I'm in the art scene, and when it comes to submitting proposals for exhibitions and being in art/film festivals and such, competing against other people being picked is surprisingly easy when you realise that most people don't study the brief that tells you exactly what the organisations is looking for. make sure you nail everything in the brief and you're in the lead, even if your art is terrible. I feel this is similar in nature, but taken to its extreme.
Lubricating a sliding door
Quieting a squeaky door hinge
Lubricating an HVAC register lever
I learned a lot about WD-40 from this project! This is a highly debated topic, but their website leans into the fact that WD-40 is, indeed, a lubricant.
While the “W-D” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, WD-40 Multi-Use Product is a unique, special blend of lubricants. The product’s formulation also contains anti-corrosion agents and ingredients for penetration, water displacement and soil removal.
Regardless of the facts, when all was said and done, they were the ones judging the entries, sooo… yep, it's a lubricant.
It is a lubricant, just not a very good one for most uses. It can't bear much load and it tends to just dissappear in a short time.
I once replaced a series of mortice lever locks in a first house that were very worn after a decade of use. You had to shake the key to get them to open. I was amazed on opening them to find them completely dry, when they come greased. I suggested they lubricate the replacements occasionally. They replied that they sprayed them regularly with wd40. This has washed the grease out and left... virtually nothing.
I think that's one of the biggest screwups people make with WD-40 is that it's basically just a petroleum solvent and other than maybe initially unsticking things, it often makes the problem worse. As far as solvents go it's not particularly great, and in terms of lubricating or breaking free it's pretty bad. I'm surprised they still sell as much of it as they do (chalk it up to good marketing), when for basically everything there's a better choice (protip: if something is really stuck, the best tool provided you don't have dogs or children getting near is going to be acetone mixed with a good ATF).
TIL that ATF=automatic transmission fluid.
Still unclear on why this particular mix is optimal for unsticking things but Google suggests a lot of people use it.
Yes, I've used ATF to fix seized up motors. Just fill cylinder and let it sit for a few days.
Hate the smell of ATF but it was a life saver on some hinges that I wanted to save, but I couldn’t get to move after trying penetrating oil, wd-40, and some other things (not in that order ). ATF after a few hours succeeded.
Jack of all trades, master of none. It is a better lubricant than most solvants and a better solvant than most lubricants, it will always be worse than a specialized product, but if you are only allowed a single can, that's a good choice. Affordable and widely available too. Oh and the pressurized can form factor is convenient.
For what it's worth, old lock grease tends to move away from where it's needed and turn into a hard, waxy substance. It's arguably better to have a lock cleaned and slightly lubricated with WD-40 than one gummed up with ancient grease and dirt, or worse, rusted.
I've heard a lot of anecdotes in every direction: only use graphite, only use a cleaning solvent. I've never read anything authoritative and I suspect the ideal approach is to regularly (e.g. every decade) disassemble the lock, clean it thoroughly, and inject grease, but nobody is going to do that.
I'm pretty sure with locks, you want a dry lubricant. So graphite, or better yet, a PTFE spray lubricant. Hasn't failed me yet.
This was in fact one of my big learning experiences in mechanical work. As a kid, my bike was running rough so i took it apart, cleaned oout all that yucky/dirty grease from the bearings using WD-40, and then reassembled it all only to find it was even worse than before. Only a few years later did I learn that wd-40 is a terrible lubricant for bike ball bearings.
You can see a similar effect with standard skate bearings used in fidget spinners - most bearings come pre-greased with a fairly high viscosity lubricant. If you spin the spinner, it will slow down quite fast, but if you take the bearing apart, clean out all the grease, and reassemble it, it will run wicked fast and long. Until some dirt gets in, at which point, grease would have worked better.
Wd-40 is not really a lubricant
And yet, it lubricates! I've heard your claim a lot, but the fact remains, it makes machinery work more smoothly, by reducing friction, and it is effective over significant time periods. By any definition, it is a lubricant.
https://www.wd40.com/myths-legends-fun-facts/
Myth: WD-40 Multi-Use Product is not really a lubricant.
Fact: While the “W-D” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, WD-40 Multi-Use Product is a unique, special blend of lubricants. The product’s formulation also contains anti-corrosion agents and ingredients for penetration, water displacement and soil removal.
Water is a lubricant as well. And yet it is not a good lubricant for all applications. WD-40 is absolutely spectacular for certain things, but if what you want is a lubricant there are much better options. For instance, there is a silicone version that will make a sticky old lock work like new.
https://www.wd40.com/products/silicone-lubricant/
You could probably burn WD-40 in a propane stove, but that doesn't mean it's a fuel.
And yet it is not a good lubricant for all applications
seems like a bit of a straw man, no?
a silicone version that will make a sticky old lock work like new.
In my apartment, my deadbolt was so sticky that it was hard to turn even with the door half open. Two spritzes (keyhole and the bolt) with WD-40 classic, and it moved easily, and continued to turn easily for the remaining 6 months in my time there. Could lubricant-X have done a "better" job? Maybe, not that it mattered in practice.
