Meta Hacker Cup Shirts

Hacker Cup shirts are back this year! If you placed in the top 2000 of Round 2, you'll have a shirt available on your Hacker Cup Profile page. If you placed in the top 200 of Round 3 and solved at least one problem correctly in that round, you'll win a shirt with a top-200 badge on the sleeve, instead of the normal shirt.

You must claim your shirt by January 31st. We will not be shipping shirts claimed after the 31st.

Due to regulations, Meta is also not able to support prize shipments to the following countries at this time:

Links to track your shipment can be found on your profile page once your shirt is shipped. Please note that you must have to claim your shirt from our vendor's website using the code in your profile. Their website looks like this:

Note: According to FedEx, if you are from India, you must complete the KYC submission process on https://kyc.fedex.com. If you do not, your prize will be returned to the shipper or disposed as deemed appropriate as per local guidelines.

Hacker Cup Round 3 begins in about 1 hour! To compete, you must have placed in the top 500 in Round 2 in the human track, or top 25 in the AI track.

• Participants who place in the top 200 of Round 3 will have a special "Top-200" badge on their shirts.
• The top 25 contestants in the human track will advance to the Final Round.

As a reminder, in the human track, no communication with others or AI usage is allowed during the contest. (Likewise, in the AI track, no human code authoring or human decision making is allowed)

I'll post an update later this week with information about the shirt-claiming process.

Good luck, have fun, and we'll see you on the scoreboard!

Hacker Cup Round 1 Recap

TLDR: Hacker Cup Round 1 is a wrap! We’ll be holding Round 2 on November 15th (instead of November 1st) to allocate sufficient time for stress testing.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and the judges hope you enjoyed the problems!

First off, congratulations to Geothermal for winning, and our top 3:

1. Geothermal, solving the set in 35 minutes and 35 seconds
2. ksun48, who solved C and D first and came back for B2
3. tourist, for placing third despite solving the set 12 seconds before Geothermal

Additionally, I’d like to give a huge thanks to the people who helped make the round possible, including the authors:

• A1/A2:SecondThread, with diagrams from Alex Li
• B1/B2: anhkha1004
• C: Intellegent, with additional writing from SecondThread and Alex Li
• D: Intellegent, with additional writing from SecondThread and Alex Li

And to the judges at Meta, who spent their entire weekend answering 1,600 clarification requests during and after the round to help save the contest, including especially Joyce Lynn and Wesley May (wjomlex).

What was up with the technical difficulties?

This year, we received an unprecedented number of submissions ( +88% YoY). For comparison:

Unfortunately, our underlying database simply could not keep up with this amount of traffic. This affected everything that relied on that database, from registering for the contest, to viewing the scoreboard, to making and judging submissions. Here’s our requested traffic (orange) and delivered traffic (purple):

Under normal circumstances, these lines should match perfectly.

In truth, we suspect the orange line is also likely an underestimate of the true demand for two reasons:

1. This only reflects people who could register, load pages, and make the requests. Others likely wanted to register for the contest after it started, but couldn’t. (They would need to load the contest and write to the DB to register for it)
2. The orange line shows unexpectedly consistent peaks. Usually we see more variation than this, especially during the beginning and end of the contest. This suggests those regions may be getting clipped because individuals face issues before getting to the place where they even need to make a submission.

What are we doing about it?

1. We’ll be running stress tests of our backend throughout this week to measure and ideally reproduce these failures.
2. After reproducing, we'll be improving our database structure to make sure we can handle the levels of traffic we need.

We want to make sure we execute on this well, and that will take some time and attention to get right. We’ll plan to host Round 2 on November 15th (instead of November 1st). This should give us the time we need to run these tests, and fix the underlying issues we find, without decreasing quality of the problems.

Scaling pains like this are unfortunately common, and they are especially unforgiving in cases like coding contests where all your traffic comes in one huge burst. All things considered, I'm thankful that we were able to save the round, and for the opportunity to build an even more reliable system in the future.

