As a top contributor, do you enjoy my blogs?

Only partially. I like more the posts that develop our community in terms of CP domain. But as an entertaining contest, it's quite funny. I didn't read everything, but some of the pictures amused me. I think that I have upvoted some of your posts.

As someone who was not on CF during Monogon's contribution crusades, did you upvote?

Honestly, I did not understand what your "who was not on CF" means. But yes, he has a lot of cool posts. And I upvoted them a lot. I am grateful to him for his contribution to the community!

What are your views on anime?

This is not my genre. Maybe for now? I haven't even watched classic anime films. A year ago, I was in a movie with my daughter watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_with_You It was good, I didn't fall asleep!

Do you play any video games?

No, but years ago I loved this thing. The last thing I remember, about 20 years ago, I played Diablo 2 in between solving programming problems. I allowed myself to play after solving the problem. It seems that I quickly realized that I like programming more.

As a top contributor how do you feel being ratioed

I don't think that you have contributed anything except garbage entertainment to the community of which the community has grown bored. Focus on your life and not on entertaining everyone and if you want to then maybe this is not the correct place.

Any thoughts on a new CF rank?

It seems to me that I would rather adjust the boundaries of the ranks than introduce a new one. I don't think we need to increase their number. But I wasn't thinking strongly in this direction.

Also do you prefer cereal before milk or milk before cereal?

I remembered everything that I had eaten lately and do not remember the cereal there. But I would rather add milk to the cereal than vice versa.

Hi! I always had this question, Where did you learn to create websites like codeforces or polygon? And also do/did you participate in any competitive programming contest?

I love programming contests and have participated in them a lot around 1999-2006. Probably, my main achievements can be found at the link https://cphof.org/profile/topcoder:Mike%20Mirzayanov It seems there is no information there, but as part of the team we won twice at IPSC https://ipsc.ksp.sk/

I was also always interested in inventing, organizing and creating something. Around 2000, I was involved (and did most of the work) in building the site acm.sgu.ru

How did you learn? Somehow I didn't think that I studied especially. I perceived all this as an implementation problem at the contest. Well, you need to write something, you write it. Yes, before that it is worth reading how smart people do this.

But I've always had an interest in technology. Around the 2010s, it was my favorite pastime — to take some new framework and make a minimal project on it with my own hands. I've tried a lot of things and figured out how it works.

would you ever add the feature to see the people who friended me?

No, I think these are the basics of privacy. Do not wait for such a feature. It is possible that I will rename friendship as subscribers or similar, idk.

What work in cf you find to be most tedious and uninteresting?

It's boring and tedious to deal with cheaters. It takes a lot of time and effort. I also do not like the bureaucracy (documents, etc.), which sometimes have to be done.

And what do you find the most interesting?

My favorite thing is to go into a flow state and write something valuable and complex. It happened that I was in this state for weeks — I ate and slept little, but I wrote a huge amount of complex code. Unfortunately, nowadays it is so rare.

It is also nice to solve some complex technical problem that didn't allow the system to work correctly for a long time.

Of course, it's interesting to come up with something new and implement it. Here, for example, diagnostics for C ++ on the website — it seems like no one in our community has done this. It's a funny thing.

Do you secretly compete in codeforces rounds for which you haven't tested or set problems?

No, sometimes I read problems and come up with solutions. But rarely. More often than not, I just monitor different metrics and just how it goes. Sometimes I suggest something to coordinators or even help something if something goes wrong. But this is rare (and the less often the better). More often than not, I do some other work in parallel.

Do you know which rounds I think are the best for me? There were several rounds that I completely forgot about. There was a contest recently Educational Codeforces Round 120 (Rated for Div. 2). At this time, I was getting a massage, and somewhere at the end of the massage (and the round) I remembered about it. I went to Codeforces and saw that everything went well. Wonderful feeling!

I believe that Nikolay KAN Kalinin makes a huge contribution. He has a slightly invisible job to you, but he's just a monster. Many thanks to him!

In general, the greatest contribution in my eyes is work of problem writers and coordinators. Many here underestimate the complexity and importance of this work.

When can we see you participating in a cf contest? Do you participate in the contests of other platforms?

I do not exclude that someday I will start taking part in the rounds. But in that case, I will not make it secret. I'll let you know about it.

Now it is rare, but sometimes I participate. This year I took part in several stages of Code Jam and FHC. It was fun! I'm surprised that for my standards I did something well.

