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Most of the details are from this Quora post: http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Resounding-Failure http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Brown-2/Fac

• jamii 16y ago
  It looks like both the linked post and the quora post are complaining about problems with the qualification round. There is no mention of the fact that the following round was in fact suspended entirely after the submission server fell over. There were still confusing problem descriptions, incorrect examples and buggy submission pages. It's a shame because it really had the potential to be a fun competition if it had just been pulled off more smoothly. The questions were interesting and the competition format allowed for the use of pretty much any method of solving problems. The 6 minute limit was annoying at first but I came to see it as part of the competition. It creates an interesting tradeoff between development speed and correctness and allows people to solve the problem in any way they like whilst still enforcing efficient solutions. The bounds on all the variables in the problem are given so it is possible to test your solution on the worst case scenario before downloading the input.