'We have a tradition at PayPal of supporting hackers'
Yepp, just like you've given the deserved prize to this teen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779719 when he found a serious bug in your site.
Last 3 or 4 paypal related mails on the full disclosure mailing list also report that paypal is either not responding, not cooperating or weaseling their way out of paying bounties all the time. I'm not sure how seriously I can take this.
Lack of resources is rarely a problem. I remember a teacher tell me that "not enough time" is rarely an excuse for not doing homework because at every waking moment we're prioritizing one task over others. Thus, companies do not lack people or money. They are deliberately prioritizing the rest of the world over you.
That really is not true. This year's edition scaled up from 1 event to 10. We want to take care of each event and make it awesome and not just organize a ton of events that are not fun at all.
I might be in the minority here, but these hackathons are a waste of time for exceptional talent; like asking a Heisman trophy winner to compete in Battle of the Network Stars.
These rising stars shouldn't be competing against each other to develop the best tool in the shortest amount of time. That ROI bullshit is at the heart of the problem.
If you want to challenge hackers, in the traditional sense, then continue to improve the security of your systems; they will still find ways to impress you.
If you want challenge hackers, in the more "dorm-room entrepreneurial" sense, then hire a bunch of them on 2-year contracts and let them do their own thing; they just might find a way to fill your pockets with cash.
The Twitter logo at the top left is very disconcerting. It looks as if the website was made by Twitter, but it only points to the BattleHack Twitter account.
Looks like a fun idea to start, but it's being pitched so badly given paypal's history and the site is actually shockingly bad. The major branding is Twitter's! The links don't work! The design is horrible! It's hosted on Github!
This seems to be some muddle of an organization that previously organized something called Charity Hack and Paypals dev evangelists, probably why the whole message is coming across so jarringly at odds with the reality of developing with paypal.
At first I thought they had a cool, if out-dated, easter egg, but they seem to have lifted the code without any credit:
(enter the konami code or open your console and enter goApeshit(), warning, loud)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadAlthough, in real life, for the majority of people... maybe the opposite is true.
> Yep, it’s an axe trophy.
> Good luck clearing airport security
http://battlehack.org/berlin/#prizes
Just didn't have a solution obviously ;)
Why we down here are always forgotten?
I should however single out AWS. Amazon have two sales engineers here in Perth.
Perth, of all places! Kudos, Amazon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
How far the legendary galactic center of .sigs must have fallen, if even its own residents disparage it so!
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/#perth
Realistically, any such contest held in the Southern hemisphere would be held in Sydney, maybe Auckland or Wellington and maybe, maybe, Cape Town.
These rising stars shouldn't be competing against each other to develop the best tool in the shortest amount of time. That ROI bullshit is at the heart of the problem.
If you want to challenge hackers, in the traditional sense, then continue to improve the security of your systems; they will still find ways to impress you.
If you want challenge hackers, in the more "dorm-room entrepreneurial" sense, then hire a bunch of them on 2-year contracts and let them do their own thing; they just might find a way to fill your pockets with cash.
What a cat-axe-tropy.
This seems to be some muddle of an organization that previously organized something called Charity Hack and Paypals dev evangelists, probably why the whole message is coming across so jarringly at odds with the reality of developing with paypal.
At first I thought they had a cool, if out-dated, easter egg, but they seem to have lifted the code without any credit:
(enter the konami code or open your console and enter goApeshit(), warning, loud)
http://battlehack.org/javascript/ie5.js
https://github.com/moovweb/harlem_shaker