If NASA designed an even better lubricant, would lubricant-X no longer be a lubricant at all by your standards? Because now there's something that can also unstick your lock, but with an even lower coefficient of friction?
WD-40 contains lubricants, and it can be used as a general-purpose around-the-house lubricant. Proven by my years of personal experience. Trying to claim that it isn't a lubricant is like trying to convince me that my lightbulbs are dim. I just laugh and move on.
In my apartment, my deadbolt was so sticky that it was hard to turn even with the door half open. Two spritzes (keyhole and the bolt) with WD-40 classic, and it moved easily, and continued to turn easily for the remaining 6 months in my time there. Could lubricant-X have done a "better" job? Maybe, not that it mattered in practice.
It was likely the solvent properties of WD-40 that helped. It dissolved the old, tacky lubricant or rust and left you with a cleaner lock. For a six month fix on a rental, that is probably fine. For a long term fix on a house you own, it may be worth using one of a plethora of lubricants designed for that specific use case (including a more specific variant of WD-40 that is designed for locks and leave behind a dry lubricant when it evaporates.)
Because now there's something that can also unstick your lock, but with an even lower coefficient of friction?
WD-40 is decent at removing rust, but not great at repelling water and thus preventing rust.
There are a lot of things that go into picking the right lubricant for a specific application. It isn't just "which lubricant is slipperiest?".
WD-40 is indeed a lubricant, but much of the benefits of using it are due to its solvent properties and people often don't understand that applying it in the wrong circumstances can lead to removing the correct lubricant and result in less lubrication.
And yet, if you want to actually lubricate things, there are much better, cheaper, options that will last longer.
It's just marketing.
I don't remember the source and forget many details, but the test was very compelling. The guy used approximately a dozen different products, clp, wd40, etc. The test involved individual identical pieces of steel all coated with each product and left in wretched environment.
The control, ie uncoated piece of steel fared better results that the regular WD40. I remember the best being Clenzoil (I had to grab my can to remember this). However, among the best was.... WD-40 specialist, specifically the "corrosion inhibitor" version. I think it was either the second or third best and I consulted my other can to remember this.
Sadly, my favorite lube ranked very poorly, which was Balistol; however, I'll never give up my Balistol.
I have put both the Clenzoil and Specialist to various 'tests' over the years and can vouch for their quality. But I'd use snot before regular WD-40 unless I was making a stink bomb.
Edit: While not the test mentioned, ProjectFarm (youtoob), who does myriad high quality evaluations, did test various lubes, but I think mostly for lubricity. It was also revealing and I highly recommend it and the channel in general.
It's a solvent (penetrating oil), so it dries out. It works well to unstick whatever might be causing trouble with the door lock mechanism. If you use something like a silicone lubricant, you'll go a lot longer before needing to reapply.
It's a mixture of light mineral oil and light mineral spirits. As a lubricant, the mineral spirits carry the mixture into crevices, then evaporates, leaving an oil film behind.
This is either useful and appropriate for a situation, or it's not. Also, the oil might not be a specialized oil for any particular use, but a lot of applications don't need a high performance oil.
In my view, the drawbacks are:
1. Controlling overspray. This is why, even if I liked the stuff, I'd prefer to apply it with an eyedropper in many if not most cases.
2. General ignorance about lubrication needs, where something else is preferable, such as grease, a suspension of wax, penetrating oil, etc.
On the other hand, keeping a supply of every possible lubricant can be a storage problem, and I've gradually come to prefer using the "wrong" stuff than buying yet another oversized container of something that I have to keep forever or dispose of.
For the right things, e.g., machining 6061 aluminum alloy, WD-40 is an excellent lubricant.
I love that 75% of the post was OP checking the math on whether or not he should join the contest.
I'm somewhat skeptical of this amount of validation.
There's a solid educational consensus on how to become the best at something: do it a lot.
If your goal is to winning contests, you should really prioritize cranking through them: getting practice at getting better. Don't try to make a masterpiece. Instead focus on becoming fast at creating entries, doing them according to the rules, and sending them off. Like those studies where people who made 1,000 good-enough vases were better at the average one than people who tried to make 100 beautiful ones - even when the goal was 'create a beautiful vase'.
But then, if you're a professional contest-enterer, that's got do a lot to boost your chances - especially over time, right? At the 1 year mark, I would expect you could raise your chances to 10% of a win of some type per contest (being conservative here). You've specialized in this. You'll always be a contender.
And that number's high enough that, if you enter 10 a day, that seems closer to the optimum. You are playing a numbers game on the strength of your numbers.
By analogy, this is like picking an index fund and continuously investing, rather than trying to pick that one stock that's going to the moon.
I agree, that section read as a post-hoc justification given how much effort went into it. If the effort to determine if something is "worth" entering is more than the effort to enter it, it would be better to just enter it rather than wasting time on the verification part.
Particularly as there's no reputational downside to entering and failing at such a contest.