We hope you enjoyed the problems, our transparency, and the chance to compete in Hacker Cup, and that you are looking forward to Round 2 and a more bullet-proof platform as much as we are. We'll see you on the scoreboard on November 15th!

Meta Hacker Cup Round 1

Meta Hacker Cup is back, with Round 1 starting in under 24 hours! Register here.

To qualify for Round 2, you must place in the top 5000 of this round. As a reminder:

• In the human track, we do not allow AI usage, or working with any other contestants during the contest.
• Please make sure you are familiar with our submission system, and have a strong internet connection available during the contest. We don't expect to have as large output files as we did for the practice round, but we won't be able to extend your timer due to network issues for future rounds.
• If you are using Windows, we recommend you do not use notepad if you do not Windows to render your data files as garbled characters.

T-shirts will be awarded based on Round 2 and Round 3 performances. Round 1 will include some of your favorite Hacker Cup characters and locations, along with some brand new ones. We had a lot of fun putting the problems together, and we hope you enjoy solving them. See you on the scoreboard!

Update: Scoreboard has been revealed!

Meta Hacker Cup 2025

Meta Hacker Cup is back! We’re excited to announce our schedule for our 2025 season, kicking off on October 10th!

• Practice Round: Fri. October 10th, 10am Pacific (120 hours, 5 days)*
• Round 1: Sat. October 18th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 2: Sat. November 1st, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 3: Sat. November 15th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Finals: Sat. December 13th, 6am Pacific (4 hours)

*While optional, we recommend you participate in the Practice Round to familiarize yourself with our submission system before Round 1, when time will be at a premium.

The contest will be held on the Meta Hacker Cup site. Registration will open Friday, October 3rd. Register here.

You can expect familiar prizes in the human track, including T-Shirts, Elite T-Shirts, and cash prizes for finalists. We’ll announce more prize details closer to Round 2.

Continuing the Meta Hacker Cup AI Track

We'll be continuing our AI track this year, but with some modifications. We'll share specific details on Friday when registration opens, but at a high level, you can expect a single AI track with time limits matching those in the human track. We won't impose any limits on compute resources or energy usage in the AI track this year.

Additionally, we have an open invitation to companies developing AI to compete in our AI track, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and any other companies that are interested in competing. For large companies that elect not compete, we'll run their top publicly available model as of our registration date with default settings on a single inference attempt per problem to represent them instead.

If you're interested in competing in the AI track, you can join our discord server to learn more.

Update: Registration is now open -- Register here!

ICPC North American Championship

Good morning! Tomorrow, May 26th at 10:00 AM EST, the 2025 ICPC North American Championship will begin. The best teams from the United States and Canada will compete to become the next ICPC North American Champion and see which teams will qualify for a spot at the upcoming ICPC World Finals in Baku Azerbaijan!

The contest will be 5 hours, and will happen in person in the beautiful Orlando, Florida, at our host university, the University of Central Florida. During the contest, we’ll host a livestream with fun facts, coaches, judges, and others.

• Watch the contest broadcast live & support your team https://youtube.com/icpclive

• Follow the live scoreboard https://nac.icpc.global/scoreboard/2025

• Check out the problem set https://nac.icpc.global/problems/2025/

• Want to play along? Register for the NAC Online Contest https://icpc.global/regionals/finder/NAC-Sampler-2025

Meta Hacker Cup Shirts

Hacker Cup shirts are back this year! If you placed in the top 2000 of Round 2, you'll have a shirt available on your Hacker Cup Profile page. If you placed in the top 200 of Round 3, you'll win a shirt with a top-200 badge on the sleeve, instead of the normal shirt.

You must claim your shirt by December 13th. We will not be shipping shirts after the 13th.

Due to regulations, Meta is also not able to support prize shipments to the following countries at this time:

Shirts shipped to addresses in the United States should be delivered within 1 week of being claimed. Shirts delivered to addresses outside the United States may take up to 3 weeks to be delivered.