Sometimes, in a team, I helped with testing some contests. It was fun too.

Do you read all DMs you receive?

No. Sometimes I can get tens of messages a day. But I somehow look through almost everything. And I respond to the most important ones. Sorry if you wrote to me, but I did not answer.

For administrators, in order for the message to be marked as read, we must either reply to it or explicitly click the "read" button. Therefore, sometimes there are, as it were, unread messages that I actually looked through.

If you did contests, what would be your rating?

It seems to me that I have already answered this question somehow. It will be funny if the new answer is very different.

It seems to me that I will start with a high purple rating and if I put in the effort, I will quickly remember how to solve problems and become a low red.

How can one join codeforces headquarters?What's the procedure??I am asking this because in this cruel world it will be a blessing for someone if he gets a chance to work for the things he loves for life

One way: come to St. Petersburg, start studying at ITMO. It will also be a plus to study well and get significant success in the competition. We have the practice to involve students in development. If you are interested and you succeed, then a long road together can await us.

Top 3 competitive programmers according to you?

For now, I will name two.

tourist Нe is a living genius. Go to any top CP platform right now and look at the first line in the ranking. You will most likely see him there. But that's not all. I was fortunate enough to discuss problems and not only with him. I really like it. And I listen to Gennady's opinion not only on problems, but it is also important for me to hear his thoughts on various aspects of the system.

Petr Peter. He was a legend when I competed. He sparkled brightly and for me, he is a model of the ideal top participant. He was top 1. He looks like a person who sees a lot of interesting things in life. He is successful at work. I was delighted to meet his child. He loves sports. In another life, I would like to be like Petr.

Is the Codeforces stuff large (excluding coordinators)?

No, now it is about ~4 people: me, KAN, Una_Shem, geranazavr555. Help a lot for a long time kuviman, stingray and some others.

What was the hardest feature to deploy?

I do not know exactly. Perhaps organizing VK Cup 2012 was the most difficult for me. Then I put a lot of effort into making it go well.

But in general, I often felt too tired. Excessively. In the first 5 years of the project's life, I worked 12-16 hours a day and often slept very little. I had no other interests (well, maybe, except for a little participation in my daughter's life). Well, I also worked at Saratov University and was engaged as a head of the programming competition center and coach. I guess I have never neglected my duties.

What is your views on other CP sites? Have some of them inspired you?

Nowadays it is rare. But I am following the development of other platforms and am happy about their success.

I can't say that any platform inspired me exactly. Sorry, I got the most inspiration from Topcoder when I was active there as a participant and problem writer. It was about 15-18 years ago.

ArnoldC was used in one of the 1st April's contests.

They was used on surprise language rounds and April Fools Day Contests. Hi, Nickolas! And thank you :-)

There are no such plans now, I see no reason.

Honestly, I find these kinds of questions pretty silly. Please do not be offended. It seems to me that they do not say anything about a person.

Perhaps I cannot answer about the number and color. Ice cream I like, it is simple: good white sundae. I like to sprinkle it with chocolate, nuts, or eat it with berries. But I'm hardly a sweet tooth or a fan of any food at all.

Every round I clean out hundreds of cheaters. After each round, I ban dozens of accounts. I believe that most of cheaters are punished.

Any plans of conducting long contests for educational purposes?

There are no specific plans. But! Imagine, a well-known authoritative writer will come to me and say "I want to hold such a long educational contest." I will help and we will do it.

Views about keeping an intermediate level contest between Div1 and Div2 (maybe some sort of Div3/2 XD )

There are no specific plans. But! So far it seems to me that the div2 rounds are already complex enough to be interesting for many, who would you call div 1.5.

If we start doing this, then most likely it will go to the detriment of the current schedule. It will say that there will be only 2 div2 and 2 div1 rounds per month (on average). Do you think it will be better?

On the other hand, we will probably do it somehow. Or already? Well, it can out that the round is slightly easier as Div1, and there is no good difficult problem. It can be Div 1.5.

In this question, I will strongly listen to the opinions of other coordinators, especially to KAN.

There was a long-time contest in the Gym last week Abakoda 2021 Long Contest, organized by NOI.PHI, The National Olympiad in Informatics, Philippines. It was aimed for beginners and novice competitive programming contestants.

I would definitely vote for organizing more yearly long-time contests and/or monthly long-time contests in Codeforces, even if they would be unrated contests.