You underestimate how much logic takes a backseat when you're feeding an infant at 3am for weeks on end. This project gave me a creative outlet during a time where sanity preservation was paramount.
The odds were calculated up front.
Fair enough, I haven't had that experience, it was a fun read in any case.
I got pretty good at "Makers Competitions" in my University years, to the point where my technical peak wasn't when winning a NASA competition, but ~2 years later when we released a technical product within a weekend in another competition.
I remember wrapping up the competition, winning all the prices we could win except one (1st place, and "best of" for 3 out of 4 categories), and the feeling that we had demolished the competition all around and that felt somehow a bit unfair for the rest. That was the last time I participated in a competition of this kind.
How did we do it? I had the network of contacts already (co-created a Maker group at my University) so I could literally hand-pick a team of 5 with the best maker in each sector; I called my previous co-winner who is great at tech presentations, and called the best designer+3D artist, the best App programmer, the best electronics person I knew, (and me). I got a stomach infection and spent a third of the competition in the toilet, but I ended up doing mainly programming and organizing: 1-2 hours to decide on the theme and solution, then split the work efficiently, and then let each person work on their own thing while continuously checking for sync between them. We ended up with a product and UI that seemed like a commercial product.
And this is, essentially, being a manager. And/or founder. Which is incredibly valuable, albeit often hated by many engineers.
I kinda feel we both read two different blog posts here?
What I took from this was:
1) Choose contests with well defined judging criteria, not subjective or popularity contests. Ideally ones where there are specific weightings for requirements and where some of the heaviest weightings are both a) things that'll be overlooked by a lot of entrants, and b) things you're personally very good at. (in this case video content and production)
2) Choose contests where there are sufficient prizes that it's worthwhile entering even if you don't win first place.
3) Choose contests where you are allowed multiple entries, and allowed to win multiple prizes.
This is all backed up with some javascript, webscraping, AI, and math - presumably to meet all the judging criteria and improve their chances of winning the HN front page contest. My suspicious is that this is what most of that validation you're skeptical about was for - not a beautiful vase, but a checkbox ticking exercise in ranking on HN.
Then don't bust a gut trying to produce the best possible entry, just use your subject matter expertise (in this case video content production) to produce "good enough" entries that are above the level that most of the public can create but without striving to surpass Ridley Scott or Quentin Tarantino levels of production.
Don't "make 1000 vases" to practice contest entry and enter 10 contests a day. Instead carefully choose only the contests who's requirements include something important that you've already "made 1000 vases" for (like, whatever you do as a day job) and only bother entering those.
To be fair, the criterias to decide on joining a contest were presumably developed by joining contests. At least, that's how I interpreted his ramblings through code and so on. I am more skeptical towards contests showing you the submitted jobs. Surely that is less frequent and an error (e.g. if a submission looks like copied, you'd assume it was but having shown these was on you as organizer)
I suspect the value derived here was enjoyment, not monetary.
You neglected that time is the most important variable here.
It's better to enter a winnable completion rather than one that cannot be found without disproportionate effort.
Hackathons are a good example. Global, online ones tend to be long, time consuming and near impossible to win any prize. Compare that with local only, now there's a chance as the number of competitors is limited to the geographical region.
But then, if you're a professional contest-enterer, that's got do a lot to boost your chances - especially over time, right? At the 1 year mark, I would expect you could raise your chances to 10% of a win of some type per contest (being conservative here). You've specialized in this. You'll always be a contender.
If you're a professional contest-enterer then it seems like a pretty bad idea to produce a detailed write-up which prospective rival contest-enterers may use as training material. If 1k people from HN visit your blog then even 0.5% of readers getting in on the game can cause your expected value to plummet.
It should be noted that the article addressed the question of how to discover contests with a refusal to divulge. This is security by obscurity. If a bunch of people get excited enough about entering contests using these deliberate winning methods then it wouldn't take much for them to set up a Discord channel to coordinate the discovery process. If even 10 people get together to "entry bomb" these contests then the original author's advantage will evaporate.
They aren’t trying to become the best at something, they are trying to maximize the ROI of their time.
Most likely done post facto :)
Nope
Yes, this! Also that OP fully acknowledged spending more time on the write up than the actual contest entries. Which I'm glad for, that was a fun read!
..and let the math shed some light on what to create and why.
I once ran an ultra marathon distance and had no lubricant but getting a bad rash so I sprayed my thighs and balls with WD-40 which I found outside someone’s garage. It lasted me almost 15 miles until I could buy some Vaseline. Off label use probably
Genius idea! I've found Vaseline to be less than ideal for running, and "personal lubricants" dry out much too quickly. I hadn't considered using industrial lubricants. Pretty much everyone who uses WD-40 for mechanical work ends up getting it on their skin (and probably inhaling a good amount), so I'm sure it's fine for limited exposure.
WD-40 isn't really a lubricant, it's more like a de-greaser and water remover.
Water displacer, hence the name, right?
It's a mixture of light mineral spirits and mineral oil.
