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

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#21

Post by Permit » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:14 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…

I thought everyone just assumed that the "Nigerian Prince" thing was a front and it was likely some Eastern European or American behind it all.

I thought the "Nigerian" bit was just to add to the allure or something.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#22

Post by cpeterso » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 6:10 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #21

synnik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought everyone just assumed that the "Nigerian Prince" thing was a front and it was likely some Eastern European or American behind it all. I thought the "Nigerian" bit was just to add to the allure or something.

I am surprised that scammers, Nigerian or otherwise, don't know better than to still reference Nigeria in their emails.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#23

Post by gojomo » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 6:23 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #22

Permit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought everyone just assumed that the "Nigerian Prince" thing was a front and it was likely some Eastern European or American behind it all. I thought the "Nigerian" bit was just to add to the allure or something.

I am surprised that scammers, Nigerian or otherwise, don't know better than to still reference Nigeria in their emails.

I also found it surprising that scammers devote so little effort to proper spelling/punctuation/grammar.

But then it occured to me: maybe errors help filter out attentive respondents, who have a low chance of completing the whole scam funnel. Those people who don't notice the errors, or don't consider them a red flag, are better leads.

In the context of a cliche'd Nigerian origin, sure, mentioning Nigeria puts anyone familiar with the 419 scam formula on guard. But anyone who does reply is likely a fresh, naive prospect. Ka-ching!

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#24

Post by nathanb » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 6:54 PM UTC

Hopefully the command line for the C compiler invocation is a typo, because "gcc contestx.c -o contestx.c" will overwrite your source with the executable--which (while catastrophic if done at home with no backup) is probably not a big deal, so long as the relevant code length metrics are extracted beforehand...but still amateurish.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#25

Post by rcthompson » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

synnik wrote: post #14

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.

I think you only get the fast code and small code bonuses on working solutions.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#26

Post by agscala » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 7:20 PM UTC

Why not have "time to submit" points work as follows:

The problem details aren't shown, only a brief description. User clicks a button "accept challenge", is given problem details, and the server starts recording time until a solution is submitted. Base points on that time difference.

Sure, there are loopholes (such as someone else posting the question on another website so you can create a solution before accepting the challenge). I think it's better than checking for new problems and get lucky by noticing a new challenge came out very recently and there are no submissions.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#27

Post by omotodun » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 8:21 PM UTC

Good day

I created www.amebopost.com. I am extremely sorry if I annoyed anyone. If I had known that I'd be getting this many users, I would have endeavored to make it more professional and thoroughly fix the bugs before making the site online.

My original goal was to create an avenue where Nigerian programmers could convene and share programming ideas and code.

The About Page was just me being Silly. It will be taken down.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#28

Post by saintfiends » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 9:19 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

https://github.com/languages

http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I wonder what made Lua take the leap.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#29

Post by tadfisher » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 10:19 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #25

synnik wrote: post #14

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.

I think you only get the fast code and small code bonuses on working solutions.

Right, submitting fast but incorrect+buggy code nets you -20 points.

Re: Groom your programming skills and make some money

#30

Post by lurker19 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 10:06 AM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #23

cpeterso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised that scammers, Nigerian or otherwise, don't know better than to still reference Nigeria in their emails.

I also found it surprising that scammers devote so little effort to proper spelling/punctuation/grammar. But then it occured to me: maybe errors help filter out attentive respondents, who have a low chance of completing the whole scam funnel. Those people who don't notice the errors, or don't consider them a red flag, are better leads. In the context of a cliche'd Nigerian origin, sure, mentioning Nigeria puts anyone…

This is perceptive. 419 is like any other advertising: if you think it is stupid, you are not in the target market, but someone else is.

Who communicates in all caps? The elderly and the mentally ill. Target market.