Links to track your shipment can be found on your profile page once your shirt is shipped. Please note that you must have to claim your shirt from our vendor's website using the code in your profile. Their website looks like this:

Update: According to fedex, if you are from India, you must complete the KYC submission process on https://kyc.fedex.com at the earliest failing which these shipments may be returned to the shipper or disposed as deemed appropriate as per local guidelines.

Meta Hacker Cup Round 3

Round 3 is upon us! Round 3 begins in under 24 hours on the Hacker Cup site. We hope to see you there after Round 984!

As in previous years:

• To qualify for the human track of Round 3, you must have finished within the top 500 of Round 2.
• To qualify for the Finals Round, you must have finished within the top 25 of Round 3.
• For those competing in the human track, the top 200 placing participants have a special badge on their shirt.

Good morning, have fun, and we hope to see you on the scoreboard! Head on over after Codeforces Round 979, and be careful not to make any algorithms mistakes!

Meta Hacker Cup Round 2

It's Rabbit Hacker Cup Season! Round 2 begins in under 24 hours on the Hacker Cup site. We hope to see you there after Round 979!

As in previous years:

• To qualify for the human track of Round 2, you must have finished within the top 5000 of Round 1.
• For those competing in the human track, the top 2000 placing participants will win a limited edition Hacker Cup shirt. We'll distribute shirts and share more information about this after Round 3.
• The top 500 placing human-track participants will advance to Round 3.

As always, we recommend taking care to make sure your code is correct before making submissions, and making sure you are familiar with how to run code on large files without trying to paste megabytes of data by hand. I'd highly recommend reading -is-this-fft-'s blog post on this if you haven't. Additionally, one problem this round has especially large input, so we recommend pre-downloading the zip file (and necessary tools to unzip it if you're using Windows) for that problem.

One thing that's different this year is that we're allowing anyone who isn't participating in the human track to register and compete in the AI track for Round 2, even if you didn't compete in the AI track for Round 1. You can register up until the contest begins here.

Good morning, have fun, and we hope to see you on the scoreboard! Hop on over after Codeforces Round 979!

Meta Hacker Cup 2024

Meta Hacker Cup is back! We’re excited to announce our schedule for our 2024 season, kicking off on September 20th!

• Practice Round: Fri. September 20th, 10am Pacific (72 hours)*
• Round 1: Sat. October 5th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 2: Sat. October 19th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 3: Sat. November 2nd, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
• Finals: Sat. December 7th, 6am Pacific (4 hours)

*While optional, we recommend you participate in the Practice Round to familiarize yourself with our submission system before Round 1, when time will be at a premium.

The contest will be held on the Meta Hacker Cup site. Registration will open July 24th.

You can expect familiar prizes in the human track, including T-Shirts, Elite T-Shirts, and cash prizes for finalists. We’ll announce more prize details closer to Round 2.

Introducing the Meta Hacker Cup AI Track

For the first time this year, we'll also be running an AI track. In it, instead of solving problems manually, contestants will create an autonomous code generation system before the start of the contest. Each contestant can compete either in the human track or the AI track, but not both.

We hope this will create an interesting benchmark for how well state-of-the-art machines are able to perform against the best programmers in the world on complex programming tasks. If you're interested in competing in the AI track, you can join our discord server to learn more.

================================

Update: Round 1 is now complete. We had a flood of submissions during the last few minutes during which everyone refreshed the scoreboard and we appear to have exceeded our number of allotted DB connections. We're looking at resolving the issue now.

Update 2: Looks like we only had a small handful of people hit the limit. Connections all have recovered.

Fun Facts about NAC Teams

Are you or someone you know attending the North America Programming Camp? If so, we'd love to get some fun facts about the teams that are here! Please submit your fun facts in this google form, or send them in a direct message to me, SecondThread on Codeforces!

What kind of facts are you looking for?

We're looking for anything exciting, interesting, or varied about your team that you're willing to share. Here are some examples from last year.