Oil displaces water, who knew?
It is a lubricant. There's a lot of confusion around this because it often isn't a great lubricant for the purposes it gets used for, like door hinges or bicycle parts. But it most definitely is a lubricant.
Yeah I hate Vaseline too and normally use a stick called BodyGlide which just creates a thin coat. Vaseline was the only thing I could buy in the village and now I know WD-40 can work in a pinch
What you really want is somewhere between corn starch and lubricants, like gold bond friction stick.
Yeah but one’s balls are pretty sensitive to topicals.
Next time please submit a video of this...haha
You should've submitted a video to the competition!
Sounds like you missed a great opportunity to make a video for the contest!
I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.
Sigh… you know, there's a bit of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" happening here, for sure, but let me be optimistic for a second.
This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I genuinely used the tools to tell the story I wanted to tell.
There was something about the way friction was removed with the typical narration round-trips that actually made the storytelling better, easier, less painful… and I truly don't believe anything authentic was lost in that process.
My hope is tools like these can make storytelling easier for everyone.
This story wouldn't have happened without AI.
I don't think that's the optimistic take you present it to be. To me the post reads as the story of someone for whom art is the least important part in an art contest and treats the artistic part as an afterthought ("I just wanted to adhere to recording content that prioritized the weighted breakdown").
I'm not going to pretend that the contest attracted the top artistic minds of this generation, but anyone who actually put care into the art part has lost to someone who made an art pipeline. Extrapolate to the art world and suddenly there's less real art because the money out there to fund it is going to AI programmers checking a spreadsheet.
Did you see my fairy entry?
Heavily artistic, thoughtful, and cinematic, leaning into my passion for the art of telling stories through video that I've kept close for almost 20 years now.
It lost. The judges selected the entries they felt were the best fit. The argument for this contest is that AI enabled _more_ thoughtful art to exist, not less.
I think that there is some value in that friction. It used to tell us, the readers, that the narrator believed enough in what he wanted to tell to invest some non-negligible amount of time and energy. The final effect was that it maintained a sane ratio of stories worth reading over stories worth nothing. It kept a decent signal-to-noise ratio. In the future stories worth reading will be lost in a sea of regurgitated garbage.
I read the story because of the AI part. Over the last two weeks I've been working for the first time with GPT and Perplexity and am a mixture of fascinated, exuberant and ready to drink a gallon of whiskey from frustration.
I'm particularly intrigued by the creative things that can be accomplished with mutual diligence between user and AI. As a bit of a moron, I can now easily accomplish what otherwise would be too daunting. It's great..., when it works. What a smart person can accomplish under such conditions is frightening, in bith good and ungood ways. I'm hoping to go the API route soon and move toward a more free-thinking version geared as a research assistant.
Anyway, I'd say that's some pretty clever teamwork. Well done and thanks for sharing. Just get some better slippery sauce and if you're gonna squirt it on all beneath the heavens, go with Ballistol (I misspelled it in my other comment) - the fairies will thank ye.
Do you think someone else could have won without AI? The author didn’t exactly win the grand prize here - he cleaned up the smaller prizes because other people weren’t so good at reading comprehension or competitive analysis. The only role AI even played here was the audio, not the concept or the video or the edits. I’m not quite sure what your complaint is I guess.
The content produced adhered to the requirements and is amusing. It allowed the creativity of a single person to be applied in a larger way to more things. This is exactly an example of how AI wouldn't enshittify the internet.
If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.
I see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a story about a guy who outsmarted the system. He used math and AI to realize that his odds were actually pretty good, but him realizing he could submit multiple submissions is the important part. Using ElevenLabs for TTS definitely helped him win, but he could have also paid voice actors on Fiverr. He could have found royalty free music anywhere.
Basically, there's a lot of AI enshittification going on, but this isn't one of them. Just seems like a bit of fun.
That 8th entry pouring loads on WD40 on trees is just crazy, that thing is petroleum distillate !
Don't worry, this is a stump that's been dead for years, isolated to a very small garden bed in my yard
"dead" stumps provide an essential home to insects, plants, lichen, fungi and other stuff. Rotting wood is essential for a healthy ecosystem. These days it is not seen as unwanted, dead or waste material from a tree but part of a life cycle. It is a living habitat.
So the judges may have seen something different rather than protecting, preserving and prioritising your family and the joyful and creative structures for children's play. At the very least it would give ambiguity in today's more ecological minded world.
Yeah the anti-eco optics was my first though too - also the voiceover is a little more obviously AI. “Dump chemicals into the forest, brought to you by WD-40” isn’t a super appealing message (regardless of what was actually happening / intended)
You chose papyrus too, I think that was the most damning.
Fairies literally only use papyrus
Well there is the water table too. But that said weed killer is poured all over everywhere
I'd still wager that is why it didn't win any prizes though. They don't want to show a video spraying WD40 in nature.
I enjoyed the post, I appreciate a good methodical process.
> pouring loads on WD40 on trees
not really the same thing as spraying a bit of WD40 on a dead stump.
