Hello Codeforces!

We are very excited to invite you to participate in An Animal Contest 6! It is hosted on DMOJ, and it is currently running. You may participate in the contest in any 3 hour window from now until Monday (March 21). More rules can be found on the contest page.

We hope you will find the problems to be fun and interesting!

Context: On a recent contest I got Java'ed so I decided that I would permanently switch to C++. That being said, I found that generally C++ debuggers were less effective than the one I'm currently using for Java (this is my personal opinion, feel free to disagree). Fast forward to today, I was complaining on Discord that I couldn't get my debugger to work properly and in response, my friend told me that debuggers are "stupid" and that "nobody uses a debugger." This started a mini-debate about debuggers and who uses them which brings me back to my original question: do you use a debugger? Please let me know in the comments.

Have a great day!

Is there an efficient way to merge two knapsack DP tables which map max value to cost (or min cost to value)? The obvious solution would be to add each element from the second DP table into the first one at a time, but this would run O(W^2). Can we do better?

After the recent ABC, I realized I suck at string algorithms (the only one I know is hashing). What are the important string algos I should learn (for cp) and in what order should I learn them?

Can someone please recommend me some good American OJs/contest platforms that host frequent contests? The reason I am asking is because currently, I am mostly using Codeforces and AtCoder to do practice contests; however, due to the difference in time zones (I live in NA), the contests on these sites often conflict with other things in my life such as school/other work/sleep. For this reason, it also doesn't matter if you recommend a site that is not specifically American — as long as it more or less follows the American time zones.

Thanks in advance!