Good luck in the competition, and we'll see you on the scoreboard! Submit your fun facts!

On February 24th starting at 11 AM Pacific Time, the 2023 ICPC Pacific Northwest Regional* will take place. This year, I will host the official contest broadcast, starting shortly before the beginning of the contest, on the ICPC Live YouTube channel.

The stream will cover the contest, discuss some problems and solutions, answer live questions from viewers, and maybe even include some surprise guests. We'll be streaming from the beautiful De Anza campus in San Jose, California, but this regional includes teams in on-site contests competing simultaneously on the same problems with the same scoreboard in:

• De Anza (California) [main site],
• UW Tacoma (Washinton),
• George Fox (Oregon),
• UBC (British Columbia), and
• BYUH (Hawaii)

If you're interested, you can see more info about the contest, the Division 1 Open Mirror, and the Division 2 Open Mirror.

Good luck, have fun to everyone who is competing tomorrow, and for everyone else, I hope to see you on the stream!

*: Not a typo; due to ongoing schedule difficulties resulting from COVID, the 2023 regional is being held in 2024.

Problem D of Codeforces Round #224 has incorrectly rendered samples for me. (Chrome on Mac). There are curly braces in the output for samples 2, 4, and 5. These are not in the actual data, they are just on the website.

Here is the second sample:

3 4
####
#>^{}#
####

The curly braces are not supposed to be there. I know there have since been updates to how samples are rendered (showing different backgrounds for adjacent test cases within the same sample, for example), so I suspect this may have broken in one of those updates.

Not sure where to post this, so thought I'd flag it here.

Meta Hacker Cup Finals 2023

The 2023 Meta Hacker Cup Finals will be happening this Saturday, starting at 6:00 AM Pacific.

We'll reveal the scoreboard and winner on a facebook livestream at 10:30 at 11:00. We'll include the stream on Codeforces if Codeforces decides to support Facebook livestreams, but otherwise, you'll want to visit facebook.com/hackercup to see the stream!

Good luck to the 25 finalists, we hope you enjoy the problems, and we hope everyone enjoys the livestream. You can also check out our teaser video before the contest!

Meta Hacker Cup Round 3

Good morning! Meta Hacker Cup Round 3 starts on Saturday, November 4th, 10 AM Pacific in under 14 hours! You're automatically registered for Round 3 if you placed in the top 500 of Round 2, or had a qualified bye from Round 1.

Important info:

• You'll qualify for the finals if you place in the top 25 in this round.
• If you place in the top 200 of this round, your T-shirt prize will have a Top-200 badge on the sleeve, unlike those who earned a shirt but were not in the top 200 in this round.
• The round will be 3 hours long.

You can find more info about T-Shirt details on this post. Good luck, have fun, and try not to get spooked by the problems!

Meta Hacker Cup Round 2

Good morning! Meta Hacker Cup Round 2 starts on Saturday, October 21st, 10 AM Pacific in under 26 hours! You're automatically registered for Round 2 if you scored at least 4 points in Round 1.

Important info:

• You'll qualify for Round 3 if you place in the top 500 in this round.
• If you place in the top 2000 of this round, you'll win a limited edition Hacker Cup t-shirt.
• If you qualify for Round 3, and you place in the top 200 of Round 3, your shirt will have a special "Top 200" badge on it.

You can find more info about T-Shirt details on this post. Good luck, have fun, and we'll see you on the scoreboard!

Meta Hacker Cup Shirts

Hacker Cup prizes are back this year, and the shirts are back in black! The top 2000 participants in Round 2 will win a shirt. If you qualify for Round 3 and finish in the top 200, you'll win a shirt with a top-200 badge on the sleeve instead of the normal shirt.

Just like last year, T-Shirts will be able to be claimed in your Hacker Cup Profile after we have finished plagiarism checks for the Round 3. (or after we have finished plagiarism checks for Round 2 if you didn't qualify for Round 3 and have no chance of winning a top-200 shirt)

You must claim your shirt by December 15th. We will not be shipping shirts after the 15th.