When I was visiting India for work back in 2006, I got my name published on The Times of India newspaper. I was reading it while having breakfast at the hotel, and I saw this sports related question, and all you had to do was to send an email with your answer. So, I did that. And apparently, only a few people did it. I got my name printed on the next issue.
We're talking about a national newspaper with a circulation of ~3 million at the time. I still keep the copy of the issue with my name. Sometimes, just showing up can take you to the top 0.0002%. :)
It’s what I tell my kids. Two things will put you ahead of most people doing most things: 1) show up and 2) try.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
Or, at the risk of being redundant, but from the wonderful lecture by Richard Hamming, “Luck favors the prepared mind.”
I wish someone has taught me that. It really boils down to that most of the time.
This is not to be underestimated; you see these opinion pieces or columns in newspapers and think, "wow these must be like the smartest and most well-known people who passed a rigorous application procedure" etc, but in practice... there's very few people actually willing and able to do these things.
You realize it's true because the same people easily morph their "areas of knowledge" so they can write opinion column about basically anything.
Me and my friend were fans of LinuxForU magazine, now OpenSourceForU. I once wrote a reply or so and it was printed in next edition. Inspired by that, we wrote an article, a simple one. That too was printed in next edition. We got a little money also from it, I think.
Oh no, its the AWD vs 4WD thing all over again.
Is WD-40 a lubricant? Apparently, again, it depends!
Any low viscosity liquid is a lubricant including water, or any small enough solids. WD40 is a lubricant, but a very poor one for folks who have not discovered silicone spray lubricant. That said if all I had was an old can of WD40, I would use it.
The funny thing is where I live you can buy “WD40 Lubricant” (silicone).
I think many people buy WD40 because, unconsciously or not, the smell brings back memories.
Right, and this is probably the important bit, sometimes a poor lubricant is worse than no lubricant, and its really important to understand when something like WD-40 should be used and when it absolutely should not.
Let me explain. I ride motorbikes. You don't want to be using WD-40 on the chain as it will strip it of any existing lubricant and dry it out, which as you can imagine, is bad. However, it's actually really useful for cleaning parts of the bike that have been covered in gunk and grease.
I have to admire their marketing, as like you mentioned, I grew up in a house where WD40 was used for absolutely anything sticking or squeeking, and so for the longest time also used it to fix those things, and beyond.
You don't want to be using WD-40 on the chain as it will strip it of any existing lubricant and dry it out, which as you can imagine, is bad. However, it's actually really useful for cleaning parts of the bike that have been covered in gunk and grease.
If you asked me to name the part of a bike most likely to be covered in gunk and grease, I'd say the chain. ;p
I think their point was ‘and then use a proper chain lube on the chain or you’ll regret it very quickly’.
Speaking of the smell, all these quick WD-40 hacks will leave the room smelling like WD-40 for weeks. I am also surprised he touches the WD-40 with bare hands, it feels impossible to get the smell of my fingers for the longest time.
I love that smell. I wish there where WD-40 smelling deodorant.
Is WD-40 a lubricant? Apparently, again, it depends!
Yeah...
I love WD-40 and use it all the time but... For many use cases there are better solutions out there. For example the picture showing it used in a window (or door?) seal: you want to use a spray of silicone for that instead. For locks (inside the lock I mean) you want to use graphite powder (or teflon). Not WD-40.
WD-40 is amazing because one can can save your day. But the examples where something better exist are numerous.
[flagged]
Aw man, sorry this one wasn't for you!
Great response. The value is in depth not just soundbites.
No I'm sorry, for my harsh and unconstructive comment. It was unkind and I shouldn't have made it.
Odd. I didn't find it tedious at all
I was getting bored toward the middle, but that is because it is a topic that didn't interest me specifically, NOT because the writing was bad.
I found the parts I was interested to be wonderful.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know it feels like you're 'just' sharing an opinion (or, lord help us, a 'fact'), but if you consider the externalities—i.e. the effect on the culture when many people post this way—the expected value of posts like this is super negative for everybody—including yourself—since over time it makes the commons nasty and lame. That's why we try to avoid them here.
You're right. Sorry for making a dick comment.
A gamed a contest into a brief TV career once.
A British computer TV show ran a content on their web site, but it was a fast-paced multiple-choice Flash game. I just opened three accounts. Ran through it with the first two to figure out all the right answers, then got perfect scores on the third.
The prize was to co-present the show one time, but apparently they got so much positive feedback they made me permanent, until I found a new job. I never let them know I cheated :/
This is the show. I only did it because I had a huge crush on Kate Russell:
In that video, Nigel pronounces www as "world wide web" and I have not heard that in decades. It's so much better than actually pronouncing the letters, I can't believe we ever stopped using it
It's also way fewer syllables!
Here "www" is read "dub dub dub", which is at least only one syllable per character instead of "double-u double-u double-u"
Be grateful we didn't end up with the w10b.
A fellow super brain finalist on hn?
