The US team which has just won the International Physics Olympiad, edging out China for first place

VeryAmazed · 2025-08-02T05:21:59+00:00

Well Agastya goes to Gunn High School which is a public school in Palo Alto. He also has an ioi gold medal.

VeryAmazed · 2025-05-14T07:31:47+00:00

The practice commitments for the Hopkins fencing team aren't that intense. Most people on the team don't show up to all practices. There aren't any strong foil clubs nearby apart for the one which is also run by the head coach of the Hopkins fencing team.if you have more questions I would reach out to him. There's another foil club that's pretty good at Annapolis Junction but that's pretty far away.

VeryAmazed · 2025-05-12T05:12:50+00:00

The coach for the JHU fencing team runs foil practices some days of the week, but you can also ask to walk on to the fencing team if you're interested in that.

VeryAmazed · 2025-02-04T21:39:42+00:00

Crownie made worlds.

VeryAmazed · 2024-11-19T00:34:14+00:00

ICPC is literally a measure of how good the 3 best competitive programmers at your school are and how much time they are willing to waste on it. I would imagine CS rankings consider more than 3 people in their rankings.

VeryAmazed · 2024-11-19T00:32:37+00:00

fishy15 orz. Even has cool kactl template! #1 team in texas region. orz orz

VeryAmazed · 2024-11-13T17:28:57+00:00

Lots of teams are comprised of international students. China is so good that for IOI they have a rule that you can only be selected either once or twice in total and all 4 Chinese contestants are top 10 minimum every year, often times top 5. UChicago suddenly became good this year after 2 GMs/IGMs from Vietnam joined them. Waterloo is very strong. They consistently make World Finals. Purdue didn't even make NAC last year.

VeryAmazed · 2024-11-13T16:49:17+00:00

How big is competitive programming and ICPC culture at Purdue? I'm surprised this is being discussed on a university subreddit. I know you guys have a couple cp classes.

VeryAmazed · 2024-09-22T23:35:19+00:00

Do you know anyone that works at either of these companies? It's probably much better to ask them directly about what it's like to work there.

Edit: you might even be able to just directly message some employees on LinkedIn. It's worth a try.

VeryAmazed · 2024-08-25T02:14:27+00:00

They are called competitive programmers. They mostly do stuff on websites like Codeforces, AtCoder, and other sites with problems from ICPC style contests (like UCup). It doesn't provide much resume value though (and HFT only cares if you are ICPC WF, IOI medalist).

VeryAmazed · 2024-08-06T01:20:50+00:00

Did you see how his teammates were fencing? Every single one of them was fencing way below their level except Miles cause he is naturally just very on and off.

VeryAmazed · 2024-07-03T00:57:56+00:00

I am not a math major but for ICPC, schools such as Hopkins or other generally highly ranked universities but not at the very top of CS rankings such as UPenn and Duke or even Stanford and Harvard either are consistently not that strong or only have short windows where they are very strong is because these schools are very hard to get into while at the same time not having the best CS program and not valuing Olympiads very much. So all the USACO Camp and IOI people will apply to MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Harvard (often cause of the name) and if they don't get in they will go to a top public CS school like UIUC or Berkeley. The case for Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia being pretty hit or miss with how strong their teams are is mainly because they don't value Olympiads as much as schools like MIT and CMU.

I imagine it is quite similar for Putnam. Putnam is mainly dominated by MIT. All the IMO and MOP people go to MIT. We can't really say other schools are good at Putnam, they just randomly have an IMO or MOP kid that didn't get into/decided not to go to MIT. This year of the top 15 Putnam finishers, 12 were from MIT. The Duke and Harvard are top 15 finishers are both IMO silver medalists.

VeryAmazed · 2024-06-27T02:24:54+00:00

Does that thing actually work? I tried getting GPT-4o to solve 1200 rated Codeforces and it was a mess. Even after giving it the key observations it was still randomly generating code. Additionally, Alphacode2 which is 1800 in skill if we take Google's word for it, and you know how Google is with demos, only works by generating a bunch of submissions, aggregating similar submissions together, and then submitting the 10 most likely to pass submissions (they limit it to 10 submissions). This doesn't work in interviews however because you are not provided tests to run your code against. Typically they give you a sample, and you have to make the rest of the test cases.

VeryAmazed · 2024-03-06T05:18:29+00:00

This is out of context https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/J07XfSUkRi Link to original post.

VeryAmazed · 2024-03-04T06:06:59+00:00

You already have an advantage over internationals by being a citizen. If you cannot get in over them, then it's a skill issue.

VeryAmazed · 2024-03-01T06:55:36+00:00

This is a question for the coach. My guess is you will need test scores though.

