CodeSprint begins today at noon (PST), with 65 participating startups | Hacker News Reader

CodeSprint begins today at noon (PST), with 65 participating startups

codesprint.interviewstreet.com

"We do not consider code elegance or code length for the score. Though your program must fit within language-specific memory and runtime limits in order for us to grade it, we do not consider memory footprint or runtime in the score."

That seems like a mistake. How could there not be a penalty for unreadable, slow, or bloated code?

Based on the IRC chat, most of the battle is tackling our biggest test cases and finding an algorithm that fits into our memory and runtime limits.

If the code produces an answer sooner, including coding time, it's the best code.

The real world rewards timeliness not comeliness.

Contests can, and should, require maintainable code by giving you one goal and then at acceptance throw some new requirements at you. But still, if you win you're showing your code was more maintainable even if it's ugly to others.

I wonder if they'll publish any statistics about the results? I'd be interested in both how many solutions were submitted and the average score per challenge. Additionally, I'd like to see how many interviews are granted and how many positions filled.

Yes, we will have a CodeSprint Post Contest Results post.

Ha, and I thought I might have to time get ahead in my studying this week. This boom in programming contests for students is wonderful, but it's turning me into a huge nerd who does nothing on weekends but code and shout about algorithms.

Is anyone else bothered that all of these contest problems are in no way associated with the real-world requirements of the specific startups that are taking part in this?

Why is a competition targeted at students taking place on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday? Seems like you'd have to miss a good chunk of class to go full throttle on this.

The contest was designed for busy students in mind. We targeted this test to be somewhere between 12-20 hours long in total.

Will the problems be available after the contest ends for those of us who are not in school but wouldn't mind a bit of practice?

Maybe. If so, we will tell you about it in our Post Contest blog post.

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