Dear CWE
I've got a Voodoo Banshee graphics card and when I installed Win98 with the latest drivers meant I could play the new titles like Unreal Tournament and Quake III but couldn't play old titles like Rollcage Turok 2 and Quake II. I then decided to install Win98 Second Edition with my old drivers which worked so I can now play all my old games, however, I've got no Open GL so I still can't play Quake III. Please give me an answer!
Paul
The nostalgia is hitting hard here.
How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, a can of WD-40 and One Secret Factor That Makes This Process Unrepeatable and Useless To The Reader
Where do you find these exceedingly winnable contests? Sorry, that’s a trade secret — but it’s not any of the standard various contest aggregators out there.
I mean, sure, but not every post/blog has to be "useful to the reader". That last "n" of "n" fiction books I read were equally useless, but I'm glad I read them.
I'm not even sure I agree that that one piece renders the entire blog post useless. The process is all there, just because the author didn't share a list of contests doesn't mean someone couldn't do their own research and replicate it.
There’s a bit of a difference between a fiction book and a 3000+ word ad for consulting services[0] that could reasonably be considered a how-to guide until it reveals its lack of repeatability in its final sentences.
I’m going to guess that if “You cannot replicate this” were at the top of the ad fewer people would spend their time reading through it.
0 (The link is towards the bottom, right above the reveal) https://davekiss.com/consult
Well there is an unfinished section on the "contests" page that suggests this info might be added:
But generally I agree. I won an Instructables contest once, because the odds were very good: most entries were low effort and it was panel judged. Nowadays I dunno, there are so many entries and a lot of them are fluff from companies writing instructions on how to build their kits. But I do think if you had nothing to do, and a good workshop, you could probably farm contests there.
I wonder if the author has a google alert set up for something like:
"there is no limit on the number of entries" "official rules" 2024
I wonder if the mispronunciation of "polish" as "Polish" had anything to do with missing out on a win with the fairy submission? Fun read!
I assumed it was just a bad look dumping WD-40 straight into the environment
It’s a floor polish! It’s a dessert topping!
And apparently a shingle sealer too.
Yeah, I’m assuming that was the reason too.
I too think it was that combined w the fact of hurting insects with it perhaps.
Incredible. One of the winning human made video submissions says:
"There's something almost poetic about working with your hands. In a world where everything has gone digital, where things get solved with a click and a swipe, there's a unique satisfaction about tackling something tangible, something real."
Then there's this guy who algorithmically floods the contest with AI slop. Click and a swipe indeed!
Hey, it's not slop!
I wrote the script, I shot the video, I edited everything — the only place AI was even used in the submissions was to alleviate the pain of tracking down fitting music and re-recording voice overs (both of which I've done manually in the past).
I actually thought the videos would be pretty helpful for a non-handy homeowner.
yeah if anything this is a good example of using AI to speed up work that's typically fairy tedious
Having done voice overs, it takes time and it doesn't feel as creative as the rest of the job.
Then there's this guy who algorithmically floods the contest with AI slop. Click and a swipe indeed!
But that's not what happened. The blog is very clear about explaining where and how it is used.
I know there's AI in the title but it's pretty lazy and frank rude to assume that means "mass produced nonsense".
Is it common for contests to post all the entries before the contest is over? Even if they do, why wouldn't smart competitors enter at the last minute in order to prevent their competitors from benefiting from their work?
The main point of this article is that most competitors are not that competitive (for some reason).
The reason might be that they had their entry lying around and the cost of entering the competition was very low.
This appears to be true of writing anthologies; it's pretty common that Amazon is running a sale on some anthology or other that advertises an incredibly high-powered list of contributing authors. But the quality on these is lower than you might expect.
I understood why when one of Brandon Sanderson's blog posts mentioned that he was solicited to contribute to one of these that was raising money for some charitable purpose, and he sent them a piece of writing he'd done for a different book that hadn't made the cut to be included in that book.
Or that artists aren’t very compliant with direction.
the goal here is probably "get X pairs of eyeballs on <product> for $Y" more than it is "create and administer a fair competition".
This is an excellent example of using LLMs to convert knowledge into productivity and profit. This will be the way forward: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity...
The linked blog post is hardly a way forward, it's a high level summary of LLM uses and drawbacks with no real insight. The conclusion: "The potential for generative AI to transform industries is vast, but realizing this potential requires a thoughtful, strategic approach that balances innovation with practicality." Really?
There are no excellent examples of anything. I feel cheated.
I read it more as a source of strategic insights, but of course, it's not a list of startup ideas ready to be executed. No one has that, everyone is figuring things out.
Had a similar idea, https://pypi.org/project/ai-alchemy/
That's not the way forward, that's how LLMs are already being used for short term gains. The way forward cannot possibly be having to participate in an even less predictable gig economy than the gig economy. That's the way backwards.
So it's two days of work for a chance at two days of pay.
Eh, I think of this hobby more like a video game — fun to play, even if you don't win (but more fun if you do).
