Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

We're pretty excited about hacking at Yahoo!, and we're always looking to share that enthusiasm with the world at large. After the rousing success that was the Open Hack Day, some of our clever HR ladies came up with the idea to run hack competitions for various universities around the country. Thus were born the University Hack Days, which wrapped up with an on-campus finale just a couple weeks ago. You should definitely read over that second link, Jeremy's summary of the event, which goes into more detail about University Hack Days as well as UIUC student Greg Schechter's winning hack, his slide rule widget. Yup. Slide rule. We kick it old skool at Yahoo!.

Probably the most rewarding part was seeing all the fun ideas that university kids would come up with if you just gave them a bit of incentive (in the form of cash money prizes). In addition to Greg: Michael Fisher, from Stanford, put together a collaborative online chess game to explore the application of "wisdom of crowds". Paul Thurlow and Ryan Frishberg hailed from CMU and created a tag association game using Flickr photos. Niels Joubert, a Berkeley student, presented an AJAX-y class schedule for his first round hack, and then went in a completely different direction for the on-campus event, demonstrating a system that would generate common musical playlists based on logged-in cell phone users near a particular location. Everyone who participated did a great job and we're very lucky to have a few of them signed on as interns with us over the summer, so hopefully they'll work on many more hacks with us in future.

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