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How I Became HackerRank 1 in Two Hours
- 0xCMP 10y ago"How I destroyed my server in 15 minutes"
- curiousgal 10y agoTL;DR Copy/Paste the solutions from the discussions page. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3BXmrLlEVhAJ:williampross.com/became-hackerrank-1-two-hours/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3BXmrLl...
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y agotl, dr: The guy just blindly copy/pasted the answers from the discussion section of each problem to the question itself and passed all tests, without even really reading the question or answer. Is having a specific HackerRank meaningful to the outside world? I am unfamiliar with HackerRank, but solve algorithm questions on a site called LeetCode for fun. When I get truly stuck, I consult the discussion area and implement the suggested solutions. But I don't think it would be meaningful for me to go through all 450+(?) of their questions and paste in the answers. What's the motivation to achieve Hacker Rank of 1, when presumably everyone knows you can just copy/paste the answers? edit: as pointed out below, I jumped the gun on the motivation question. I guess I assumed the second part of the article expanded on the motivations, which were that the author heard people hired based off of HR. Hopefully those companies realize how easy this is to manipulate.
- Namrog84 10y agoId hope most people realize how easy it'd be to manipulate. Reminds me of the LinkedIn recommendation system is completely pointless as you can easily create dummy accounts for referrals. I doubt most people spend much effort investigating the peers and you could come across looking better. There are tons of opportunities out there to be manipulative if you really wanted to be. Same with github repo example code and lots more. Just depends if you personally want to risk it and put in effort.
- fuqted 10y agoYou can do the same with upvotes here. Anyway, that's why Codewars censors the answers if you haven't completed the challenge and doesn't allow you to earn credit for the challenge if you choose to view the answer. Of course you can choose to make a dummy account and view the answers, but you'd really have to be desperate to do such a thing. And this is all pointless anyway.
- darklajid 10y agoAgreed, you might be able to cheat your way to a high(er) karma. But do you know about any company hiring based on the HN comment karma/score for some reason? That would be .. weird, right?
- danieltillett 10y agoSome companies might use high karma to reject candidates :)
- sundvor 10y agoWhat, you spend all day on Hacker News? Get out of here!
- danieltillett 10y agoI suppose it is slightly better than spending all day on stack overflow.
- Splendor 10y agoFrom the article: > Motivations For Getting The Ranking. Recently I saw a Bloomberg story linked on Hacker News where it said that Wall Street is frantically looking for programmers.
- plandis 10y agoHe mentioned why he did it. Allegedly Morgan Stanley / other unspecified banks were hiring people based on Hacker Rank rankings
- adventurer 10y agoI believe that article stated Morgan Stanley / Banks were hiring based on using Hacker Rank to screen candidates with their own unique tests, not rankings. It didn't involve the default questions William went through, though similar.
- darklajid 10y agoThat very article (no offense, but did you skip the last part?) states the reason for this article, for this behavior: A report stating that someone was hired for a somewhat prestigious position, based on their HackerRank. The article asks if this can be true and tries to prove that this would be a rather foolish metric.
- Matachines 10y agoLeetCode also doesn't force you to read from STDIN :-) I find LeetCode fun and straight forward.
- throwaway29292 10y agoThe default questions (on which OP has gained #1) are just for practice. The actual contests held from time to time on which companies actually hire are difficult, and don't have solutions easily available. The default challenges are like examples, the real number #1s on Hackerrank contests are actual competitive programmers(similar to #1s on other sites like codeforces, topcoder).
- almata 10y ago"The service is unavailable." It seems no algorithm there taught you more useful things though.
- dorianm 10y agoI guess it would also be trivial to detect copy/pasted solutions and ban/remove those answers from the user.
- ktRolster 10y agoIt's a game of cat-and-mouse. A user can modify some variable names and get around naive algorithms. If you eliminate too many 'pre-made' answers, then you get into a situation (especially for shorter problems) where you start flagging people who legitimately solved the problem, and just happened to write an answer similar to someone else's.
- sdenton4 10y agoHomework: Write an adversarial ML model in which one model modifies source code to produce equivalent output, and the second model tries to determine whether the output of the first model is 'original' or not...
