4 ms·

Before clicking, assumed "integration" referred to integrating software with third party tools. Which sounds hellish to compete in, but I'd be fascinated to wa

Before clicking, assumed "integration" referred to integrating software with third party tools. Which sounds hellish to compete in, but I'd be fascinated to watch.

bschne 3y ago
Oh god, for some reason my brain just jumped to "International Parsing of Badly Documented and Absolutely Cursed Legacy File Formats Olympiad"
- dekhn 3y ago
  that's also held every year at MIT, shortly after the Ignobel Prizes. Sometimes people are awarded prizes for the same work in both competitions.
dheera 3y ago
Or even just an "installation bee". Both players are given a vanilla Ubuntu system with a GPU and asked to get a certain outdated software package with multiple non-apt-gettable dependencies working on the system. Forbidden to use docker or conda. The final round will be similar except it will be a Jetson device running an outdated ARM version of Ubuntu.
- bschne 3y ago
  This reminds me of when, as a teen, I got into tinkering with various security tools using the BackTrack live linux distro (I think it was the precursor to Kali?), and on my then laptop had to run about ten commands I had painstakingly cobbled together from various google searches in order to get the GPU drivers running and a decent screen resolution — on every reboot
armchairhacker 3y ago
We already have CTF competitions where players are given a server or program and have to hack into it. How about a competition where players are given a legacy codebase and have to learn it to fix various bugs? With a huge prize pool, thanks to a few government and financial companies who are unexpectedly charitable...
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  A few companies already use a similar process for interviewing; they give you a codebase that you have to figure out and implement a feature in that codebase.

4 ms·

Before clicking, assumed "integration" referred to integrating software with third party tools. Which sounds hellish to compete in, but I'd be fascinated to wa

by jamestimmins 3y ago

Before clicking, assumed "integration" referred to integrating software with third party tools. Which sounds hellish to compete in, but I'd be fascinated to watch.

bschne 3y ago
Oh god, for some reason my brain just jumped to "International Parsing of Badly Documented and Absolutely Cursed Legacy File Formats Olympiad"
- dekhn 3y ago
  that's also held every year at MIT, shortly after the Ignobel Prizes. Sometimes people are awarded prizes for the same work in both competitions.
dheera 3y ago
Or even just an "installation bee". Both players are given a vanilla Ubuntu system with a GPU and asked to get a certain outdated software package with multiple non-apt-gettable dependencies working on the system. Forbidden to use docker or conda. The final round will be similar except it will be a Jetson device running an outdated ARM version of Ubuntu.
- bschne 3y ago
  This reminds me of when, as a teen, I got into tinkering with various security tools using the BackTrack live linux distro (I think it was the precursor to Kali?), and on my then laptop had to run about ten commands I had painstakingly cobbled together from various google searches in order to get the GPU drivers running and a decent screen resolution — on every reboot
armchairhacker 3y ago
We already have CTF competitions where players are given a server or program and have to hack into it. How about a competition where players are given a legacy codebase and have to learn it to fix various bugs? With a huge prize pool, thanks to a few government and financial companies who are unexpectedly charitable...
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  A few companies already use a similar process for interviewing; they give you a codebase that you have to figure out and implement a feature in that codebase.