The second problem from this year facebook hackercup sound like the classic knapsack problem. But the solution is much easier (words are in fixed sort order). Feel free to find a smarter algorithm or comment my python solution.

problem description

We are starting preparations for Hacker Cup 2013 really early. Our first step is to prepare billboards to advertise the contest. We have text for hundreds of billboards, but we need your help to design them.Read more

This year qualification round had three problem. The easy one was Alphabet Soup - classic character counting problem.

problem description

Alfredo Spaghetti really likes soup, especially when it contains alphabet pasta. Every day he constructs a sentence from letters, places the letters into a bowl of broth and enjoys delicious alphabet soup.

Today, after constructing the sentence, Alfredo remembered that the Facebook Hacker Cup starts today! Thus, he decided to construct the phrase "HACKERCUP". As he already added the letters to the broth, he is stuck with the letters he originally selected. Help Alfredo determine how many times he can place the word "HACKERCUP" side-by-side using the letters in his soup.Read more

The facebook hacker cup is a google-code-jam like coding contest - starting with the 2012 qualification round this weekend. Try to solve the 2011 practice round. If you can submit your solution (the spinner after submit dont stops) try to check the result response with HTTPFox (it shows the correct / incorrect response) - hoping this will be fixed for this weekend.

All solutions can be testet with codejammer.com - a fine javascript solution for running code contests like facebook hacker cup or google code jam.Read more

This is a short coding puzzle with q*bert (who is q*bert?) and an chrismas tree.

the qbert question

The task: Our 2011 q*bert can only jump down. He start from the top and has to find the path to the bottom of the chrismas tree with collecting the most points available (while jumping left-or-right down). Find the way with the highest sum.

Input:

The sum is 465 - try to solve it with a little program. The brute force method will be possible with this small tree.Read more

It's hard to find Chuck Norris, therefor we'll use a SeleniumIDE to record a frontend test, fine tune it and deploy it to a headless Hudson instance, so you don't have to look for yourself all the time.Read more

After a long saturday in berlin I could write some facts about the talks and list all the news. But the gdd world tour is over and all speaker announced to publish the slides. So I will offer the not-complete list.Read more

Imagine you're on the phone with your mom and she keeps on talking. And talking. And talking. And you keep on listening and listening. And listening. Every now and then your mom will throw in a "you still there?" to which you will murmur "uh huh".

And while your mom keeps talking, you feel the increasing urge to answer to something she said, but being well raised, you don't want to interrupt her, but wait until she is finished.

Now imagine being a Javascript (Come on, It's not that hard, is it?).Read more

Code puzzles are fun and you can solve it with some lines of code. The code puzzle on snowisfalling.com is a page showing snow is falling up instead down. After reading the code, sleeping two nights without time to solve it, the simple solution is easy:

So Microsoft recently published a security update for Internet Explorer, which had the side effect, that in certain circumstances dropdowns (that is a select element) won't open.

In short, if your page runs within an iframe from a different domain than the embedding page, your dropdowns will stay closed. You can still use the arrow keys to navigate through the options; if your users can do so too is another question.Read more

Did you use compressing while using resources from your scripts and projects? Many data files are compressed to save disc space and compressed requests over the network saves bandwith.

This article gives some hints to use the “battery included” power of python for the handling of compressed files or use HTTP with gzip compression:

1. reading log files as GZIP or uncompressed
2. using files directly from ZIP- or RAR compression archive
3. use gzip compressing while fetching web sites

Read more