10 ms·

Show HN: Google Code Jam Archive

103 points by zibada 3y ago

Hi HN, As many of you already know, Google has discontinued their coding competitions and is shutting down the competitions website. Before it's gone forever, I've scraped everything I could from their website and set up my own archive. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Google besides participating in these contests years ago) While the initial version was ready back in March, today I'm rolling out big and hopefully the final update, so this might be a good time to share it with the HN community. Everything is static HTML and SQLite archives (with a very minimal backend to serve files directly from SQLite), so you can easily grab your own copy. May these 3.5 million source files be a nice training dataset for some fancy future AI! Some useless stats: Tabs or spaces? 28% tabs vs 72% spaces for the whole dataset, but quite unexpectedly, 66% tabs vs 34% spaces if we consider only the final rounds. Most used languages: 63% C/C++, 20% Python, 12% Java, 2% C#, with others less than 1% each. For the final rounds it's 83% C/C++, 13% Java, 2% Python.

progbits 3y ago
I don't have anything to add but since you didn't get any comments so far let me just say very nice job. Much easier and faster than navigating this on archive.org. I'll definitely be mirroring the archives later.
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
Nice job, looks really cool! I might use this to help me prepare for upcoming interviews.
- giuscri 3y ago
  omg, is leetcoding still a thing in a post-FAANG world?
  - lozenge 3y ago
    I believe FAANG still exists, did I miss something?
    - giuscri 3y ago
      are still hiring though?
      - yeputons 3y ago
        Absolutely. It's only in some jurisdictions it's somewhat illegal to simultaneously lay off, rescind offers and hire.
forty 3y ago
This is really cool, thanks! I noticed that it's missing results from Distributed Code Jam, which happened 2 or 3 years only, and I'm partial for it since that's the only Codejam competition where I have ever managed to win a t-shirt:D
srvmshr 3y ago
I'm surprised so few people are interested in this. It's a very good collection. I think it'd be very useful for people wanting to have a go at it, now that google has sunsetted it. I am not sure how it is hosted but maybe a GitHub repo with source files could ensure they'll be archived even better for posterity. OP have you posted them anywhere on GitHub/Gitlab? Edit: My bad, I saw the downloadable zip archives for every year. This is nice. (Also if we want to mirror this to help individually - can you post some brief howto. Happy to mirror & share the load)
- zibada 3y ago
  For the problem statements, there is official github repo (see link in the next comment). As for my zip archives, you basically unzip them all somewhere, point the webserver to it and you are all set (+optionally basic Apache+mod_php setup or equivalent to serve user profiles and solutions).
yeputons 3y ago
Thank you very much! Did you have any luck with Distributed Code Jam?
- zibada 3y ago
  Unfortunately, these rounds are not available either on the official website or on their github (https://github.com/google/coding-competitions-archive/ https://github.com/google/coding-competitions-archive/), so I'm afraid there's not much we can do from the outside.
lintim 3y ago
This is cool! Thanks especially for sharing the db files- that is very helpful work.
fn-mote 3y ago
Ah, somehow I missed the part of the announcement where "the site will be fully shutting down on July 1, 2023". WHY, GOOGLE??? Those problems are beautiful. What would it cost to leave the site up?? Leaving us absolutely nothing for posterity? Scorched earth. :(
- lrem 3y ago
  I'll offer a guess educated by almost a decade of working for Google: security treadmill. How can you trust something to stay secure for more than a couple weeks? Borg will outright refuse to run any binary that's been compiled a couple months ago. Couple that with notorious internal API instability culture and you get just this - can't hope to have a thing just stay up by itself. So they did the better thing here - give a schedule for the turndown, instead of "this will stop serving a couple months after some binary no longer compiles".
  - musicale 3y ago
    > can't hope to have a thing just stay up by itself Archiving the problems and editorial solutions as static html would have been nice.
    - lrem 3y ago
      It would, but then you're talking about a launch of a thing that wasn't there before. So you need to go through all the reviews needed for that, which might be way too much work for a volunteer trying to salvage something that just lost the team.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  This is why https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-a... https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ (press Play)
29athrowaway 3y ago
You should contact the Internet Archive and get these archived there as well.

103 points by zibada 3y ago

progbits 3y ago

I don't have anything to add but since you didn't get any comments so far let me just say very nice job. Much easier and faster than navigating this on archive.org. I'll definitely be mirroring the archives later.

zaptheimpaler 3y ago

Nice job, looks really cool! I might use this to help me prepare for upcoming interviews.

giuscri 3y ago
omg, is leetcoding still a thing in a post-FAANG world?
- lozenge 3y ago
  I believe FAANG still exists, did I miss something?
  - giuscri 3y ago
    are still hiring though?
    - yeputons 3y ago
      Absolutely. It's only in some jurisdictions it's somewhat illegal to simultaneously lay off, rescind offers and hire.

forty 3y ago

This is really cool, thanks! I noticed that it's missing results from Distributed Code Jam, which happened 2 or 3 years only, and I'm partial for it since that's the only Codejam competition where I have ever managed to win a t-shirt:D

srvmshr 3y ago

I'm surprised so few people are interested in this. It's a very good collection. I think it'd be very useful for people wanting to have a go at it, now that google has sunsetted it. I am not sure how it is hosted but maybe a GitHub repo with source files could ensure they'll be archived even better for posterity. OP have you posted them anywhere on GitHub/Gitlab? Edit: My bad, I saw the downloadable zip archives for every year. This is nice. (Also if we want to mirror this to help individually - can you post some brief howto. Happy to mirror & share the load)

zibada 3y ago
For the problem statements, there is official github repo (see link in the next comment). As for my zip archives, you basically unzip them all somewhere, point the webserver to it and you are all set (+optionally basic Apache+mod_php setup or equivalent to serve user profiles and solutions).

yeputons 3y ago

Thank you very much! Did you have any luck with Distributed Code Jam?

zibada 3y ago
Unfortunately, these rounds are not available either on the official website or on their github (https://github.com/google/coding-competitions-archive/ https://github.com/google/coding-competitions-archive/), so I'm afraid there's not much we can do from the outside.

lintim 3y ago

This is cool! Thanks especially for sharing the db files- that is very helpful work.

fn-mote 3y ago

Ah, somehow I missed the part of the announcement where "the site will be fully shutting down on July 1, 2023". WHY, GOOGLE??? Those problems are beautiful. What would it cost to leave the site up?? Leaving us absolutely nothing for posterity? Scorched earth. :(

lrem 3y ago
I'll offer a guess educated by almost a decade of working for Google: security treadmill. How can you trust something to stay secure for more than a couple weeks? Borg will outright refuse to run any binary that's been compiled a couple months ago. Couple that with notorious internal API instability culture and you get just this - can't hope to have a thing just stay up by itself. So they did the better thing here - give a schedule for the turndown, instead of "this will stop serving a couple months after some binary no longer compiles".
- musicale 3y ago
  > can't hope to have a thing just stay up by itself Archiving the problems and editorial solutions as static html would have been nice.
  - lrem 3y ago
    It would, but then you're talking about a launch of a thing that wasn't there before. So you need to go through all the reviews needed for that, which might be way too much work for a volunteer trying to salvage something that just lost the team.
29athrowaway 3y ago
This is why https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-a... https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ (press Play)

29athrowaway 3y ago

You should contact the Internet Archive and get these archived there as well.