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Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills (sixrevisions.com)
111 points by edw519 116 days ago | 18 comments


5 points by tetha 116 days ago | link

and they dont mention uva.onlinejudge.org, the acm problem contests and such?

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1 point by Dilpil 115 days ago | link

Indeed, this is the one my University's CS club uses. It has really interesting puzzles, and you can submit code to it.

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1 point by d_c 115 days ago | link

I like the uva onlinejudge, spoj is pretty good too: http://www.spoj.pl/

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4 points by arthurk 115 days ago | link

The topcoder headline reminds me of Mythical Man-Month. "What could you accomplish with a team of 222,375?" Nothing?

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5 points by j_baker 115 days ago | link

Can 222,375 women deliver a child in 0.000040472 months?

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4 points by a-priori 115 days ago | link

Properly staggered and with a lead time of 9 months, yes, 222,375 women could deliver a child every 0.000040472 months on average. I'm sorry, was that not the question? :)

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2 points by noodle 116 days ago | link

i also like http://codegolf.com

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1 point by MaysonL 102 days ago | link

Another interesting site is Sphere online: http://www.spoj.pl/

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1 point by jlees 115 days ago | link

I like to go through past puzzles from the Informatics Olympiad (http://www.olympiad.org.uk/) for a more theoretical less programmy type of challenge.

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2 points by klipt 115 days ago | link

For algorithms training[1], the USA Computer Olympiad training program is also excellent: http://train.usaco.org/usacogate

[1] basically from scratch; it's suitable for smart highschoolers with some programming experience. That website has been responsible for more than a few IOI medals.

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1 point by igorgue 115 days ago | link

I don't like Facebook's puzzles some of them are impossible to solve without using C.

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2 points by tudorachim 115 days ago | link

Interesting. Which ones?

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1 point by weaksauce 115 days ago | link

Can't you call C functions from pretty much any language worth it's salt nowadays? What are the problems that are intractable in other languages?

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1 point by amichail 116 days ago | link

The assumption here is that programming is about clever problem solving.

Whether this is so depends on the situation.

The challenge of inventing a new kind of app may be far greater than anything associated with its implementation.

Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.

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4 points by eru 115 days ago | link

> Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.

Like Java or C++? I'd rather stick with the easy stuff like Haskell, the problems at hand are challenging enough.

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2 points by req2 115 days ago | link

Does working on your serve improve your tennis game?

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2 points by robin2 115 days ago | link

I remember doing some of Dave Thomas' code katas when he first posted them, and thinking that they were fun but a bit pointless, and generally rather too easy to learn much from. The other month at work I did a presentation at work on Andy Hunt's theories of programmer skill development where I mentioned katas, saying that I didn't really see they had much value. However, Ron Jeffries' celebrated failure to write a sudoko solver puts a slightly different perspective on this.

If your daily work involves doing algorithmic stuff, even if it's only moderately demanding, then I don't see that you will get much benefit from doing the same sort of thing at a more noddyish level.

However, if your daily work isn't like that, if perhaps it is in the vicinity of what used to called Data Processing (e.g. implementing payroll systems), then I can easily imagine that your coding chops might get rusty. In which case, taking deliberate steps to avoid that would be sensible.

[This argument only applies to the question of puzzles improving ones work, rather than being fun.]

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1 point by j_baker 115 days ago | link

If you're at work, no, it's not about clever problem solving. In my spare time though, I prefer to solve bigger problems than parsing CSV files into databases.

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