
China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest - blacky
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/people-management/news/index.cfm?NewsId=15144&RSS
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le_dominator
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.

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paulbaumgart
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

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DaniFong
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.

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Locke1689
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.

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j2d2
It's a copy of the article's title...

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Locke1689
That doesn't mean it's not inaccurate.

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shalmanese
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.

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Locke1689
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.

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socratees
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.

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colonhyphenp
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.

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bbg
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?

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mquander
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.

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

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radioactive21
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.

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paulbaumgart
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.

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vinutheraj
I get this when I try to open the link -

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