Radewoosh's blog

Special place for algorithm explanations/tutorials — feature proposal
By Radewoosh, history, 5 years ago, In English

There are many blogs on Codeforces, and most of them aren't very important a long time after publishing, like round announcements, saying "hello", asking for a better explanation of problem B than the one in the editorial, and so on. Among them, there are a few very interesting blogs that are a great resource of knowledge, like ODE by MiFaFaOvO, HLD by Vladyslav, suffix automaton by quasisphere or even Blogewooshes.

In my opinion, it would be great if there would be a special place for such blogs, accessible for example, by navigation bar, where they would be somehow sorted. It would be much easier to think "Let's learn something new!" and to do it. Also, probably Codeforces would have the greatest such base for competitive programmers. What do you think guys and MikeMirzayanov?

EDIT One more argument after thinking a bit more: of course there are a lot of papers, but everybody here knows that it's much easier for "us" to learn from blogs written by other competitive programmers. An example which comes to my mind: I've heard that parametric search sometimes isn't very popular in papers because it has something like $$$O(\log(limit$$$_$$$for$$$_$$$coordinates))$$$ and it isn't "proper" to have something like this in the complexity while ofc for us it's great and has a lot of usages. Competitive programming and paper-science differ a lot, so a base of knowledge for us would be great and we have a lot of it written and hidden, so why not organize it?

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +208 Vote: I do not like it

CF Wiki basically.

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5 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +145 Vote: I do not like it

I am quite surprised I agree with you about something, that would be very nice to have a place for blogs whose validity never expire (not necessarilly educational ones, but mainly those). And don't forget about my Ultimate guide to TopCoder plugins xD

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +223 Vote: I do not like it

    nobody participates in topcoder anymore, so your blog is as dead as most others

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +37 Vote: I do not like it

      Uh, you got me here xD

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        5 years ago, # ^ |
          Vote: I like it +73 Vote: I do not like it

        I have recently set up my topcoder arena by reading your blog! Thank you :)

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -28 Vote: I do not like it

perhaps even solutions of OI problems can be compiled(which don't have English editorials).(from various blog posts about them or comments on cf contest pages)(eg-JOI and POI)

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +7 Vote: I do not like it

    That's not exactly what I meant. It would be also OK to have a base of solutions, but Codeforces already has its own editorials (with links to them on problem sites) and other tasks belong to other websites and they have such bases of solutions (maybe), while on Codeforces there are plenty of educational blogs with a lot of techniques, which might be forgotten unfortunately.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
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      Yeah I know that you didn't mean this.I was just suggesting that if cf makes a wiki such things can also be added

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +29 Vote: I do not like it

Can we just start a subreddit?

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
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    We can pin various important articles and have flairs like "edu" or "atcoder <3", so it will be way easier to search for something.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +25 Vote: I do not like it

      IMO pinning is something different.

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        5 years ago, # ^ |
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        Flair is like a category, we can have the whole category for educational posts. For instance, as far as I understand you can select what flares are visible to you.

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
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    Is that site even accessible from all countries with high rated Codeforces users?

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +18 Vote: I do not like it

Amazing idea! But how do you think "Codeforces" could judge if a blog is worthy of being in such special place? Because it cannot purely be in the blog writer's will. We always see a new "Full DP Tutorial" coming up so there's gotta be some way to filter those blogs.

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +148 Vote: I do not like it

simple feature request: unblock visibility of failed tests immediately after the contest. After I fail a problem on systests, I need to wait for all systests to finish before I see that test. And it took an hour today.

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +147 Vote: I do not like it

    .
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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +41 Vote: I do not like it

    I was a bit afraid that after proposing something nice there would immediately appear a lot of people with their own ideas (especially these ones created by impulse after the contest) using the opportunity to tell about it and in this way making Mike a less happy to consider mine because it would be unfair.

    Thanks, Kamil.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

      I don't see how my 2line-comment makes your blog less appealing to Mike or anybody else. And I don't think that I should create a new blog with such a small thing. Yours and Swistakk's responses take like 10 times more space and attention than my comment.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +24 Vote: I do not like it

      My question may sound dumb but it is not so.

      Hey Radewoosh Errichto Swistakk you all are not only from same country but also from same university (university of warsaw). So are you people classmate or atleast in same year or somehow you people know each other?

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        5 years ago, # ^ |
          Vote: I like it +150 Vote: I do not like it

        We try to pretend that we don't know each other.

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          5 years ago, # ^ |
            Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

          .

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          4 years ago, # ^ |
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          But you and errichto were teammates in ICPC 2018 as of my knowledge. Am I wrong?

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            4 years ago, # ^ |
              Vote: I like it +33 Vote: I do not like it

            But people sometimes joke. Am I wrong?

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              4 years ago, # ^ |
                Vote: I like it -10 Vote: I do not like it

              No, your highness.

              Hope you reply
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                4 years ago, # ^ |
                  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

                Guess what — it's computer science.

                Also, I guess that my birth year is public, you can find it for example here, so no, I'm not this guy.

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it

great Idea!

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5 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

I totally liked your idea,I was so shocked that this xor blog I mentioned was months old and I never got to see it. Also could we make the blogs more mobile friendly, I love to read stuff on mobile, but I have to constantly zoom in and out for reading.see the differencegreat tutorial of xor and the same blog on his website, try to read the second, it feels very awesome to read, if such feature could be implemented that would be great.

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +17 Vote: I do not like it

Thank you for pointing this out in a separate blog!

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

    Didn't know about your comment, but I thought that my idea may not be very original. Anyway, imo it's worth mentioning in a separate blog.

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5 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +108 Vote: I do not like it

I think the more general underlying issue here is that CF has a great blog system, but it's really used more like a forum. And there are many common and useful features of real forum systems that don't exist here.

In particular, we do not have "sub-forums" or the ability to list all threads posted in a sub-forum.

What if, when we post a blog, we could choose one or more "categories" that the blog falls under:

  • Contest announcement
  • Contest editorial
  • Tutorial
  • Announcements of non-CF contests (hmehta, codechef, IOI online mirror etc)
  • Asking for help
  • "General discussion"

And then have the ability to list all blogs of a given category (or all blogs overall). Tags exist of course, but they are not really used like that: there is an infinite number of tags and no consistent standard of assigning them. There would only be a small, fixed number of categories, and the list of blogs in each category would be easily accessible.

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +59 Vote: I do not like it

    Also with tutorials, maybe it would additionally be nice to have different categories for different target audiences. Otherwise the "interesting" blogs like "suffix automata" and "ODE + generating functions" would be drowned between tons of "DP for beginners" blogs.

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
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      CF has a great blog system, but it's really used more like a forum

      The problem with that is, we do not have "sub-forums"

      I think this resumes our problem here in this great platform.

      I believe you covered all the necessary categories that a forum would have, except the "General Discussion" one, I think we should also have an "Off Topic" one for outside-CP discussions(something most forums I've seen have). So that the first one keeps the ones about CP.

      However, I see a small problem in the "Tutorials" category. I think posts there should be only visible after being accepted by a moderator, that way we only get high quality ones that stay relevant even after years of posting, since people will put all of their feedback and questions there(unlike the case where there are 30 DP tutorials).

      And finally, maybe with this new system, we should start implementing some limitations on posting/commenting for newly registered users? Here is the most recent blog about it.

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5 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +227 Vote: I do not like it

I like this idea. I was thinking about something like this previously, but not implemented yet. Thanks for your good thoughts, I'll return with some details or implementation.

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2 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -27 Vote: I do not like it

2 years later, Catalog came out.

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