askd's blog

By askd, history, 2 months ago, In English

Hello! Sorry for the spam blog, but I don't know where else to advertise... I am offering competitive programming 1-on-1 coaching for $20/hr on weekends, with the first lesson being $5/hr, but probably only for 3-4 hours total over Saturday/Sunday.

I'd be happy to help explain/discuss any problems/algorithms! (but not too advanced because I am skill issued :rofl:)

My qualifications

  • Peaked International Master before losing all my braincells to my dumb office job
  • Get paid lots of money to work my dumb office job
  • ICPC world finalist
  • USACO plat
  • I have a girlfriend!!!!

Why receive competitive programming coaching

  • Sometimes understanding editorials/concepts can be tedious, and it'd save time to have someone either explain it to you or be able to answer whatever questions you have
  • I can offer my perspective on what I find enjoyable about CP
  • Learning CP was pretty lonely, at least for me, since finding friends to talk about it can be kinda hard
  • Could help you improve at SWE interviews or something.....
  • (I think) my prices are quite cheap compared to other coaching lol

Why am I doing this

I've been working as a SWE in finance for about 5 months now. It pays ridiculously well, but I find it too uninteresting. I understand that I'm very privileged to have such a job, so shouldn't really complain, but would still like to be happier. I'd really like to try some sort of tutoring thing, to see if I'd enjoy it more.

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By askd, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hey everyone!

I encountered a very strange RE today on 1270F - Awesome Substrings.

Spoiler

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By askd, history, 3 years ago, In English

upd: Added a few platforms, also you can now flame me here: https://discord.com/invite/R66xRwH7N5

tl;dr cp-notes.com is a web application where you can maintain a profile of solved/unsolved problems from several different competitive programming platforms. You can write notes about each problem (with support for LaTeX and images!). If you think your notes for a particular problem are substantial/useful enough, you may choose to publish them so that they will be publicly visible. Public notes can be upvoted, searched for, and will have their own comment section. Receiving upvotes on your public notes will also raise your contribution, for which there is a leaderboard (lol)

Oh yeah, you can also link your CF account in your settings page, and have your username color displayed.

Screenshots

Motivation

  • I think the primary purpose of my site is to be an improvement tool. In my opinion, in order to "become good," it's necessary to reflect on past problems and try to reuse their ideas. Even adding notes to your profile which you don't write anything about can be helpful in this regard, since they serve as some sort of personal reminder. Of course, I can't really personally attest to the success of this because I suck at CP myself, but I very highly suspect that it's true :^)
  • Reading editorials has to be one of my least favorite parts of CP. It feels quite often that the most helpful insight into the problem is some random comment. This is quite annoying in of itself, since finding this comment usually requires a lot of needless scrolling. A solution to this could be posting such insights as published notes on my website. (On an unrelated note, it's completely understandable that editorials are usually quite informal for the sake of conciseness, writing that stuff is exhausting)
  • This last point is definitely more speculative, but it seems that there's a good number of people who have some desire to share cool thoughts about cool problems! Talking/writing about this stuff is fun — I know I'm not completely alone in having a problems blog which nobody reads.
  • I'm currently on a gap year, and making this site made me feel productive!

Kinda expecting this site to be a complete flop, so give me github stars to fill the void in my soul once it inevitably does!

Frontend: https://github.com/askdfjlas/askdfjlas.github.io

Backend: https://github.com/askdfjlas/cp-notes-lambda

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By askd, history, 3 years ago, In English

Today, I found this screenshot on my desktop from a few months ago, which I'd completely forgotten about. Has anyone seen this before, and if so, can they reproduce it? Also, looking at it is completely surreal.

Apologies if this is a duplicate blog

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