- ktRolster 10y agoIt's hard for even a human. In some cases, the copied material can be equivalent to original material, thus, literally impossible to distinguish (disclosure: I've worked on a system to detect this sort of thing in academic settings).
- tedmiston 10y agoThey definitely do plagiarism detection. It can be abstracted moreso that variable / method naming choices don't differentiate two solutions.
- gamedna 10y agoOver the past several months about 4 out of 10 companies that interviewed me actually required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not have a HackerRank score. The fact that I have worked for several industry leading companies, and had 20+ years of development experience was irrelevant without that score. As a sr. dev manager, I found this to be an odd requirement.
- jacquesm 10y agoGood reasons to look elsewhere. What a ridiculous thing.
- logicallee 10y agoNo more ridiculous than women listing height requirements in their dating profiles, asking about height, and filtering out people with too low a number -- even though they don't actually care, it's not actually a requirement they have[1], it's just one they list and filter against at the online stage, despite not actually caring. By don't actually care, I mean that when they meet those men in different settings they don't care about height, when very short men decline to mention their height or match with women despite not meeting stated "requirements" it isn't an issue, and indeed some men lie outright about their heigth but women get over it and enter happy relationsihps with them once they actually meet. In many contexts stated requirements or the hoops applicants have to jump through don't match actual requirements. Fundraising would be another one. VC's don't invest in companies that actually meet whatever requirements the VC's list on their web sites regarding what kind of opportunities they're looking for. In short, people are lousy at stating their requirements and sabotage processes. For my woman example, the same woman will complain that no good men are available, while having an irrelevant filter in their dating profile: then, when they meet someone nice in real life, they're happy. It does not occur to them that the person they have met does not meet their stated requirements. Here is another case of someoen with an impossible laundry list of requirements: https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_girl_go_on_a_date_even_if_the_guy_doesnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_gir... That post is titled "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating?" When that person actually meets someone in bible study (say), I doubt very much that the person will meet all of her requirements. Rather than "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating" we might be reading a Quora post about "Should HR still interview a candidate, even if the guy doesn't meet the HackerRank requirements?" Those requirements are irrelevant and just weed out qualified people. (And the answer is, yes, they still should.) [1] Example: Tom Cruise is officially 1.7m (which could be inflated, celebrities often pad by a little bit) which is 5'6.9". That is lower than many women's stated requirements, but those requirements are not actual requirements and I doubt he had any trouble dating women he literally didn't meet the requirements of at the time. The requirements aren't real, they're fake and invented, made-up. Not true. - EDIT: I absolutely stand by this comment, even though it is being edited to -1 and will likely end at -4. I completely stand behind every word. Lest you think I'm speaking with a bitter tone, I'm not. I'm average height or slightly above, no issues for me or disqualification due to it. I was using it as an example of a "number" that is a requirement, only it's not.
- danielrm26 10y agoNot likely to get a programming job out of this, but perhaps a job in information security where the game is to figure out how to abuse systems.
- johnwheeler 10y agoYou earned it as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't sound like you're breaking any rules so much as taking advantage of a flaw in the system. That's hacking in it's most sublime form. If it were a blackhat operation, you'd be exposing yourself to punitive damage. You're not here (unless the mods take retribution on you)
- prashant10 10y agoThis is a very well know thing and this post could have been more interesting if you could have automated stuffs :P
- welder 10y agoPeople should start using real world coding as a measurement of skill. My personal website shows real-time graphs of my programming in each language I've used. http://ahamlett.com/ http://ahamlett.com/
- achikin 10y agoIt's offtopic but the urge to ask is too high. I have an idea of how wakatime works, so on Tuesday you've been coding for almost 13 hours? No planning, not committing, not reading docs, just typing into your editor for 13 hours?
- welder 10y agoYep, I had a backlog of things to work on and no distractions that day. However, it's also counting the previous day's coding that spilled over across midnight.
