Quixey Challenge - 1 Bug, 1 Minute, $100 | Hacker News Reader

Quixey Challenge - 1 Bug, 1 Minute, $100

quixeychallenge.com

68 pointsLiron41 comments

Asking me to register before I test your website? Really? Yay! I just love doing that!

And by registering, you mean username + password + confirm password + email + captcha ... I hope I'm going to get a confirmation email, I don't get nearly enough of those.

And hopefully you're going to send me a monthly newsletter. And commercial offers from your 'partners'! If so, please make sure you send it as HTML. Plain text is boring and ugly, and quite frankly would work too easily on my mutt client. Who would want that?

They really should advertise more upfront that this is Python. They should maybe even call it the Quixey Python Challenge.

couldn't make myself pass the bloodsucking reg form (it has more than 2 fields :), so didn't even see that it is python.

How long does it take to type in a gibberish mailinator address and a password?

Longer than closing the tab. It would be nice if the qualifier didn't require registration.

>How long does it take to type in a gibberish mailinator address and a password?

it isn't about "how long" this specific operation takes. In Russian there is a saying "One's experience of a theatrical show starts with the coatchecking experience at the theater". In this particular case the reg form strongly suggests that the user experience on the site wasn't designed well.

And as it happens according to the other posts, the experince of the majority of the users (the ones who completed the registration) was miserable as they didn't fit the narrow category of "know and interested in Python and ready to provide Skype ID".

I agree. That's what stopped me from solving most of them in time. Fiddly errors in my solution stopped me with the rest.

Oh, it all looked so enticing until I read:

  * Using machine learning to implement intent-based search ads

No. I think not. I'd rather use machine learning to block ads, thank you.

Riiight. And you work where?

Somewhere that makes real physical products. And doesn't need ads to know where you are... :-)

http://i.imgur.com/o1A7M.png

Yeah, I got annoyed by that too. The fact you have to guess what calls they used makes this distinctly not a bug fixing challenge.

Not to mention, their example said that the return value would be (3 + 5) / 2, as opposed to just returning 4.

Here I was, trying to figure out how to write a class named Stack, that behaved like a list, had a push(self,x) method that did an append. Also, adjust the "op()" function so that instead of calculating the results of a mathematical operation, it returned a string holding the operation (like "(3 + 5)") being sure to add parentheses if there was a precedence issue.

...all in one line of code.

yeah, that one particular challenge was screwed up. The other ones were much better.

There's also this: http://i.imgur.com/vvKOR.png

That one's really damning. It's implying that they're using some sort of syntactic equivalence to compare solutions, which is a big no-no. It's not that difficult to generate a bunch of tests and run both solutions through an interpreter, and in this case, it's not that hard to compare them both on every possible input by running them through an abstract interpreter.

Yeah I got that and

arr.push(x) marked wrong instead of their arr.add(x)

The one-line rule is your friend.

I love puzzles like this and gave it a try.

Learned something. A ticking counter is really, really unsettling. :)

Good luck with the site, I'm pretty sure that I cannot do even the simplest of things (having written not a single line of Python doesn't help, but the challenges are clear enough. I cannot blame the toolset here, it's myself/my mind going nuts).

Note: if you pass the qualifier you need to provide a Skype id to register for the challenge itself.

More than that you need to be able to take a skype call, so doing this at work is out

Or if your microphone on your laptop doesn't work and you didn't know that because you've never tried to use it before.

[edit] Actually I just talked with them on chat, and they were able to set it up without my mike working, so it seems pretty flexible.

I passed the challenge! I was able to do it because I tried implementing the solution myself from the problem statement, and made sure I had a correct solution before clicking Start. If you manage to code in the style Quixey has used, you can just diff your code and the buggy code they give you to find the bug. I highly recommend that strategy.

Just curious... not that I'm going to do this. Couldn't this be easily gamed by having one person in a group do the challenge first and then broadcast the question to the rest of the group to analyze at leisure prior to taking the quiz?

If it's like the last time there were different challenges.

That was fun!

Even though I've never written a single line of Python, the challenge was clear and simple to solve (I'm winner #17).

To the people complaining about them not marking all solutions as correct, it does state in the "About" tab that you have to solve it by either editing one line or adding a new one.

That being said, they should've made it clearer and more visible. I actually failed all the qualifiers except for one because I added/changed more than one line.

If you're gonna participate (which you should!), make sure you take a look at the "About" page.

Be warned, if you want to sign up for the real challenge, you need a Skype account and a computer with a working mic. I don't have one at work, so guess I don't get to try.

So I was the fifth winner. It's pretty fun. Keep your head on straight and you'll figure it out -- it's about the same difficulty as the qualifiers, so if you have any trouble, try and do them all, I guess.

Also, it may not be obvious that there is a skype element, but the challenge occurs completely in the browser. I finished mine before they called me on skype, so don't worry about that element.

This was fun but nerve-racking. I qualified and competed in the challenge but froze. The guy I talked to through Skype was real nice and supportive. Was a neat experience overall :)

Solved the Quicksort challenge. It's a bit tougher when you don't know python! Make sure you add quixeychallenge on Skype and then add yourself to the queue.

Save the Quicksort challenge for last. It's the easiest one (in my opinion).

That way you can see all the other challenges.

Is it too late to enter the challenge, link is broken for me now, although it still says I have qualified to take the challenge...

Wow. This in no way relates to actually useful development practices.

But that doesn't mean it's not fun.

That was fun. The challenge is not very hard.

Let me guess. US only?

No. It asks for your country if you win.

captcha image doesn't even load.

I refuse to do this unless some chick gives me a bj under the table and John Travolta holds a gun to my head.

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