The Hot Dog Wars Are Over. Now Let's Dissect Our National Soul.
Hey hackathon crew,
Round 1 of the Data Storytelling Hackathon wrapped last week—and it was something else.
The prompt was intentionally absurd: *is a hot dog a sandwich?* But the work that came out of it wasn’t about food. It was about intention, identity, language, logic. Some projects used humor to sneak past our defenses. Others built full pipelines, interactive tools, even narrative worlds.
Data Storytelling Hackathon: 001: "Is A Hotdog A Sandwich?" | Vancouver AI
People brought code, poetry, visual design, storytelling, and systems thinking. Some submissions were scrappy. Some were polished. All of them showed heart.
And one of them stopped us in our tracks.
Sev took a ridiculous premise and followed it all the way down—through data, interface, philosophy, and back again.
HotDogma | Sev Geraskin | Data Storytelling AI Hackathon Process | Vancouver AI
Sev pulled survey data into a three-agent orchestration system—each agent responsible for analysis, visualization, or classification. The tool spun out everything from custom controversy metrics to real-time audience segmentation. It was rigorous, sharp, and weirdly fun.
But what made it remarkable was the perspective.
Sev treated “is a hot dog a sandwich?” like a philosophical wedge. A way into bigger questions about how we define things, how we project meaning, and how data can reveal more about belief than fact.
There’s even a 3D hot dog that morphs into a sandwich and back, in case you need a visual metaphor for epistemic collapse.
