Sako

Here are my 51 learnings from 50 hackathons in 2024! Endless shoutout to all the organizers, sponsors and hackers for driving the pace of innovation in a region where it’s already sky-high. 🙌 🚢 After reflecting on this journey, I’ve grouped my learnings into these key themes: ✅ 1/10 Hackathons: The Heartbeat of Innovation 1. Definition of hackathon: With ideas you don't have, with people you don't know, with tools you haven't worked with: SHIP USEFUL THINGS FAST! 2. Hackathons are the freestyle dance of innovation, unlike the routine exercises of gyms or corporate life. They keep your engineering and entrepreneurial skills razor-sharp. 3. Hackathons are a great way to challenge yourself, step out of your comfort zone, and embrace creativity. 4. Hackathons unleash collective intelligence that can ripple into positive impacts beyond the event. 5. Hackathons are the perfect environment to collaborate in non-corporate, non-academic settings, enabling individuals to bring out their best.

@eldar_hsnv @imperialcollege @nvidia ❤️

Frontier AI research shouldn’t need a GPU supercluster. Excited to share CheckWork: an @imperialcollege × @nvidia collaboration, published at APNet ’26. CheckWork synthesizes checkpoint-aware traces to simulate how checkpointing overhead shifts across model architectures, parallelism strategies, network topologies, storage, and system configurations. Presenting as first author in Singapore this August 🚀

Engineering was never about writing the perfect code. Real engineering is when people come to you with problem or you face it: ✅ Ask the right questions ✅ Understand the environment ✅ Guide them ✅ Share resources ✅ Connect with right people ✅ Help package effective solution

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

🚨LAUNCH NEWS🚨 We are about to experience a golden age of open source AI as a response to many companies losing access to AI APIs and the combined inference bills hitting tens of billions of dollars. There are now more than 100,000 models uploaded to huggingface every month, but small task specific models are still hard to discover and running a mixed model workload across pipelines and real-time queries is a challenge. Building on our heritage of search & document processing across e-com and enterprise, we decided to *BET OUR WHOLE COMPANY* on a new product that launches today: a self-hostable open source cluster we call the Superlinked Inference Engine. Help us make open source AI viable by starring, contributing and using SIE on your own hardware in the safety of your own cloud *for free* 🙏 Repo link and more info: superlinked.com/blog/launch Onwards! PS: We would not be able to do this without our wonderful partners @trychroma @lancedb @qdrant_engine @weaviate_io - more on this coming soon!

@frontiertower @Superherohotel love it!!

The real reason founders move to SF isn’t the capital. It’s the hallway conversations. So we built a hallway. Launching @superherohotel: 6 floors in a historic 1920 Nob Hill building. 10-min walk from @frontiertower. Members have raised $150M. Events have pulled 70K. Sleep at the hotel. Build at the Tower. Come for 4 weeks. Ship, raise, break through 👇

@rpoo enjoy it Ross!!! try also cold plunge in Bay🙂👌

touching some grass

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things. Courage beats intelligence.

@meh_agarwal 🔥

Hollywood isn't dead. It's evolving. And we're leading that evolution. We just shipped Koyal v2.5: The best Agentic AI filmmaking platform. It goes from your script or music to full video with consistent characters, settings & storylines. Large Production houses, music labels & ad agencies use @KoyalAI for storyboarding & pre-viz. Smaller studios use it for making content they never had the time, budget or resources to create. Write a scene. Direct the camera. Build a world. @KoyalAI brings it to life. Here's what's new: - Go from script to video: Write a scene with dialogue, pacing, emotion. Koyal fully realizes it. Using the best voice models on the planet. - Direct the camera: Push in. Pull back. Drift through a scene. Real 3D camera blocking. Shape the shot the way you see it in your head. - Build a world that stays:Lock in a location and return to it. Your scenes stay consistent from the first frame to the last. Plus: dialogue, SFX, annotations for editing, and more control over every shot. Under the hood, we benchmark 40+ models weekly with real humans so Koyal always uses the best available (more on that next week!) Our agents pick the best models for each scene in run-time so you focus on the story, we handle the complexity. You don't need to prompt a film, you can direct it. With Koyal, we're looking to replace the camera, not the filmmaker behind it. Try it now at beta [dot] koyal [dot] ai DM me for credits!

@marianebekker 🔥🚢

You.com just launched a Research API — meaning you can now plug deep, real-time web research directly into your apps. No more hallucinations, no stale data. Just live intelligence, on demand. 📄 Docs: #what-is-the-research-api" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.you.com/research/overv… ⭐ Sign up: you.com/signin?redirec…

Get $100 in free credits (no card required) and try it here: you.com/signin?redirec… Thanks to You.com for sponsoring! PS: My favorite search tool at hackathons! AND my first sponsored post, let me know how i did :) #AI #BuildInPublic #ResearchAPI

Saturday 2/14 ‣ The Board Walks meetup.com/the-board-walk… @theboardtalks ‣ Build What You Love - Women in Tech Hackathon luma.com/ic3l89gi @aivalleyio @courtneythko @victorsuortiz ‣ AI Meets Robotics – Launch & Fund Your Own Startup (Edition 1) luma.com/ai-meets-robot… @lablabai @GoogleDeepMind @theaievangelist @Robotcom @gokiwibot @Marianebekker @sakows

@GeorgeKurdin @usemonk @zhou_squared ❤️🚢

Revenue automation software has a credibility problem. Numbers appear in dashboards. And accountants are told to just trust them. Our team at @usemonk took a different approach. We set out to make every number traceable and defensible. Today, @zhou_squared shares our product philosophy on building for accounting/finance professionals. We’ve been fortunate to have the support of our customers and experts in this build. Thank you for continued feedback!

who’s run a lot of hackathons? Am curious to pick their brain on what happens to the format given vibe coding etc Who should I talk to…?

@MammadKarim @andrewchen :)

@sakows @andrewchen here is the man

Here are my 51 learnings from 50 hackathons in 2024! Endless shoutout to all the organizers, sponsors and hackers for driving the pace of innovation in a region where it’s already sky-high. 🙌 🚢 After reflecting on this journey, I’ve grouped my learnings into these key themes: ✅ 1/10 Hackathons: The Heartbeat of Innovation 1. Definition of hackathon: With ideas you don't have, with people you don't know, with tools you haven't worked with: SHIP USEFUL THINGS FAST! 2. Hackathons are the freestyle dance of innovation, unlike the routine exercises of gyms or corporate life. They keep your engineering and entrepreneurial skills razor-sharp. 3. Hackathons are a great way to challenge yourself, step out of your comfort zone, and embrace creativity. 4. Hackathons unleash collective intelligence that can ripple into positive impacts beyond the event. 5. Hackathons are the perfect environment to collaborate in non-corporate, non-academic settings, enabling individuals to bring out their best.

🎯 Next Time: The Fix 1. Branch chaos | One person owns deployment 2. Feature creep | One feature, executed perfectly 3. “update” commits | Commit messages that aren’t garbage 4. Integration hell | Merge early, merge often | 5. Demo panic | Stop coding 2 hours before demo to practice

💀 The Harsh Truth You had the right idea (egg music was perfectly useless) but couldn’t ship it. Your git history looks like a team that panicked, thrashed, and gave up. Winners ship broken demos that work. You shipped nothing that worked.

When You ask AI to evaluate why you lost at hackathon. Loud and clear: You Lost Because You Couldn’t Execute