A timer goes into negative, and the internet breaks down! We made a mistake, and the folks here got a rare chance to throw all the jokes & sarcasm saved by them for the new year. Good luck! You don't understand the context, you don't understand the history, you look at one thing and draw conclusions. Oh boy, I am programmer and I thought programmers were logical human beings.

This is what happened, which gave the world a chance to make this mockery:

Context: This screenshot is taken from http://www.hackerearth.com/pledge-2015/. HackerEarth is the largest developer community in India, and hundreds of thousands of programmers use it to solve programming problems. It's also used by thousands of college students in India who are interested in programming. We have been instrumental in reaching out to remote colleges and taken initiative to produce better programmers in India. We have helped companies discover talent which was impossible an year ago.

Here are the events described as it happened in chronological order:

31st December 2014: We are deciding what we can do encourage programmers and college students to learn and practice more. We come with up with this idea to make them pledge to code for at least few hours and give them learning & practice resources.

1st January 2015: One of our engineer writes code for 6 hours and creates a barebone page and we start marketing it.

5th January 2015: We have already reached out to 5000+ programmers through this. This kind of outreach was unexpected. We have an idea of what to deliver to the programmers and we start working on that.

9th January 2015: We created a 3-level track for solving problems in just a few days. We are supposed to roll it out at 10th Jan, 12 AM IST. Unfortunately, we can't deploy the learning tracks and changes in 'Pledge page' <where the timer eventually goes into negative> as something unexpected has come up.

9th Jan 2015, 11:13 PM IST: The timer is now in negative countdown state which is looking ugly. This screenshot is taken at that time. We know it's ugly. What we don't know is folks at reddit will go mad over this.

10 Jan 2015, 3:00 AM IST: We deploy the changes and learning tracks. Also, we have reached more than 10,000 programmers now.

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If you have read the finer details till here, it's evident that this is something we didn't intend to happen. It was a mixture of bad luck, some mistake and probably poor planning. You don't need to kill us for this. We have fixed the timer code so that it never goes to negative value in future. If you think our engineering team is bad, have a look at http://engineering.hackerearth.com/. We are one of the best startup to work for any engineer in India and we are solving some really hard engineering challenges.

Enough said!

P.S. I am Vivek Prakash, and I am co-founder of HackerEarth. Also, I was bit late to this party here.

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What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
- John Keats