

Quixey Challenge - 1 Bug, 1 Minute, $100 - Liron
http://www.quixeychallenge.com

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babarock
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?

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

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

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

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VladRussian
>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".

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jrabone
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.

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omarchowdhury
Riiight. And you work where?

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

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timb
<http://i.imgur.com/o1A7M.png>

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

~~~
Darmani
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.

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darklajid
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).

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

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

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aidenn0
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.

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roryokane
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.

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msluyter
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?

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

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frcepeda
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.

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nelhage
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.

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orionhickman
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.

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rumdz
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 :)

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switz
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.

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

That way you can see all the other challenges.

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seles
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...

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

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

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H4wk_cz
That was fun. The challenge is not very hard.

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suhastech
Let me guess. US only?

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jakubw
No. It asks for your country if you win.

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kareemsabri
captcha image doesn't even load.

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