Due to regulations, Meta is also not able to support prize shipments to the following countries at this time:

Shirts shipped to addresses in the United States should be delivered within 1 week of being claimed. Shirts delivered to addresses outside the United States may take up to 3 weeks to be delivered.

Links to track your shipment can be found on your profile page once your shirt is shipped. Please note that you must have to claim your shirt from our vendor's website using the code in your profile. Their website looks like this:

Update: We'll release codes on your profile to all winners at the same time after we finish plagiarism checks for Round 3 on Monday, November 6th.

Update 2: Codes have been created and can be viewed on your profile.

Update 3: (November 22) Our stock for the following sizes is low. If you select one of these sizes, you will still get your shirt, but it won't be shipped until late December: XL, 3XL, Top-200 XL.

Meta Hacker Cup Round 1

Good morning! Meta Hacker Cup Round 1 starts on Saturday, October 7th at 10:00 AM Pacific in under 48 hours! Anyone can register for Round 1 this year, even if you haven't participated in the practice round.

Important info:

• To qualify for Round 2, you must solve at least one problem in this round. (Due to having too many submissions in the early part of the contest, we relaxed this requirement from the earlier one of needing to place in the top 5000 of the round)
• The contest will be 3 hours.
• As usual, you may not discuss solution ideas or code until after the contest hours is over. It's your responsibility to make sure that your code is not leaked. We'll DQ contestants if we have reason to believe they shared code or solutions with others.

Hacker Cup Round 2 Conflict with ICPC Regionals and WPC

Round 2 will overlap with some ICPC regionals and the World Puzzle Championship. For people able to prove that they will attend an official International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) or World Puzzle Championship (WPC) during the day of the Round 2, it will be possible to get a bye from Round 2 and go directly to Round 3.

To get the bye you must attend one of the events during the day of Round 2 and finish in top 500 in Round 1. At most 50 contestants will get a bye; if more than 50 qualify, only the best 50 of them in Round 1 will qualify. To be considered for a bye, send an clarification request before Round 1 with the word "ICPC" or "WPC" followed by your name. We will later validate your status for the bye.

Prizes

T-shirts will be awarded to top participants based on performance in Rounds 2 and 3. Contestants who do not qualify for Round 2 cannot earn a prize. More prize details will be announced after Round 1.

We’ve put a lot of work into these problems, and we hope you enjoy the contest. Good luck, and see you on the scoreboard!

Meta Hacker Cup Practice Round

Good morning! The Meta Hacker Cup Practice Round starts in under 24 hours!

If you haven't yet, now's a great time to register for the round here. This round will be 72 hours long, starting tomorrow, September 21st at 10AM Pacific. Though it's optional, we strongly recommend participating. If you've never competed before, you'll see that Hacker Cup has a slightly unconventional submission system (you run your own code locally, and upload the output), so it's good to practice that. Be sure you have a sufficiently large stack size, for example, if you plan to use recursion in any of your solutions, and that you're familiar with compiling your code if you don't usually do that in other contests.

A couple other reminders before the contest starts:

• We ask that you don't discuss the statements or solutions (ideas or code) until after the practice round ends.
• If you choose to use an online compiler (such as IDEOne, or something else), it is your responsibility to make sure your code stays private. If your code becomes public, even by accident, you'll be DQ'd.
• If you're using Windows, don't use notepad because it sometimes may unexpectedly attempt to read some files as random Unicode characters.

If you're using an IDE, you may need to paste in larger inputs than you're used to. I recommend you do at least one of the following:

1. Make sure your IDE is capable of allowing you to paste in huge (up to like ~70mb) inputs, or better yet
2. Write your code to read from a file rather than stdin, or
3. Redirect stdin to a file when executing your code.

You can also view some of our FAQs here. Good luck, have fun, and see you on the scoreboard!