I wax skis for people as a side hustle. People ask me whether it's worth it. I tell them I enjoy doing it and it brings me beer money, so it's definitely worth it, even if the hourly rate is less than working at McBurger.
$2750 USD is 2 days of pay? In what world? That's some parts of the world yearly gross.
What people don’t realise is that the true competition he was trying to enter, was to get on HN by following the correct formula of including the keywords AI, maths, an amount of money, and a novel item (WD-40).
I too am only on HN for WD-40 content!
There's no prize quite like internet points
Hahaha this is great dude. Also your creative fae submission is fantastic. I can see why it didn’t win but it’s amusing.
The ElevenLabs narrator did say the faeries applied “Polish”. From Gdańsk or Warsaw? :)
I noticed the "Polish" too but thought it was too funny to fix it
I got kicked out of a black-tie gala because my shoes were overheard telling Polish jokes.
doing the write up on the contest of course has its own benefits, it just seems to me whenever I read one of these things I think it isn't worthwhile. Not just this contest, this one seemed worthwhile, but this has to also be compared with all the other contests, payoffs etc. This seems like a big win that even if it took 20 hours (which seems the max of time it could have taken - given edits took 8 hours) would still be a good wage - do you pay taxes on context wins?
But for every contest he enters and puts effort in what is the overall payoff, seems unlikely to be this high, and with that I would think it seems like a bunch of stuff to do for little money.
bro, it's not just about the money. He's promoting himself, building up a portfolio, learning new skills and entertaining himself.
if you work for money you build up a portfolio and probably learn new skills - it is difficult not to.
I have considered doing this before, contests etc. but I'm not sure I can breakdown the actual cost of doing it, the benefit, and risk to be able to see what one actually gets from the time devoted.
Not to say that I might not do other things that cannot be quantified easily either, but in the contests case I want more quantification, I guess it just seems more likely a waste of time to me.
This is just work! You made eight commercials for a megacorporation for $300 a piece, right? Sounds like you are undercharging!
I did a contest once and won $2500. In the end the part I spent 2 weeks on made like $50, and the part I spent 30 minutes on right before the deadline made $2000. Not sure what lesson to take from that...
It was way more work than expected, especially because they had us do a peer review that took like 80% of the actual time. So in the end I probably made close to minimum wage and most of it was not fun. But the novelty at least made it sorta-worth it.
For some people it's not all about the money.
For me it's about making money in ways that don't feel like work.
Hey can you tell me which sling are you using and weight of the baby?
haha yeah -- it's a Tula, kid is ~11 lb
Thank you!!!
One huge question is whether or not you took the time to read the T&C yourself, or got ChatGPT to analyse that for you too. Regardless, I'm in awe of your approach to being a serial contester.
Great question. I manually review the T&C, word for word. However, I did think to plop it into ChatGPT this time around as well, mostly out of curiosity, to see if it came to the same conclusion:
here are the rules for a video contest. are there any gotchas or clauses that could give me the slight edge in winning if i were to submit one or more videos? what do i need to know? [entire ruleset]
The response was accurate but generic. Maybe with some stronger prompting (ie. "what's the number one thing I should prioritize?") it'd be more helpful, but for now, I'd still rather review manually.
See the response here: https://gist.github.com/davekiss/10209469246dde21b2550747add...
This is awesome!
Is there somewhere that contests like these are tracked?
Would be awesome to browse.
It's covered a bit at the bottom of the article.
Where do you find these exceedingly winnable contests?
Sorry, that’s a trade secret — but it’s not any of the standard various contest aggregators out there. Did you spend more time working on this blog post than on the contest?
Yes.
Measure twice, cut once
Of the three AI tools the author talked about, two of them (OpenAI and Sumo) are facing lawsuits for copyright stuff[1]. That by no means invalidates what he's done, but more speaks to the interesting times we live in. These tools both saved him time and improved his product. I hope we find a way to have our AI cake and still feed our originators of content.
[1] https://variety.com/vip/content-owner-lawsuits-against-ai-co...
As soon as you listed the full set of prizes I was really hoping to see that gallon jug haha. Nice job!
TL;DR: submitting multiple entries increases your chances of winning.
Really interesting and amusing post thanks for taking the time to write it and share it.
Love the use of Playwright for the contest intel...I am currently using Playwright to redo some prior scraping projects and seeing real world examples such as these is a big help.
You attack the problem like blackjack card-counter would. You assess the rules, make mathematical odds projections when possible and logical ones when not, and keep a keen eye on what you are up against as to judge how to best attack the money.
Thanks for the smart write-up...its been a big inspiration for me.
Very cool! I think the one that didn't win was not selected because potentially problematic to use for the brand. Spraying WD-40 on the ground could be seen as polluting, and they would probably want to stay away from that. It's also not the intended use of WD-40 which makes it too far fetched for a potential marketing use.
It took me a while to realise that it was a WD-40 branded one gallon jug and not one gallon of WD-40 in a jug...
