In the Olympics of Algorithms, a Russian Keeps Winning Gold (opens in new tab)

This is possibly both racist (nationalist/) and anecdotal, but I've noticed that russian programmers think more like their US counterparts than some other ethnic groups that were educated in their home countries...

Primary and secondary mathematics education has been strong in Russia before, during, and after the Soviet period. Some of the neighboring countries that were part of either the Russian empire or the Soviet Union (also China since the P.R.C. regime began) share some of the same cultural influences on educational practice.

Another Hacker News participant told us all about a very interesting discussion of mathematics education in Russia

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

by a Russian mathematician who has since taught in the United States and in Brazil.

*Structure of educational system might be a bit different there, so by class I mean a profiled group of people stuck together for 3 years of high school.

In modal.register.js:100, 128, 337

$("#veriImg").attr("src", "/present/captchaImage.action?t=" + new Date().getTime());

It doesn't seem like the expected value of the captcha ever actually gets registered on the server side.

My one idea of stopping before the Ajax request and setting the verification code equal to an empty string to try to match a null/undefined on the server side didn't work.

It's possible that, in some really obvious error, the server makes its own request based on a current timestamp to get the captcha value to match against and uses a later timestamp, but the time difference because of latency means that I can't test that without guessing a bunch of times.

Rules for languages differ by contest. I believe all of them accept C and C++ solutions, most also accept java. Erlangists and Lispers are going to have a bad time, though.

There is one site (http://spoj.pl) that takes the former approach but supports a huge variety of languages from assembler to Haskell.

Many popular and large contests allow any language you want. This is often solved by letting the contestant download a problem file, running his solution and uploading a solution file along with the source code for verification (cf. Google Code Jam). This frees the organisers from having to support every language, interpreter or compiler anyone would perhaps use (which is often the largest problem when it comes to supporting different languages).

I coded on Pascal myself when I was of the winners of Ukranian computer science olympiad.

"Petr almost never submits any solution without having a rigorous proof even when good mathematical intuition is enough and the proof is hard."

wow! reading this brings home how much I still have to learn. Humbling.

Google's ads are the last on my list, when it comes to being invasive or annoying.