Groom your programming skills and make some money • Hacker News Board

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#11

Post by Jun8 » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:28 PM UTC

ryanhuff wrote: post #10

Jun8 wrote: post #8

I mean, is this a joke or a viral site or something? The About page explains that it was done by someone called "Sir Pastor Alhaji Babalawo omotodun, Ph.D, MSc, etc...", which sort of brings to mind the Nigerian emails. Couple this with the outregous "also get paid tons of money($1 for winning a special challenge per week)" and P(legit site) goes really low. On a different note, in the longest palindrome problem, the…

He/she clearly states in the About page that he is from Nigeria.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't want to disparage this guy too much but if I'm from Nigeria, I would bend over back backwards to appear legit. I wouldn't advertise gimmicks like "cheap money" or "Phd., MSc, etc."

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#12

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:30 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#13

Post by parfe » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:31 PM UTC

OwlHuntr wrote: post #9

yangez wrote: post #7

It would be nice if Ruby was one of the permitted languages.

Right? They're alienating a very large developer community. I tried to send them an email about ruby support and the typo on their compilers page but their email form doesn't even work. I take this to be way too amateurish and scam-like.

"very large" and "very loud" are two different things. I'm sure you'll take exception with any metric that shows Ruby to be a less common language but

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ruby 127 questions.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python 272 questions.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php 466

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#14

Post by synnik » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

So... you can get up to 50 points for the fastest code, and 20 points for the smallest code. And you only lose up to 20 points for code that doesn't work.

I think I just detected a wonderful loophole in this scoring method.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#15

Post by synnik » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:44 PM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #8

I mean, is this a joke or a viral site or something? The About page explains that it was done by someone called "Sir Pastor Alhaji Babalawo omotodun, Ph.D, MSc, etc...", which sort of brings to mind the Nigerian emails. Couple this with the outregous "also get paid tons of money($1 for winning a special challenge per week)" and P(legit site) goes really low. On a different note, in the longest palindrome problem, the…

As someone who works for a Nigerian boss, I get very tired of this kind of racism. I see it frequently. I see people refuse to do business with us because of his origin. I also see people try aggressively to scam us because of his origin, assuming we are naive.

But you cannot judge an entire country based on some highly visible scammers from there. Not all Nigerians are trying to scam you. And many Americans ARE trying to scam you. Many Nigerians have left their country, gotten educations, and become highly successful businessmen throughout the world.

This specific guy who runs this site? I have no idea. But I will judge him on his own merits, not his country of origin.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#16

Post by bromagosa » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:46 PM UTC

parfe wrote: post #13

OwlHuntr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? They're alienating a very large developer community. I tried to send them an email about ruby support and the typo on their compilers page but their email form doesn't even work. I take this to be way too amateurish and scam-like.

"very large" and "very loud" are two different things. I'm sure you'll take exception with any metric that shows Ruby to be a less common language but http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ruby 127 questions. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python 272 questions. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php 466

In a website for programming challenges, the market status of a language should be the least regarded metric to decide whether to include it or not.

Just check this out: http://projecteuler.net/languages

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#17

Post by Jun8 » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 3:58 PM UTC

synnik wrote: post #15

Jun8 wrote: post #8

I mean, is this a joke or a viral site or something? The About page explains that it was done by someone called "Sir Pastor Alhaji Babalawo omotodun, Ph.D, MSc, etc...", which sort of brings to mind the Nigerian emails. Couple this with the outregous "also get paid tons of money($1 for winning a special challenge per week)" and P(legit site) goes really low. On a different note, in the longest palindrome problem, the…

As someone who works for a Nigerian boss, I get very tired of this kind of racism. I see it frequently. I see people refuse to do business with us because of his origin. I also see people try aggressively to scam us because of his origin, assuming we are naive. But you cannot judge an entire country based on some highly visible scammers from there. Not all Nigerians are trying to scam you. And many Americans ARE tryi…

You are absolutely right. Two points, though: (i) As you see from my comments, my judgments were based on the site, the Nigerian thing is an afterthought and (ii) unfortunately, people do have Bayesian prior probabilities, commonly referred to as prejudices. You cannot avoid them and they need to be addressed sometime. What I said was that if I were from Nigeria, I would be work more on my site to erase any spammish connotations. This is probably true of your boss, too.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#18

Post by buster » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

Mh, i don't think giving points based on code size is a good idea, developers really really shouldn't try hard to minimize the code size, this just leads to unreadable garbage. Time to Solve and Speed to Run is ok, imo..

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#19

Post by buster » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:11 PM UTC

bromagosa wrote: post #16

parfe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"very large" and "very loud" are two different things. I'm sure you'll take exception with any metric that shows Ruby to be a less common language but http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ruby 127 questions. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python 272 questions. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php 466

In a website for programming challenges, the market status of a language should be the least regarded metric to decide whether to include it or not. Just check this out: http://projecteuler.net/languages

What about the infamous TIOBE Index? http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html There should be atleast 3 other languages before ruby then ;)

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#20

Post by a_m0d » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:09 PM UTC

sad_bug_killer wrote: post #5

It needs some polishing, there are quite annoying aspects: 1) Mandatory gender and country? Seriously, why? Even e-mail shouldn't be mandatory IMO. Hitting 'Enter' on register/login forms doesn't work as submit, I need to grab the mouse for that (especially annoying on a programming-related site) 2) The "How are programs run" section is completely useless. It's never mentioned how is my code actually invoked, just ho…

Another interesting thing on the "How are programs run" page is the fact that the programs are apparently run on a Linux system, yet C# files are compiled with Microsoft Visual C# somehow!