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Ask HN: What type of challenges do you like to code for fun?

23 points by rvivek ↗ HN
We're building HackerRank.com with the core part being fun challenges with a social component around it (add your school/company network). We just put up a launch page last week with an interesting game and we had over 500 bots with 2.1M games being played till now. Completely surprised that people from Facebook, Uber and Hulu had so much time and interest in coding bots.

Gearing up for our beta launch, we'd love to hear from you on what are some of the kinds of challenges you like to code for fun? (game bots, scraping stuff, heavy-math problems, quick stuff like 4clojure.com, etc) Your feedback will greatly help us in building. Feel free to ping me off list. Appreciate your time.

6 comments

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tom_b
I very much like the "Koans" approach to grabbing the basics of programming languages fundamentals.

I would love if HackerRank included language-specific functions and methods that any hacker wanting to claim mastery of that language should know.

For example, I would guess knowing map, reduce, filter in Clojure is probably something anyone who claims to be a Clojure hacker should be able to do at a whiteboard.

In SQL, you better know inner and outer joins, insert from a table to different table, update one table with data from another table, and at least be able to talk a little about analytic functions (with data windows).

Essentially, I want the concept of "The Little Schemer" in your challenges, both for concepts and specific languages.

rvivek
Thanks Tom. That helps! We do have that on our launch plans
[dead] shane_armstrong
Currently I am working on a custom language compiler and direct executor in JavaScript, just to test my skills.

it takas commands like:

"OUT hello;VAR nin = 1;VAR nino = 31;VAR nana = brrrr;SAN nin;OUT var nin;COU nin;MAT nana = nin - nino;IDE nin 1 int;LOO nin <= 100 DO MAT nin = nin + nin;OUT var nin;"

and tokens and parses them.

It's not particularly interesting or useful yet, but i figure if I add sufficient abstraction to the operations as I go along it could be a fast way to process long numbers of JavaScript functions, but I'm really only doing it to push the limits of my current JavaScript abilities and see what is possible.

If anyone is interested (though I doubt you will be) my current progress can be found at: http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/other/jqueryassembly.html, the current page contents are just output generated, but a view source will reveal the code in all it's glory :) It is well commented enough to understand, though not standardized by any means, as sometimes I code after a 9 hour work shift and it's harder to concentrate.

I digress, that's what I do for fun in my spare time :)

PeterisP
Project Euler has some interesting puzzles.
zander1229
It would be cool if the games built upon each either. That would be pretty neat and add a little more complexity while still being fun.
[dead] zashapiro
I usually build things that I blatantly don't know how to do. When I was first starting in Ruby, that was a scraping app to pay my parking tickets (I never got a parking ticket again after completing the app, ironically).

I usually watch Railscasts and absorb some concept I have little direct interest in but I'm somewhat curious. Those concepts have a way of creeping back into the things I'm building for fun.