China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest | Hacker News Reader

China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

computerworlduk.com

41 pointsblacky24 comments

This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.

After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work.

In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly frowned upon to pitchforks-and-torches style anger.

No!Spec (http://www.no-spec.com) is the industry's main sounding board against these types of "competitions", so I won't rehash those points here.

The article's implied "gee-whiz these are wonderkids!" approach to the entrants didn't sit too well with me. The fact that entrants were largely between 18 and 24 years old seems more to do with a lack of professional experience (evidenced by partaking in spec work), than some magic ability of younger people to be able to do compelling work in technology.

I think it's more probable that those grizzled old guys with beards are too busy getting paid for their labor to partake in a lottery, hence the skewed demographics. Also, it would be natural to see more entrants win in countries where the US dollar exchange rate benefits taking a risk of getting no money. It isn't indicative of a lack of talent inside the US.

Disclosure: I'm in my late 20's.

Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right:

"TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors."

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder#TopCoder_as_a_business )

Sounds pretty sleazy to me.

There are good counterexamples though, for instance the netflix prize. Another decent way to go about it would be to open source the result of such a contest.

I can't disagree with you. But we can't dismiss the fact that the world's more competetive place that it was before. And the quality of education in the US esp. maths/science should to be on par with the quality of education in developing countries.

They are referring mainly to the algorithm's competition, which is dominated by current competitors in the IOI and ICPC.

There are indeed design and development competitions, but for the most part, Topcoder isn't what you think it is.

The entrants are between the ages of 18 and 24 because this competition is targeted toward college age students.

It is targeted towards college age students because they haven't developed enough antennae yet to warn them when they're being used.

To intercept the expected comments that these contests have nothing to do with real world skill (in programming, not 'cracking'), Steve Newman, cofounder of Writely, was a top competitor on TopCoder, as was Adam De'Angelo, previously CTO of Facebook. Craig Silverstein, an ACM ICPC programming competition world champion, was Director of Technology and employee #1 at Google.

This does refer to the algorithmic competitions specifically, the correlation between achievement in the design/development competitions is less clear.

Could someone change this title? TopCoder is an NSA supported competitive programming site. While I guess competitive programming could be consider MIT-style hacking, this is not cracking and it's definitely not run by the NSA.

I strongly agree. The NSA has an extremely tangential role in how this is happening. TC has many sponsors, all of whom are interested in hiring extremely sharp programmers, and the NSA participates as a member of that set. This particular contest was sponsored by the NSA, and the next might be sponsored by Intel or AMD. That's just how they pay the bills.

It's a copy of the article's title...

That doesn't mean it's not inaccurate.

People from developing countries have more incentive to participate in these competitions as the effort/reward ratio is greater. This is what significantly skews the numbers.

Weird, a comment replying to the above disappeared. Anyway, just wanted to share this:

- http://www.gapminder.org/videos/gapcasts/gapcast-6-chile-a-d...

Pretty OT, but important to notice that "developing country" is not an easy definition.

Yes. I compete in the ACM ICPC and TopCoder competitions and here's the deal. Top Chinese competitors in these areas get jobs doing these competitions. They literally get paid by the Chinese government to practice algorithm writing and competitive programming all day every day. US competitors are just college students like me who have things like school to deal with. Given this situation, it is unsurprising that Russian and Chinese coders win almost every year.

I doubt its an hacking contest. The title is misleading, and the competition is just a regular one except that "TopCoder" is backed by NSA.

Yeah the title is definitely misleading. The word "hacking" isn't even mentioned in the article besides in the title. Replace "hacking contest" with "programming competitions" and "NSA" with "NSA sponsored" and you have a more accurate title.

Yeah but with "China", "NSA", and "hacking" in the title it must be an interesting article.

I have recently begun participating in the TopCoder 'Arena', where I've made some code that could be of absolutely no monetary value to anyone (except to me, as training). Actually, it's a lot of fun.

Still, I wonder about this company.

It has some connection to the NSA, as advertised on their web page and elsewhere. Does anyone know more details about this relationship? In particular, what does the NSA aim to get out of it?

As far as I know, the NSA just gets some free advertising space, and before the arena matches you get the opportunity to chat with a member of the sponsoring corporation/organization, so they get to tell some really good programmers about NSA job perks.

It sounds like India had the worst showing, as far as making it to the finals.

another point is that in the US the notion of "Hacking" is still seen as negative or criminal.

Something else is that in that age group in the US people are about to graduate or graduating so if they are really good at math/science/engineering they have already either been picked up my companies or in the process of getting hired. Why does this matter? Becuase if you are going to or are working for a company im pretty sure they dont want you to participate in any event about hacking.

I think the phrase "hacking contest" was how the author of the article chose to describe it. The TopCoder competition page doesn't mention the word at all: http://www.topcoder.com/tc ; probably exactly for the reason you describe.

I get this when I try to open the link -

WebKnight Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

What is WebKnight? AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is an ISAPI filter for securing web servers by blocking certain requests. If an alert is triggered WebKnight will take over and protect the web server.

For more information on WebKnight: http://www.aqtronix.com/WebKnight/

AQTRONIX WebKnight

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