How to make money on porn, winning the hackathons. Tips of the winner, interview with Artem Kupriyanov

    Good day, dear Geektimes!

    Most likely, many of you have heard about hackathons. Recently, quite a lot of similar events take place in Russia such as Whateverhack , AI.Hack or Hack.Moscow . Thanks to the Russian Hackers hackathon community, I managed to interview Artyom Kupriyanov , who managed to achieve serious success in speaking at hackathons. Our hero lives in Moscow, studies at the 3rd year FIVT MIPT, works as a Middle Data Scientist at Sticker.Place. He told how he is preparing for the hackathons and how they helped him in life.

    This is Artem.

    And he won 8 hackathons.

    Here is a short list of Artem's victories:



    Q: How did it all begin? At what point did you start programming?

    * Laughs *
    A: Good question. I started programming in my first year at PhysTech, machine learning from the second semester. I was very attracted to this topic, artificial intelligence will capture the world, and I decided to try it. At this moment, a specialization of MIPT from Yandex appeared, called "Introduction to Machine Learning", I began to study it, passed the first 3-4 courses, and somehow it started. Then there were all sorts of projections, for example, related to betting on basketball, and various ideas began to emerge that I wanted to bring to life somewhere, and then I met with hackathons. The first time I wrote a music bot, which was not very well appreciated by the jury, it was my very first experience.

    Q: What was the name of this hackathon?

    Mind round. FizTekhovsky hackathon.

    Q: After the first hackathon, did you win nothing or didn’t something happen? At what point did you understand how to act next time, what did you burn out with?

    A: Just from there I got a lot of different chips, talked with the guys who performed this hackathon, and somehow I realized what to do. Well, for example, that a presentation for a hackathon needs to be done not in 15 minutes on the knee, but in 4 hours and competently think over everything. Of course, the experience of presenting came a little later, we began to prescribe monetization. Then I came to the conclusion that teamwork is very important, so it’s very important to choose the right guys with whom you will work and generate ideas together. After all, you need to start programming when the idea is already thought out, it seems to me.
    Q: Describe your dream team (dreamtime). Do you always go with the same guys or do you have some kind of rotation?

    A: Recently, I like the story when a person simply takes and attracts other people. This is practiced at kaggle-competitions , when some “grand masters” take inexperienced dudes into their team and work with them, and they are very motivated. And so, even in the first year, the guys still participated, and we had a backbone, 5-6 people initially, who wanted to do something, and we participated 6-7 times with them.


    These are two teams of Artem, they both won a prize at the birth hack hackathon

    Q: What size of hackathon do you consider optimal for a hackathon or is it not so important?

    A: I think that 3-4 people is enough. If the person is larger, then difficulties arise with the division of the task. Let's say one person works on design, another on front-end, and the rest on idea.

    Q: What do you mean by “working on design”? Is a person engaged in rendering or something more related to programming?

    A: Rather, some kind of rendering. That is, how it will look, how to submit it, where we will take the data, why people should like it. There are a lot of questions, but I think this should be done by one person who first generates ideas, and then discusses this with the team.

    Q: What is your usual role in the team?

    A: Lately I have been a team lead if that doesn't sound too bright. I give out tasks, I lead the guys, I myself do data science. The manager also plays a big role, because you need to submit your opinion and make sure that everyone has the same understanding of the project.

    Q: Describe how you prepare for the hackathon.

    A: We gather somewhere a week before the hackathon 2-3 times and generate ideas. We think over how we can win, which products we can use. We have a person in the team, relatively speaking, an oracle who fully listens to the idea, and then can say: “No, we definitely won’t win with such an idea,” we discard it and discuss it further. He never let us down; all the ideas that went through his meat grinder turned out to be good.

    Q: Advise beginners how to generate ideas for hackathons, what should not be done?

    A: I think you need to watch various news sources, like Rusbase and TJournal or foreign ones, for example, TechCrunch, follow startups and observe how the world lives. That is, it is obvious that there is no need to repeat ready-made solutions, it is better to improve ready-made solutions or come up with something new. Now it’s fashionable to Uberize everything, why not?

    Q: Hackathons usually last 36 or 48 hours. How do you distribute time in a team?

    A: I believe that if a hackathon lasts 2 days, then on the first night you should definitely have a good sleep so that on the second day the team has maximum strength and enthusiasm, and the next night how it goes. And then you need to correctly assess the stage of development of the project, and if you have time, you can sleep, and if not, then it is better to concentrate on work, and only then sleep. In our team, everyone goes to bed and wakes up together. I don’t like it when someone is sleeping and someone is not, because the employee has lost motivation, the interaction between the team is lost.