As a person who is also in the art scene, this is reasonable and inspiring.
i have a friend who is great at this, so i picked her brain a bit. she does this method and i see her booking show after show without a social media presence. she does 90% studying the brief, 8 percent presenting her submission in a structured way (think: explain the idea, what lead up to it, how it will benefit the show, who she is, and even visualises how it will look by photoshopping her art into their space) and 2% submitting beautiful work.
Everybody other than the artists love that "presenting her submission" part.
Better than the piece. Better than the essay about the piece. They want the summation of the essay of the piece. Preferably with an associated pic of a cute art goth pixie.
Ah art.
Is goth still in?
Ya but they call it something different. I forget what. Maybe "death cultists".
No they don't, they call them mommy instead.
Goth is always in. It just floats in and out of the consciousness of non-goths over time.
Basically what we are all doing here on HN. We are social creatures by nature and the commentary and commentators are often more entertaining than the subject.
My dad is an accomplished artist but never wanted to play the art scene and mostly spent his career as a professor. He once produced an entire storage shed of metal sculpture than he later recycled for lack of anything better to do with them. I could only fit two in my house.
This means that to improve one's chances to gain publicly, one should adjust their art to the exact requirements of the publicity-producing organization, and not let artistic whims like "inspiration" ruin the day. Or, better yet, has to learn how to reorient the latter slightly to check every box when a checklist becomes available.
This requires a serious mastery of the art that allows to obtain exactly what's envisioned.
It also rubs many artists the wrong way, because they want to be led by the art, ideas, concepts, etc, and not by external riders. OTOH most great masters of the past worked under such conditions, with notable success. Michelangelo certainly had a rather detailed list of requirements for the Sistine Chapel paint job.
in my experience, your submission does not have to be a carbon copy of what you end up making. you can check the boxes to make them trust your artistic ability - then you can make it yours, within reason. the money controls the art outcome, until you're banksy. a lot of great artists are able to stylistically and thematically change their art on a whim, by studying the materials/style and putting conscious effort in. this is not rare. modern art does not require mastery by any means and some of the more successful artists actively avoid perfectionism.
Modern art may not require visible utter technical mastery, even though sometimes it's demonstrated, too. What I mean by mastery is the ability to produce such an oevre that checks all the right boxes, and does not check any wrong boxes. In this regard, being edgy and provocative is the right trait to demonstrate, while overstepping it and, say, showing something that can be seen as bigotry is not comme il faut. Navigating these boundaries efficiently is what I also mean by mastery.
I agree with what your saying but I believe this applies to everything in life.
From what you do at work or say to your friends to whether you break a writing rule or whether you jump a fence.
When you observe people in their element, you can tell apart the people who know know when to break rules and who haven’t figured it out.
Yep!
I mean, anyone's free to create whatever art they want on their own time and dime, and accept that it may or may not resonate with others and their pocketbooks. If you're applying for a specific thing for someone to give you money and they've said what they're looking for...yeah, you should probably conform to that.
It depends on whether you're doing art for the artistic expression or to make a living. If it's the latter, you'll need to do what is asked or what is worth money instead of what you want. This applies to every creative endeavour, or hell, most of anything that earns you money. I don't want to sit here writing user stories that should ideally be fixed today, but it earns me money and I can do it so I guess.
The same is true for scientific grant applications.
Except the reviewers don't usually read it either
A thousand times this. M******g reviewers who fail to comprehend the instructions for evaluating a proposal is a perpetual pain in the neck.
I'm surprisingly annoyed that I cannot guess what word you you are censoring, and AI wasn't helping much, mind spoiling it for me?
Also, I don't think you have to censor words here in general.
What profanity that starts with M, ends with G and references sex comes to mind?
We’re an adhocracy that uses votes, and profanity doesn’t win votes…simple math…
Even engineering contests are like this. I remember back in college there was a sustainable dog house competition with a very clearly defined rubric. My partner and I min/maxed the hell out of it and won first prize and $1,000, while everyone else built beautiful dog houses that ultimately missed the point.
what was the rubric they missed?
There was a lot of emphasis put on insulation values, thermal mass, and temperature differential. Half of the dog houses were like 20 pounds and open to the air on all sides. We put a 150 lb garden on top of ours to act as a heat sink and then insulated all the walls of the dog house. We were able to keep 10 degrees below ambient after 3 hours out in the sun.
The rubric also put a ton of points on the technical report which seemed like an after thought for most people but at the end of the day it was an engineering competition so the whole point was the technical portion and the dog house display itself was kind of just the fun bit. We did really well just because we bothered to do all the requested calculations on life cycle cost analysis, heat losses, carbon balance, etc.
Our final product looked like a tank, but it won by a long shot.
I'm not in a grant field, but this comment reminded me of this video from attoparsec about public art grants from a few years ago that really resonated. My mom spent the last ~15 years of her career in a field that involved grant writing for public health projects, and many of the strategies were similar.
Video: https://youtu.be/cK4K8aj7X1s?si=xAQH54SfC8yUE_ll