Hello Codeforces!
It's been a while since our last blog post. We've been working hard on several features that we are happy to share with you.
Gmail spam
First of all, we suspect some of our users using gmail didn't get our last emails, as they were considered spam. If you wish to further receive emails from us please check your spam folder and move the emails to inbox.
Enforced templates
All the interview problems, except for those that were used in CSA rounds, now support enforced templates in C++, Java, Python and Javascript. Basically, the template takes care of reading the input, calling the function you need to implement and printing the result. You can concentrate on solving the problem, not having to worry about all the messy details.
Interviews
This new section allows you to take an interview on demand. You can choose the difficulty and duration. The tasks are selected from those you didn't solve yet in the interview archive. You can access the interview section here.
Hourly contests
Every half-hour, a contest starts on CS Academy: every full hour highlights an algorithms-style contest and every hour-and-a-half an interview-style contest. This feature was introduced to reach a a few different points:
- give users an incentive to stay on the website for a longer period of time
- bring old but great problems back into attention
- add a bit of competitiveness outside our regular rounds
- most of all, make the problem-solving experience a bit more fun
The problems are chosen from the archives, in a way that tries to ensure none of the participants had previously solved them.
Rating changes
As some of you noticed, we had a bug in the rating algorithm. We fixed it and recalculated all the ratings. We decided to change the cutoffs for red at 1700 and for yellow at 1600.
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the website is same as hackerrank
I see the "Interview Contest #1" is upcoming soon, can you explain exactly how this differs from a normal algorithms contest? Is it just that there are 8 tasks instead of 5? Are the problems not original, and that is why they are considered "interview" problems?
Interview problems usually require a much smaller algorithmic baggage, and their main challenge is implementing clean edge-case free code. Take for instance the task Justify Formatting. It's straightforward to understand what you need to do, the whole trick is getting it done quickly and correctly. The format is pretty much the same, it's just the problems are guaranteed to be solvable even by those without knowledge of advanced algorithms and data structures (the overspecialized kind you have in competitive programming).