Recently there were rumors going on about a very unusual programming competition called "NextHacker". Is it different from "normal" contests in several ways:
- You need to pay to participate ($700 !). The exception is if you place in top-3 on some dedicated qualification contests on Codechef/Hackerearth.
- Prizes are surprisingly high as well: IIRC, it was smth like $170k for the first place. This is very unusual for "normal" programming contests, I've seen similar prizes only in data science-style competitions (e.g. Kaggle ones). Though given the amount one needs to pay to participate, I guess they can easily afford such prizes.
- The announced task format was "you're given a code, you need to find some bugs there". Though corresponding Codechef/Hackerearth rounds have the classic format.
This all (especially the idea of giving $700 to some unknown people) sounded somewhat fishy from the beginning, however, collaboration of Hackerearth and Codechef was giving some hope. Also, they even had the place for their finals announced, and this place seems to confirm that this is a real event.
However, starting from today, their site disappeared (i.e. now it shows empty page with a picture). Contests on Hackerearth and Codechef still exist, though the Codechef one was removed from the contest list.
So, I'm wondering, does someone know something about this event and its organizers? Of course I didn't give them $700, but I was planning to participate in Codechef qualification round. Is it going to happen in the end? When their site was up, it was saying that ~3000 people already gave the money, so this whole situation seems rather intriguing...
I really wish to meet at least one genius who gave 700$ for it :D
For me it looks impossible — find bug in code is more funny thing than competitive.
I'm guessing that it's real, but ran by people who are trying to do something beyond their abilities and ran into one of the usual problems: low participation (which means low money), running behind schedule / people who said they'd help opting out, or failing to secure sponsors (i.e. money). It's hard to distinguish between scamming and amateurishness...
It's just a wild an unimportant guess, though — I didn't even heard about it till now and they sure as hell aren't going to outjew me.
And I'm sure they didn't find 3000 wealthy programmers, isn't that something of an oxymoron?
P.S. nslookup gives IP 54.152.171.48, registered to Amazon Technologies (whois record), seems like it's a generic Amazon-hosted site. Once again, hard to distinguish between scamming and amateurishness.
There was a post here — http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/21985 — about the contest and someone from the organization answered some questions.
It does look strange. What I didn't like the most was the list of sponsors, which I believe was fake (logos black&white, listing basically all big tech companies, mentioning both google and youtube, etc).
Saying that 3000 people already paid, seems like bait.
The participation fee is normal at conferences. They might have expected to have 3000 people paying that price.