- tedmiston 10y agoThe author is breaking the rules of HackerRank and should (hopefully will) be banned. Anytime we share challenge problem solutions in the open there is an ethical issue about it. HackerRank specifically even does plagiarism detection. I some of my own solutions to challenge questions in a public repo on GitHub [1] for educational purposes. I recently slapped a big disclaimer on that for people like this. > Disclaimer: These solutions were developed by me individually unless otherwise stated and are shared for education and curiosity. Please do not use them as your own. If you're working on the same problem, please do not view my answer until you've solved it on your own. If you're working on a related problem, it's generally okay to cite a solution to another problem as a reference. [1]: https://github.com/tedmiston/challenges https://github.com/tedmiston/challenges
- stale2002 10y agoWhat ethical issues? This is imaginary internet points we are talking about here, not your PHD thesis. The internet points on these websites really don't matter, what matters is the skills you learn while doing them.
- tedmiston 10y agoThe ethical issue of pretending you thought of and wrote code that you didn't. Not much different than plagiarizing in academia. Internet points aside, HackerRank is a technical recruiting platform.
- kamaal 10y agoThere is already an ethical issue, anyway you look at it. Even if you do not copy paste the answers. Its not like participants on forums like hackerrank invented those algorithms. Every single data structure and algorithm question asked on sites like hackerrank has solutions invented by some Computer Scientists, participants are just using them. The only question we are asking from the where do those participants replicate the answers? Do they replicate it from a book? Webpage? Memory? You could replicate the answer from anywhere, as long you didn't invent the data structure or the algorithm you are essentially plagiarizing. >>HackerRank is a technical recruiting platform. If you use irrelevant tests to measure capability of the candidates, why cry when they match up to it in their own way?
- tedmiston 10y agoIt should also be pointed on that #1 is not an exclusive position on HackerRank's leaderboard. It it shared by everyone who got full points on each Java practice problem [1]. I see 16 full pages + 1 partial page = 166 people who are tied for "#1 in Java". Furthermore, "#1 in Java" is not "Hacker Rank #1". Each leaderboard is broken up by language, topic, or contest. OP is trolling really hard here. There is no overall ranking across boards, so this claim doesn't make much sense. (All this aside, I do really like the HackerRank platform and have been solving quite a few problems there lately.) [1]: https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1/page/1 https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1...
- appleiigs 10y agothe point is he's tied for #1 in java by just copy/pasting the answers.
- jedmeyers 10y agoAnd HackerRank Java challenges are more like training for the beginners than a "Master of Java" verification. I know this because I also was #1 in Java and it was very easy compared to the algo challenges they have (you lose #1 position when they add new questions).
- tedmiston 10y agoThis is true. I've done dozens of the Python ones which are more or less mastering the basics of the standard library.
- orliesaurus 10y agoLadies and gents, this is the 2016 software engineering world
- ubernostrum 10y agoThis is how companies ensure they "only hire the best".
- exBarrelSpoiler 10y agoWhich coding challenge website do you prefer? HackerRank, LeetCode, TopCoder, CodeFights, Stockfighter, etc.?
- guessmyname 10y agoI have a list of nine different websites (see them below) that I visit every-single-day to keep my programming skills in shape. I have no preference whatsoever since they are all pretty much the same, some of them have better coding problems than others but nothing special. However, during the last two months I have been using LeetCode and HackerRank more than the others because they are used I have been interviewing with a lot of medium and big sized companies, the big ones usually ask medium/hard questions from LeetCode while the medium sized companies prefer to filter people via HackerRank. - https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/ - https://www.codeeval.com/ https://www.codeeval.com/ - https://www.hackerrank.com/ https://www.hackerrank.com/ - https://www.hackerearth.com/ https://www.hackerearth.com/ - https://www.interviewbit.com/ https://www.interviewbit.com/ - https://www.codingame.com/ https://www.codingame.com/ - https://www.codewars.com/ https://www.codewars.com/ - https://open.kattis.com/ https://open.kattis.com/ - https://codefights.com/ https://codefights.com/
- exBarrelSpoiler 10y agoI thought Code Fights was the current hotness, people have been hyping how they feature real AIs (testbots) created by actual companies or note. Isn't its format at least distinct from the other sites, which are mostly the same Top Coder format of "here is an algorithmic problem, solve it and we'll grade it?"
