I could understand this post if Zuckerberg had like a 2200 rating, or if he did an SRM last month at 4 in the morning, but what on Earth are we supposed to take away from this?
I doubt in 50 years anyone will know who Zuck is; he's really not that relevant historically. Steve Jobs will be known, Zuck, not from anything he's done yet. Facebook is not original or world changing, it's simply popular. It wasn't the first nor will it be the last social network.
Larry and Sergy, Robyn Li, the iTunes store, the QQ guys, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Ballmer. (note, I'm guessing)
There's tonnes of sites that serve 750 million. No service that has the same amount of activity, but in 10 years a few status updates will seem like usernet does today.
Jeez, you guys don't see the significance of a product having 750 million active users? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it's historical significance, especially without any precedent.
No precedent? I assume you know of MySpace and the like so what do you mean there is no precedent to Facebook? Or do you mean to a product that has 750 million active users?
Yeah, creating something thas is popular IS history... people will still remember Michael Jackson... and Facebook... and another bunch of useless extremly popular things.
People do and will remember Jackson because of the music with lasting value he left behind, not because they remember listening to that music 20 years ago.
Facebook will, wenn G+ eats its lunch in a year or two, leave nothing tangible, audible or visible behind. Facebook will be just a memory, and memories quickly fade. Do you remember browsing geocities or tripod sites? Exactly. Me neither.
I joined TopCoder a couple of months ago but never really got how it works. Am I supposed to try all the challenges/quizes/exercises? Should I give past competitions a try?
Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other words, do employers look at it)?
When I was still in college, the BEST general-purpose training I ever received was in my ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) training, and the contests that followed. Topcoder was one of the methods we used to train for the contests, among Usaco, old ICPC contests, Project Euler, UVa (another set of contest problems). Some people used SPOJ and other such places.
From the years I was on the team, if I improved at anything, it was the ability to look at a problem, and solve it. I've gotten to use little bits of it in the year and a half I've been working, but it was more the experience I found profitable and would encourage anyone to do the same.
Disclaimer: I was on the UCF programming team for 5 years.
Practicing at all of these contests you mentioned basically guaranteed all my future steps (employment, school). It's not everything but it's a lot that you won't be able to do past college.
If you're in school and have the opportunity to participate in a club or practice by yourself, I definitely recommend it.
A few words in regard to the algoritm competition: you should give past competitions a try in order to get some practice. Your rating is determined by your performance in live challenges.
I'm not sure if employers look at it. Of course, if you get into the higher ratings, it's a nice thing to have on your resume. It also depends on the employer as well, I remember for instance one of the founders of LikeALittle was a TopCoder India champion, so for a startup like that, TopCoder experience might be something that they find interesting.
Algorithms are very useful to know, both for interviews and for real life coding, but a lot of the projects that you'd pursue for fun wouldn't have a lot of algorithmic content. Problems from this sort of contests force you to focus on tasks which make you learn about algorithmics instead of spending your time on ancillary issues.
Being high-rated in these competitions requires quite a high amount of practice and participation, so in that time, you could've been learning a lot of new skills and building things.
However, knowing a lot about algorithms can be very useful in many situations as well.
And for instance, Google has those (in)famous algorithms questions in their interviews, so I guess you'd be more confortable in them.
I think the most fun way to get into TopCoder is to just start competing in live events, which (for the algorithm matches) usually occur three times a month (though some might be at impractical times).
You'll probably screw up the first few times you participate; that's pretty normal, so don't let that get you down!
Of course you can do the archived problems for practice, but starting with live matches is much more exciting.
The one thing to take away from this profile? He figured out how to improve his rating fairly quickly. This U shape is fairly common, but (especially back then), I don't think it would be that common to get on a stable upward trend within 2 months
I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end.
This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university:
A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now.
I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.
2002 is quite a while back, the problems have steadily increased in difficulty, try and look at a div 1 set now.
Also the competition is much tougher as back then I think the site was mostly open to people from the US while now you can see US is 6th in the rankings http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=country_avg_rating
That said as my experience goes (referred 23 inters who did internships at Google and 9 who got a full time offer), >1500 rating is pretty good at least for whiteboard coding and algorithms questions. That's not enough of course, huge gaps in other areas won't help you. But 1500 rating is a great start.
Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions
topcoder doesnt mean much
its just a mind game like so many others
you might succeed or fail - if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time. Like everything else. Beside, everyone thinks successful persons are necessarily very smart in all kind of ways.
that's of course not true. it takes some smarts, yeah, some luck, some proper timing, and usually faith in yourself/ The smart part is probably a small one in fact.
TC is a place to learn and practice algorithm development skills, which is MUCH more than just a game.
It's not necessary in any programming job, but there are places where this kind of knowledge is really needed - from what I know, Google is one of the examples.
So if you like maths/algorithms, TC is a very useful place.
The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be "good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire better coders once you need to scale.
Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg because of the usage was so long ago (2002).
I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.