Meta Hacker Cup 2023 Schedule

Meta Hacker Cup is back! We’re excited to announce our schedule for our 2023 season, kicking off on September 22nd!

• Practice Round: Fri. Sept 22nd, 10am Pacific — Mon. Sep. 25th, 10am Pacific (72 hours)*
• Round 1: Sat. Oct. 7th, 10am — 1pm Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 2: Sat. Oct. 21th, 10am — 1pm Pacific (3 hours)
• Round 3: Sat. Nov. 4th, 10am — 1pm Pacific (3 hours)
• Finals: Sat. Dec. 9th, 6am — 10am Pacific (4 hours, Online)

*While optional, we recommend you participate in the Practice Round to familiarize yourself with our submission system before Round 1, when time will be at a premium.

To compete, you can register at Meta Coding Competitions at any time between now and September 25th.

You can expect familiar prizes including T-Shirts, Elite T-Shirts, and cash prizes for finalists. We’ll announce more prize details closer to Round 2.

We look forward to seeing you on the Practice Round’s scoreboard!

Llama Code in CP

Today, Meta released Llama Code, a Large Language Model trained specifically for code. It's trained on Python, C++, Java, PHP, Typescript, C#, Bash. They are releasing 3 models with 7B, 13B and 34B parameters respectively. The smaller two allow for Fill-in-the-Middle.

It's free for research and commercial use, but obviously requires a solid amount of computing power if you want to run it locally.

You can read more about it here: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/08/code-llama-ai-for-coding/

I'd be interested in seeing if this becomes useful in CP. It seems like there's a lot of potential, specifically with code completion with Fill-in-the-middle. Imagine having vscode, hitting "F3", typing something like "SegTree with lazy prop, range set max, and range +=", and getting exactly the segment tree you need in two seconds.

I also think it may be useful because although LLMs are currently horrendous at the problem solving aspect of CP (similarly to how tools like MidJourney suck at hands), if you can highlight an area or chunk of code and be like "hey, this part's bad, try again for just this part", that might help improve weaknesses.

Just a thought.

Fun Facts about NAC Teams

Are you or someone you know attending the North America Programming Camp? If so, we'd love to get some fun facts about the teams that are here!

Please submit your fun facts in this google form, or send them in a direct message to me, SecondThread on Codeforces!

What kind of facts are you looking for?

We're looking for anything exciting, interesting, or varied about your team that you're willing to share. Some great examples that we've seen in the past include:

• I play Smash Melee competitively in my free time
• One of our team members (his_handle) is getting married within a week of finals
• I'm surprisingly not actually a Computer Science major, instead I'm majoring in x and plan to use it for y.
• 2/3 of our team uses the non-C++ programming language X.
• This weird thing happened at regionals when we qualified.
• Our team practiced pretending to get questions wrong so that when we solved the last problem we didn't ruin the scoreboard reveal for anyone. One of our teammates really likes cycling and once biked over 100 miles in a single day.
• Last year, we were the highest-scoring team at the NAC not to make World Finals, by 27 minutes of penalty time
• Our team's mascot is X which we use for Y

Or really anything else that you think is unique or interesting.

What will these be used for?

Similarly to the 2022 NAC Stream, we'll use the content in these facts to make the stream more personal, and hype up your team when you submit a problem when we're watching the scoreboard. You can view the NAC stream here, and get contest updates here.

We're looking to get at least one fact per team. I'll be bothering you in person before the contest if you don't submit one, so might as well just make it easy on yourself and do it online now to avoid all potential human interactions later on, right? Just fill out this google form, or DM SecondThread!

Codeforces appears to have a minor bug in the backend regex evaluation for determining which submissions are legal java code. When attempting to submit, if you have an open curly brace in a submission before your outer class, you receive the following error:

Source should satisfy regex [^{}]*public\s+(final)?\s*class\s+(\w+).*

This happens even if the curly brace is in a comment. Here's an example case it won't let you submit when really it should:

/*
{
*/
public class A {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
	}
}

Here's the thing though: according to regex101 the regex is correct, and the above java code does indeed match (with PHP >=7.3 regex, the default). This makes me believe there's some bug in how CF is evaluating whether the regex matches, rather than with the regex itself.

