Stanford Hack Competition - Spring 2011 Results

In case you missed the Stanford Hack Competition last weekend, here’s a summary of all the hacks.

The rules were:

• 12 hours to code.
• No previously written code allowed (except for common libraries and stuff).
• Judged based on innovativeness, technical difficulty, and usefulness, in that order.

The winners:

Dropo by Grant Mathews, Abi Raja, Hoon Cho (They each won an iPad 2) http://dropo.abi.sh

Ever wanted to quickly share music, video or other files with your friends? Just drag/drop any files from your Desktop onto a Dropo and everyone else on that dropo will get it immediately (with instant previews too!). (Works best on Chrome)

Reversible Programming by Jacob Taylor (He won an Xbox with Kinect) http://www.stanford.edu/~jacobt/reversible.html

A programming language in which every statement can be undone, so any function can be inverted. Written in Lisp and compiles to Lisp.

The rest of the hacks:

Instant I/O by Feross Aboukhadijeh (I didn’t enter the competition since I invited all the judges ;) http://instant.io Instant foreign language flashcards, version 2.

Keystroke Sounds by Henry Tung, Ivan Zhang, Yifeng Huang

Listen to people typing using a long range microphone, then use audio processing and statistical profiling to figure out what they typed.

YouStache by Emilio Lopez, Brian Brunner, Simon Ye No URL yet, coming soon.

YouStache lets you watch videos with your friends and paint on top of the clips. Highlight cool parts of video, point out the things that excite you or, our personal favorite, give everyone mustaches.

Github/Reddit Mashup by Chris Maury http://chrismaury.com/post/5439442378/githacking

Githacking is a community based approach to creating full-featured applications and not just code libraries. The focus is on enabling a distributed community to create production quality code, quickly. It is not related to githacking.com, I just used the name to help describe the concept.

CSS Style Editor by Venkat Dinavahi

Style allows you to save and edit Cascading Style Sheets in real time from a toolbar. It eliminates the pain of having to memorize CSS commands and refresh a page to see changes. Furthermore, Style offers panels for editing CSS properties.

H1B Wage Search by Andrew Smolik, Joseph Chow, Tal Rusak

Search through a database of H1B records to find salaries at any company.

Thanks to:

• The ACM-ers that helped organize this (especially Alex, Ranjani, Daniel, and Jake).
• The judges (Adam D’Angelo, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Steve Bourne, and Steven Schlansker).
• Our sponsors (Yahoo, Trumpet Technologies, and Facebook).

This hack competition went really well, so we’re planning to do this again in Fall Quarter! Start planning your hacks!