2% bias, 98% noise: what I built, and cut, for a hackathon judging engine

2% bias, 98% noise: what I built, and cut, for a hackathon judging engine The sample event Hackathon Raptors gave us for Dogfood 2026 has 41 projects, 30 judges and 126 finished reviews. When my judging engine split the judges' disagreement into "this judge is just more generous" and everything else, generosity came out at about 2%. That number ended up deciding most of what I built and most of what I cut. Dogfood's brief was the same for every team: in 72 hours, build the submission and judging platform Raptors will run their own events on. I entered solo.