    Q: If you could, what would you change in your past hackathons?

    A: Well, I will say this, if you are called to a hackathon, then it is better not to refuse. I had a story, the team with which we had already won, called me to a hackathon from Kaspersky. I decided to refuse due to study, although in fact, I was rather afraid. As a result, the guys won, but I did not even participate. That is, it is always better to fight for something than to regret later that you have not tried.

    Q: What was your favorite hackathon project?

    A: Probably the last one, FapAdvisor. He very much hypanul, everyone liked it, and now many people ask us to test him, saying "this is not for me, but for my friend." A teammate works at ABBYY and says that he often hears about this project at work. Personally, it really warms my soul.

    Q: Tell me briefly about what this project is about.

    A: The project consists of 2 parts. The first is a recommendation system for selecting actresses. We select according to the 4 most important, in our understanding, aspects: breast size, volume of moans, skin color and experience - our most killer feature. The second part is the service. For example, do you have a friend whom you sighed at in school and would like to see something hot with her. Our service solves this problem: you send the victim’s Instagram account and get a video. We are still developing this project, we hope everything will be fine.


    New technology projects are born at hackathons

    Q: When you go to the hackathon, do you always work for the result? Or sometimes just have fun?

    A: I think that you always need to go all the way to success. Of course, you should not forget about networking, lectures and all sorts of other things on hackathons. I now really remember the lecture from Uber on VisionHack. That is, you don’t have to sit in the same room and constantly code, there are always a lot of things to do.

    Q: How did the hackathons influence you? Especially in terms of career and education.

    A: The first work I found just after the hackathon. I think this is a very good line in the resume and there is something to tell in the interview. That is, I have already decided many cases in various areas of machine learning, there is something to brag about.

    Q: What do you like most about hackathons? What do you think people go there for?

    A: I like chatting with the same enthusiastic guys at the hackathon. In addition, a huge boost in knowledge over the weekend, which in a normal situation you are unlikely to acquire. Well, besides, competitive spirit and adrenaline. I also really like when handing out T-shirts. This is my trigger, although I think everyone has a different way. And the atmosphere of hackathons always surprises, at one event, for example, a cook arrived and fed us very tasty.

    Q: What course did you go to the hackathon for the first time?

    A: On the second.

    Q: So it turns out that in a year you pumped yourself up with hackathons and work. Describe yourself at the start and now.

    A: At the start, I was a student who completed 3 courses at Coursera. Now I have quite a lot of experience in computer vision, I work as a middle data scientist in a company and have a bunch of hackathons, good experience in many areas: I can develop and manage.


    Q: How do you feel about your hobby at work? Does this interfere with the work?

    A: This is a pretty interesting story. At first, everyone at work was surprised, questioned, rejoiced. The last time I was scolded with FapAdvisor because I used production servers to drive pornography on them. But this is the only case when something did not like at work.

    Q: What are your future plans for hackathons?

    A: I want to go to Europe for a long time. Judging by the reviews, this is not very scary, although it’s hard for me to overcome this threshold. In general, I don’t really know English, although maybe my teammates will help me, and I will do my usual business. In Russian, we already have a rather large party of 10 people, we evaluate hackathons every week, and choose whether it suits us, think with what we can come and decide where we will go. The closest I’ll go to is probably Hack.Moscow. I was called there to talk about how to drag hackathons, and I don’t mind hanging around (smiles)

    Q: How do you see your career in IT in the future?

    Well, I'm interested in data analysis, I see myself in this. In general, I want to either come up with a startup at the hackathon and work on it, or become an existing CTO. Well, I want to further develop in the field of computer vision.

    Q: Do you read Habr?

    A: Not recently, only if I google something and come across a useful article.

    Q: Lastly, can you give some advice or tell some interesting story.

    A: Well, the first advice, as I said, you should always not be afraid and go - this is at least a cool experience. It seems to me that the guys’s big problem is that they are afraid or cannot assemble a team. Also, I think the problem of some IT people is a poor presentation of their projects, so I advise you to work on presentation skills. You can see the pitches of different startups and take notes. It’s just that often good ideas die because of poor presentation, unwritten logic, monitoring or development plans. And this is very important for the jury.

    Q: Artem, thank you very much for the interview! Successes and new victories, read this interview on Geektimes

    A: Haha, thanks. I will wait!

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