Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

tl, dr: The guy just blindly copy/pasted the answers from the discussion section of each problem to the question itself and passed all tests, without even really reading the question or answer.

Is having a specific HackerRank meaningful to the outside world? I am unfamiliar with HackerRank, but solve algorithm questions on a site called LeetCode for fun. When I get truly stuck, I consult the discussion area and implement the suggested solutions. But I don't think it would be meaningful for me to go through all 450+(?) of their questions and paste in the answers.

What's the motivation to achieve Hacker Rank of 1, when presumably everyone knows you can just copy/paste the answers?

edit: as pointed out below, I jumped the gun on the motivation question. I guess I assumed the second part of the article expanded on the motivations, which were that the author heard people hired based off of HR. Hopefully those companies realize how easy this is to manipulate.

That very article (no offense, but did you skip the last part?) states the reason for this article, for this behavior: A report stating that someone was hired for a somewhat prestigious position, based on their HackerRank.

The article asks if this can be true and tries to prove that this would be a rather foolish metric.

He mentioned why he did it. Allegedly Morgan Stanley / other unspecified banks were hiring people based on Hacker Rank rankings

I believe that article stated Morgan Stanley / Banks were hiring based on using Hacker Rank to screen candidates with their own unique tests, not rankings. It didn't involve the default questions William went through, though similar.

The default questions (on which OP has gained #1) are just for practice. The actual contests held from time to time on which companies actually hire are difficult, and don't have solutions easily available. The default challenges are like examples, the real number #1s on Hackerrank contests are actual competitive programmers(similar to #1s on other sites like codeforces, topcoder).

Id hope most people realize how easy it'd be to manipulate.

Reminds me of the LinkedIn recommendation system is completely pointless as you can easily create dummy accounts for referrals. I doubt most people spend much effort investigating the peers and you could come across looking better.

There are tons of opportunities out there to be manipulative if you really wanted to be. Same with github repo example code and lots more.

Just depends if you personally want to risk it and put in effort.

You can do the same with upvotes here.

Anyway, that's why Codewars censors the answers if you haven't completed the challenge and doesn't allow you to earn credit for the challenge if you choose to view the answer.

Of course you can choose to make a dummy account and view the answers, but you'd really have to be desperate to do such a thing. And this is all pointless anyway.

Agreed, you might be able to cheat your way to a high(er) karma. But do you know about any company hiring based on the HN comment karma/score for some reason?

That would be .. weird, right?

Some companies might use high karma to reject candidates :)

What, you spend all day on Hacker News? Get out of here!

I suppose it is slightly better than spending all day on stack overflow.

From the article:

> Motivations For Getting The Ranking. Recently I saw a Bloomberg story linked on Hacker News where it said that Wall Street is frantically looking for programmers.

LeetCode also doesn't force you to read from STDIN :-) I find LeetCode fun and straight forward.

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