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Google Code Jam Winner Announced
Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual
Code Jam programming contest.
Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada),
third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia),
fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland).
Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."
So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.
I don't comment very often, but I always get a little tingly feeling thinking about how Google is one of the very few companies I see in the wide expanse of capitalism that seems to actually enjoy making their customers feel good about the fact that they are giving a little out of their own pocket/time. I would pay to use google, just becase google is not an angry behemoth like Microsoft, Walmart, or Big Bro.
Congrats to the guys who won, and a special congratulation to Google for being my favorite company on planet earth.
fucking xenophobe....
you run a company where you don't hire certain people b/c of arbitrary charecteristics and see how well you do.... I want to be your competitor so I can crush with w/ my diverse team of superior intellect and ability because I draw from a larger pool of talent instead of your artifically limited one....
Why is this a warning sign? Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, the odds were not very good that an American would be among the winners. Stop being so narrow-minded, there are bright people from all over the world--America and abroad.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I just want to take the time to congratulate Jimmy on a job well done. I knew someone from the "TI Community" would make it big some day.
I'm sure everyone who's ever owned a recent TI graphing calculator (TI-83 and up) will remember zTetris, among other puzzle games, that Jimmy wrote.
Jimmy Mardell
Decency? This was a competion and the best men won, what's indecent about that?
Patriotism? If google ran a crooked competition where an american got a prize they didn't earn would that make you proud? Wouldn't it be better to keep trying until you win fair and square and then take pride in that?
Shouldn't it be scaled to the coding population, not just the population? You're scale assumes that everyone in the country is a potential programmer.
Considering only 24 people are ranked for Sweden and over 1300 for the US, it's not surprising we're ranked lower. We've got a lot more people trying (and failing) which lowers the overall score.
It'd be interesting to see how our top X compare to another country's top X or just who has the top coder over all.
The statistics as they are, are pretty much meaningless.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
"Of course there are. There are ~300 million Americans. There are over 5.7 billion other non-Americans."
That argument doesn't hold water when you account for the penetration of computers into the lives of those 5.7 billion vs. our 300 million.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
The people who are competing for prizes are, AFAICT, donating their labor to solve real problems for real companies. Take a look at the set of current "competitions" here
Or, how about this quote (trying to lure "customers", ahem... Donations for competitions):
or, this one:
So, do you want to work for free, for a chance to win less than you would have made in your job to do the same thing? All for the opportunity to get listed as a good coder on a site that exploits you?
If so, be embarrassed... Be very embarrassed.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
One-hundred hours of my time is worth about $7,000 (100 hours * 70 dollars per hour salary).
Just to clue you in to a little known fact:
The vast majority of people in developed countries make nowhere near $70 an hour.
I'd venture that a lot of the people going in for something like that probably make more in the $10-20 range.
$10,000 is a hell of a lot of money for someone just starting out, or not making $140,000 a year like yourself.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Sorry to the americans that *aren't* like that - as with most things, the few spoil it for everyone.
The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.
Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The American thing to do is pick the best man (or woman) for the job, regardless of their national origin. That is what makes this country great.
-- Will program for bandwidth
That's not patriotism your talking about, that's nationalism.
They don't have many universities (for the size of the population) but they provide some of the toughest, highest quality courses in math, engineering and Computer Science.
I spent only three years in a Polish high school (they normally last four or five years) and went straight to a third year of a top British University in their Electrical Engineering programme. All of the math required was covered in the first couple of years in my high school.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.
I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.
Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.
Um, this isn't the Olympics. The government of Croatia does not go out of its way to get the best 11 coders to sign up for it. "Croatia" really has nothing to do with it. It just happens that the 11 programmers who happened to sign up from Croatia were better than the average US contestant. The only thing you can argue is that a sample of 11 programmers it not large enough to be statistically significant --- and thus not an accurate representation of the average programmer in Croatia.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Kids would be stupid to pick the tech field. The only thing stupider would be to say you wanted to work on an assembly line or something. Those jobs are going going gone...