- guessmyname 10y agoCodeFights is more like a play environment like CodingGame, I am yet to find a company that requires me to write the algorithm for a robot in order to demonstrate my programming skills. This is why I prefer LeetCode and HackerRank, not because they are better but because they are what companies are using to interview people. CodingGame has a Machine Learning exercise so it is not like the other websites are not innovating, it is just personal preferences.
- eternalban 10y agoHe's not reading between the lines. They are looking for young/green developers.
- dunkelheit 10y agoOn a related note, I've observed that some of the solutions to tough problems just perform matching on the input and print out hard-coded expected output. How utterly pointless. I don't see the point in hackerrank-bashing though. The site's UI is nice and it has got a good selection of problems for brushing up coding interview skills. Also, I think that most companies that "hire based on hackerrank ratings" use it to feed their pipeline and do additional interviews on their own.
- douche 10y agoIf the system is stupid, the smart thing to do is find a stupid solution to it. Illustrate the absurdity of the metric.
- jakozaur 10y agoI prefer Codility over HackerRank: https://codility.com/ https://codility.com/ They also have lessons: https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/1-iterations/ https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/1-iterations/ and challenges: https://codility.com/programmers/challenges/ https://codility.com/programmers/challenges/
- finid 10y agoWell, if you guys know any Wall Street companies hiring "programmers" based on their HN points, please let me know.
- lewisjoe 10y agoI like computers. I did when I was 17 & I still do now. But, as a young developer now, I'm quiet scared of the industry as a whole. The direction it's heading towards. I don't know the right answers but there is quiet a lot of things on part of the hiring process & what's considered as value in the software industry, that feels wrong. Let me get specific. 1. Competitive programming is great. But why hold it in direct proportion to ability to build products? 2. What happens 10 years from now. I know the 'keep up with the latest' drill. I'll definitely be doing it & I quiet like it. But why is the trend unreasonably favouring fresh graduates and quiet unjust to the seniors. Shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't despise the freshers. I'm quiet a fresher myself, but it still concerns me. 3. Why are things changing so fast in the first place? Don't get me wrong. I'm looking at the JS ecosystem. I like diversification. It's good. In our industry diversification helps better than anything else. They eventually converge back. JS is yet to reach that state, but still it concerns me the way the Javascript ecosystem is diversifying. We've got an awful lot of things to set right in the industry. Hiring process is definitely something that needs attention. I personally find short-term paid contracting as a part of the hiring process, much much healthy than whiteboard coding & website ranks.
- malisper 10y ago> Competitive programming is great. But why hold it in direct proportion to ability to build products? Because it's quick to test how good someone is at competitive programming, it's easy to grade everyone consistenty, and it (somewhat) correlates with actual programming ability. Compare it to other interview techniques. A programming project/trial period is time consuming. And it's hard to grade everyone consistently when going off of their resume/github.
- lewisjoe 10y ago> Because it's quick to test how good someone is at competitive programming, it's easy to grade everyone consistently, and it (somewhat) correlates with actual programming ability. I'd agree. Competitive programming does correlate with actual coding ability. The category of people who find it satisfying, earning ranks from a website - that's what bothers me. Young talents who've got all the time needed to earn score, they do it. What about the rest of our veterans? How fair is it to keep a website rank as a baseline for job in the real world. I don't know many who find competitive programming fascinating, after 5 years solving real problems for real people. I may be wrong here. Please disapprove/acknowledge me in the comments. It's a deep problem. Not a lot of organizations can afford the short-term contracting method. I agree. But I consider the cumulative star counts of their github projects, way better a metric than a rank from a website. There's no one right solution to this. But competitive programming score is IMO a very wrong direction to go. We are very much capable of coming up with better solutions. That's what we are good at :)
