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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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%. :)
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.
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.
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:
> 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!
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Video: https://youtu.be/cK4K8aj7X1s?si=xAQH54SfC8yUE_ll
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
Particularly as there's no reputational downside to entering and failing at such a contest.
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.
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.
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%. :)
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q6yPcUwatg
> 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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's just marketing.
The ElevenLabs narrator did say the faeries applied “Polish”. From Gdańsk or Warsaw? :)