Groom your programming skills and make some money

So... you can get up to 50 points for the fastest code, and 20 points for the smallest code. And you only lose up to 20 points for code that doesn't work.<p>I think I just detected a wonderful loophole in this scoring method.

It needs some polishing, there are quite annoying aspects:<p>1) Mandatory gender and country? Seriously, why? Even e-mail shouldn't be mandatory IMO. Hitting 'Enter' on register/login forms doesn't work as submit, I need to grab the mouse for that (especially annoying on a programming-related site)<p>2) The "How are programs run" section is completely useless. It's never mentioned how is my code actually invoked, just how it is compiled (when applicable). Let's take C for example, it says 'gcc contestx.c -o contestx.c'. Assuming the argument to '-o' is a typo, this way of compilation includes linking... so it seems I'll need `int main()` to avoid linker errors, but what's to be in `main`, I'm never told. I'm just assuming .c code is just `-c` and `dlopen`ed, but I'm not sure, since 15 minutes after submitting a solution, there's still no feedback.<p>Other nitpickery includes email validation code that's not clickable (okay, this is arguably a good thing) and other stupid memes implemented on the site like asking for the email twice or showing me my local time in the upper-right corner even though all other times on the site are displayed in the server's time zone (e.g. upper-right corner shows 16:45, but the solution I just sent is shown as submitted at 7:45)

Good day<p>I created www.amebopost.com. I am extremely sorry if I annoyed anyone. If I had known that I'd be getting this many users, I would have endeavored to make it more professional and thoroughly fix the bugs before making the site online.<p>My original goal was to create an avenue where Nigerian programmers could convene and share programming ideas and code.<p>The About Page was just me being Silly. It will be taken down.

I mean, is this a joke or a viral site or something? The About page explains that it was done by someone called "Sir Pastor Alhaji Babalawo omotodun, Ph.D, MSc, etc...", which sort of brings to mind the Nigerian emails. Couple this with the outregous "also get paid tons of money($1 for winning a special challenge per week)" and P(legit site) goes really low.<p>On a different note, in the longest palindrome problem, the C++ function header doesn't pass (or return) references, which seems to be amateurish.

The "make some money" part is only $1, unless I'm missing something, and currently there's only 1 contest paying. So that's not really going to be incentive to participate.<p>It sounds like Project Euler except code size, code speed, and code submission time matter. Neat idea but how's this significantly different? Project Euler already has a huge number of challenges, a leader board, and a vibrant community. What differentiates amebopost?

Are you normalizing the execution time across languages? For example, when they introduced java, the USACO assumed that java code would run 5 times as slow as equivalent C code (so they would give 1 sec for C and 5 secs for java)

Mh, i don't think giving points based on code size is a good idea, developers really really shouldn't try hard to minimize the code size, this just leads to unreadable garbage. Time to Solve and Speed to Run is ok, imo..

Why not have "time to submit" points work as follows:<p>The problem details aren't shown, only a brief description. User clicks a button "accept challenge", is given problem details, and the server starts recording time until a solution is submitted. Base points on that time difference.<p>Sure, there are loopholes (such as someone else posting the question on another website so you can create a solution before accepting the challenge). I think it's better than checking for new problems and get lucky by noticing a new challenge came out very recently and there are no submissions.

Hopefully the command line for the C compiler invocation is a typo, because "gcc contestx.c -o contestx.c" will overwrite your source with the executable--which (while catastrophic if done at home with no backup) is probably not a big deal, so long as the relevant code length metrics are extracted beforehand...but still amateurish.

It would be nice if Ruby was one of the permitted languages.