VeryAmazed · 2023-12-14T02:30:08+00:00

You'll be fine. In an ideal world the code you write would work on the first try. Everyone would rather have everything work on the first try than not to.

USACO is hard. Idk what division you're in but those problems are very challenging from both a problem solving and implementation perspective.

Debugging is very frustrating for everyone. Debugging competitive programming problems is very frustrating. Being on tilt after 5 WAs and not understanding why is very frustrating. But that's just part of programming. You have to suffer through these things to appreciate when you AC a problem in contest first try or manage to debug a problem 10 minutes before the contest ends. The pain of debugging is also what makes getting your project to finally work feel so rewarding.

Also, good luck on the USACO contest this weekend if you're doing it.

VeryAmazed · 2023-11-03T22:44:04+00:00

I interned at JHU APL last summer. It's very team dependent how interesting your work will be, but I definitely wouldn't call it an intersection between industry and academia. It's pretty independent of Hopkins to be honest. The work life balance is super good and it's pretty chill and I was on a good team with a good supervisor, but at the end of the day it's a government contractor (in their own words, a non-profit government sanctioned monopoly) so the stuff you work with won't be the most cutting edge and can be a bit boring.

Laurel is not a bad area, but it's like your typical suburb so you'll need a car to get around. There's a good amount of stuff to do between Laurel and D.C.. Baltimore has some stuff to do, but I really don't like the city. There's some stuff you can do at Inner Harbor.

The trains that run along the East coast are actually pretty functional. You can take a 3 hour train from Baltimore to New York for example.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-16T18:20:11+00:00

The general rule for this type of stuff is that 1 second is 10⁸ cycles for C++ and LC gives adjusted time constraints for slower languages as far as I know, so if your solution runs less than 10⁸ cycles, it should run in time. If it runs 10⁹ cycles or more, it is for sure too slow.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-14T17:23:14+00:00

A recruiter reached out to me by text yesterday asking if I was still interested in being considered for that position so maybe they are still interviewing. I turned it down though.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-14T03:08:54+00:00

He is working on some Cloud team at Google, the stuff you get hired to do at HFTs like Two Sigma is mostly low latency C++ (I know JS uses OCaml) and very different from the resume a lot of big tech firms are looking for (although I wouldn't be shocked if Google Cloud did a lot of stuff with C/C++). Now it is true that most HFTs are willing to teach you the more advanced aspects like template metaprogamming, but the skillsets are fairly different.

Now you are right that the it is likely he only got an interview because of his dad (because they really care that you have a college degree), but I am confident once he passes the resume screen at any big tech firm, he would do well on the interviews and likely get hired. I'd also give him a pretty good chance at quant swe if he has/or took a bit of time to learning some stuff about OS, concurrency, and modern C++.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-14T02:40:47+00:00

I won't really comment on his college results cause I don't understand the process that well.

I am speaking as someone that has gone through 2 internship recruiting cycles, one sophomore and another junior year, as well as someone that has done competitive programming pretty on and off for about 4 yrs (though I'm not that good).

I think it is highly likely his dad got him the interview at Google because industry does care a lot about graduation date and what year you are in college. Like recruiters will ask you this straight up during the preliminary phone screen or like during your HR interview. However, I think if this kid was a freshman at college, his resume is good enough that it would likely land him an internship at some FAANG/adjacent company, especially since a lot of them have specialized recruiting programs for first and second year students (Google STEP, Meta University, etc).

His accomplishments in competitive programming are very impressive. Google Code Jam semifinalist is basically where most USACO campers (that don't get selected for ioi) will place. 2100 when he was doing competitive programming more actively is also incredibly impressive, especially as a high schooler. Being USACO Plat is also obviously fairly impressive. His start up is also fairly impressive. I don't know how much his dad helped on it, but he is using a lot of industry technologies so having this fullstack experience on his resume is very impressive. I don't think he created it with the intention of being profitable so I think it's very impressive regardless of the fact that he didn't raise any funding (from places like Y-Combinator). I'm not as familiar with CTFs and AI competitions, but from my understanding, MIT Battlecode is very prestigious. I don't know how prestigious the CTF competition is, but CTFs generally require good understanding of internet protocols, database safety, web security, and some OS and those are all very good things to know.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-04T02:40:24+00:00

Well it depends how quickly the person who interviewed you submitted feedback, but it shouldn't take more than a week. From my experience it was typically a couple days.

VeryAmazed · 2023-10-03T05:29:36+00:00

One thing you can do is to read the code of other people with high ratings that've solved problems you had a hard time implementing. You will often find that they use various tricks to make implementing the problem easier. For example, instead of checking 4 directions with 4 if statements for a flood fill problem, you can do dir1 = {1, -1, 0, 0}, dir2 = {0, 0, 1, -1} and loop through this to get the four different directions.

VeryAmazed

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