Why it matters

Although it's not a super big deal, often times I will use a comment block above my main class as a note pad to think about the problem, and whenever I use curly braces in my notes, if I don't go back and delete them before submitting, CF doesn't accept the submission.

Alright, that's all. Happy debugging, and let me know if I can help :)

Meta Hacker Cup Finals

Good morning! The Meta Hacker Cup Finals are coming up in a few weeks, and will be held on December 10th. The contest will be 4 hours long, starting at 6:30 AM, PST, with a streamed scoreboard reveal at 11:00 AM, 30 minutes after the contest ends.

In the first ever Meta Hacker Cup Finals, the top 25 programmers of the over 16,000 entrants who competed in the first 4 rounds will battle it out on the hardest problem set of the season for a $20,000 grand prize. Contestants will have 4 hours to solve as many of programming challenges as they can of the 5 to 8 algorithmic tasks which will be revealed when the contest starts.

The scoreboard reveal will be streamed to the the Hacker Cup Facebook page, with commentary from SecondThread and Zef RosnBrick.

The 25 Finalists

*An individual's tourist factor is defined as the probability that this person would perform better than tourist in a Codeforces round, as predicted by the Elo Rating System.

Max Elo or Current Elo?

Here's a graph of all finalist's Round 3 place vs. their current elo and max elo. Although both current and max elo are useful predictors of performance in Hacker Cup, max elo has a higher R^2 coefficient, meaning it appears to be a better predictor.

See you in the Stream!

I'd like to draw a bit of attention to a blog I published last year asking for support for Facebook Livestreams on Codeforces. It looks like there was some initial interest in adding support for it, but it appears it isn't quite finished. If there's anything I can do to help make this happen, please reach out to me on CF DMs.

I hope to see you in the finals stream! We've had some great problems this year; perhaps you can find some of the ones you most liked or struggled with in the image below:

Update: The contest has started and the scoreboard can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/codingcompetitions/hacker-cup/2022/final-round/scoreboard

Fun Facts About World Finals Teams

Are you participating in ICPC World Finals in Dhaka this week? Is someone from your team competing in World Finals? Did your best friend's brother meet someone whose cousin competed in regionals against a team who qualified? If so, we'd love to get some fun facts about the world finals team from you!

If you have any, please submit your fun facts in this google form, or send them in a private message to me, SecondThread, on Codeforces!

What kind of facts are you looking for?

Well variety is what makes things exciting, so we don't want to limit it too much. But for some inspiration, some good ones we've seen in the past include:

• I play Smash Melee competitively in my free time
• One of our team members (his_handle) is getting married within a week of finals
• I'm surprisingly not actually a Computer Science major, instead I'm majoring in x and plan to use it for y.
• 2/3 of our team uses the non-C++ programming language X.
• This weird thing happened at regionals when we qualified.
• Our team practiced pretending to get questions wrong so that when we solved the last problem we didn't ruin the scoreboard reveal for anyone.
• One of our teammates really likes cycling and once biked over 100 miles in a single day.
• Last year, we were the highest-scoring team at the NAC not to make World Finals, by 27 minutes of penalty time
• Our team's mascot is X which we use for Y

Or really anything else that you think is unique or interesting.

What will these be used for?

I'll be commentating during the ICPCLive World Finals stream. Similarly to how we did this during the 2022 North American Championships Stream, we'll use the content in these facts to make the stream more personal, and hype up your team when you submit a problem when we're watching the scoreboard.

We're looking to get at least one fact per team. I'll be bothering you in person in Dhaka before the contest if you don't submit one, so might as well just make it easy on yourself and do it online now to avoid all potential human interactions later on, right? Just fill out this google form, or DM SecondThread!