied to a relative scale instead of an absolute one.

            It fucking makes sense, and I can’t imagine a better way of doing this.

  2. Ah, I get it, now… There’s *supposed* to be only two choices, pick the most-qualified of the two.
    OK, that makes total sense, and that’s a heck of a lot easier than trying to pick the best 50 out of *all* the hundreds of submissions.
    I kept loading that vote-page and sitting and waiting for a huge list of projects to show up, thinking my connection was flaking out on me.
    Thanks for the explanation.

  3. Hey guys beware that happened to me I can vote between 2 same projects, i mean, SAME!
    ID, html code and all the rest, only difference: left with pics, right with none.
    Cheers.

    D.

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