- codeN 10y agoDisclaimer : Developer at HackerRank, however I do not know details about how Furlong was hired, so I can not go into that. Also this is not an official response, but a personal one. So I think the source of misunderstanding is that we have multiple rankings on HackerRank. The leaderboard Mr. William Ross became #1 was in the practice leaderboard for the Java Domain[1], which is based on practice problems, and which is intended to get people upto speed with Java. This is our global leaderboard sections [2] : http://i.imgur.com/2rkgwmg.png http://i.imgur.com/2rkgwmg.png We make the distinction of Contest based leaderboard which are based on your performance in contests, and practice leaderboard, which is the one Mr. Ross got on to. This is based on contests and the forums during contests are monitored for answers and solutions, and this is what would be considered really hard to get on to, and I know the #1 there, uwi is amazing. Our regular domains available at our domains page[3] are meant as a learning tool, where you can rise up as you solve problems, and yes the solutions are all available in many places. However since this is a practice area we do not do many of the things done in contests like restrict forums, look if solution is available online, run plagiarism(code similarity) matches etc, and generally we encourage people helping out in forums, although yes we should keep a watch on direct solutions appearing in forums. This is not intended to be a competition. While I do not know how Furlong was hired, I can tell you the common ways that people do get hired. 1. Companies conduct contest or sponsor HackerRank conducted contests. 2. Candidates apply via HackerRank jobs[4] which again has a HackerRank test that follows. 3. Candidates practice on HackerRank after which they may be approached by companies seeing their positions, but generally this involves a HackerRank test as the first round. 4. Common test for a LinkedIn placements (currently in India alone) 5. The regular HackerRank test companies send across. [1]: https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1/page/1 https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1... [2]: https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard [3]: https://www.hackerrank.com/domains https://www.hackerrank.com/domains [4]: https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/all https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/all
- thebigspacefuck 10y agoWell shit, I thought doing the challenges there would actually reflect my ability. Now it kinda seems like a waste of time.
- johanneskanybal 10y agoToday in "What happens when nailing the tech interview is impossible for companies but the incitament for doing so is great and well, there's a lot of software companies around". Great read, worked for about 10 years in dev never heard about hackerrank but it's part of a pattern sure.
- dev_throw 10y agoCompanies like HackerRank turn software engineering into a commodity (great for code copy paste). The HackerRank contests submitted by companies were quite buggy, verbose (but with confusing English), and like the author, took a lot of fighting with the website to get the code to pass the tests. This is in no way a measure of success as a software engineer, where a significant amount of time is spent in defining problems and articulating maintainable solutions for deploying features. This means using design patterns, proper documentation, in lieu of regex type expressions that are indecipherable a week later.
- matchagaucho 10y agoHackerRank seems ideal for apprenticeships, internships, and other low-risk onboarding programs that provide candidates with opportunities to perform in real-world situations. Those who "game" the system are easily filtered out.
- tgarma1234 10y agoI feel like a system like IBM Watson is going to end up writing the code in the near future. The real action, therefore, is in explaining the business logic and requirements in a structured way so that the AI can write the code.
- votr 10y agoThis is going to keep getting worse until we have some sort of guild or association whereby being a member implies we're already vetted.
- lonelyw0lf 10y agoA developer who has so much time in hand that he spends his time playing challenges all day is likely to not be "good" or "great" anyways. I've always found these challenge sites to be stupid and would never wanna work for a company who demands a good HackerRank or a good karma score on StackOverflow.
- edoceo 10y agoValidation of my decision to never use HR for hiring data
- laxk 10y agoDid you get any offer from any company?
- 0xmohit 10y agoAnother recent discussion about HackerRank [0]. (It was flagged.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174
- hacktank123 10y agoimo hacker rank is bad since it commoditizes developers. Ive in the past refused to take a hacker rank quiz. I always offer the alternative to take a live phone screen. Some agree some don't. But in the end I refuse to have my reputation in the hands of some random company.
- master_yoda_1 10y agoHackerrank is a great site for solving problems and learning. If you want to do fraud you can do anywhere. But fraud won't go very far. You would be caught. One example: I quit my last job because one co worker (c++) try to set a flag in destructor and checking that flag in member function to fix a segfault. Even though the person was having an ivy league degree and 10+ year of experience I don't want to work with them. Couple of other guys also left the company. So it won't last long and a fraud would be caught. A fraud might end up working in sucker jobs and always wonder why they ask algorithmic question in interviews ;)
- dimino 10y ago3 people left their jobs rather than work with the novice to make him better? You're never going to find happiness that way, friend.
- master_yoda_1 10y agoThe guy has 10+ years of experinence. There is a fifferenve between fraud and novice.