I became interested in such problems at the age of 15, but only at the age of 17, I was able to intensively develop in this direction. Until the age of 17, I did not have a computer and did not have constant access to someone else's. It was a different time, my friend.

Isn't free contribution enough ;) ?

Oh sure. And this post motivated me to do this session. It turned out badly that time. We tried to record something, but to be honest, my English is too bad for such an activity. It's hard for me to speak freely on general topics so that it still looks normal in the recording. In short, I did not like what happened.

I thought about such a thing. Perhaps it makes sense to hide uninteresting comments and comment threads in old posts by default (sort of like archiving). Of course, we must leave the opportunity to see everything. But in fact, there are a lot of comments that become uninteresting and even trash in terms of meaningful discussion.

Sorting functionality sounds interesting, but this is a comment tree, not everything is so simple.

I read almost all meaningful posts. But sometimes I miss something. Recently there was a post about a survey, I skipped it. I read about it only in the report.

It seems to me that I spend about an hour a day on reading posts and comments in total. But I still do a lot on Codeforces besides this, so much more. For example, yesterday I spent a significant amount of time launching testing of the upcoming div3 round and working with problems, writers and testers.

We can also support this field. This requires some effort, if it were quite simple, then I would have done it already.

But the current API provides all the information (history of rating changes) so that the tools can be fixed. But that hasn't been implemented, has it? If so, then the authors or the community (if it is open source) did not make an effort to fix it.

No https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/98770?#comment-875404

This question should be included in top 5 troll questions of all time.

After moving from Saratov to St. Petersburg (ITMO), I now have the opportunity to work on Codeforces almost full-time! I am only slightly involved in teaching at the university and am grateful that the authorities support my work on Codeforces. I don't do any research. I think I tend to be more practical than research.

So that it's easier to see a GM SecondThread!

Seconding the question--that said, I'm not a huge fan of the Edu/Div. 3 hacking system because I don't like waiting 12+ hours to see if I FSTed. I find it frustrating to discover that my solution to a problem is wrong long after I originally submitted my solution.

Another issue I have with the current hacking system is that in the case where pretests are intentionally made weak (hacking is generally irrelevant when pretests are strong), it penalizes FSTs far more severely than failing pretests, when intuitively there's no reason one is a worse offense than the other. Secondarily, in order to determine your contest strategy (e.g. whether to attempt to find hacks, whether to stress test solutions that passed pretests, etc), you must essentially guess whether pretests are strong. In contrast, my understanding is that TopCoder's hacking system avoids these issues by making all pretests into sample tests. This means that FSTing is clearly distinguished from failing pretests (pretests are given to you as samples, system tests are not), and you can tell for yourself how strong pretests are (since you know exactly what cases were covered by the pretests).

Unfortunately, I don't like TopCoder's approach either: FSTs generally introduce more variance than I'm comfortable with, and I find that TopCoder's system forces me to debug code to make absolutely certain there are no errors before submitting it, whereas on CF, once I'm reasonably confident my solution is correct, I can submit it and hope for the best, debugging only if it's wrong. This means that on CF, assuming pretests are strong, I can spend more time thinking about problems and less time debugging.

For context, my preferred solution is to consistently make pretests as strong as possible, limiting them only as much as is necessary to prevent queue issues. Then, either eliminate hacks altogether or shift them to a short phase after each contest (much like TopCoder), in order to prevent users from viewing each other's code during the contest.

Assuming this doesn't happen, though, I especially think that authors who do not intend to write strong pretests (i.e., those who are intentionally leaving edge cases, maximal cases, etc out of pretests) should say so in their contest announcements. At this point, the default assumption is that pretests will be as strong as possible, so contestants should know in advance that their strategy will need to change for these rounds. This is especially important because not giving everyone this information advantages anyone who does know in advance that pretests will be weak--for example, if I know an author personally and know that they like hacks and try to write weak pretests, then that information would give me an unfair advantage over other contestants in choosing my strategy (i.e., I'll know that I should debug my solutions particularly carefully, then lock them and look for hacks).

It seems to me that here it is impossible to say that something is strictly better or worse. There are pros and cons. It is possible that the rules will change.

Usually, we try to have 3 div1 and 3 div2 rounds per month. Sometimes it turns out more, sometimes less. But on average, we manage to follow this schedule. I glad if we manage to conduct two Div3 rounds a month. Regarding sponsorship rounds, this is not the main goal for us. It is an important source of income, an indicator of business interest in the community, but nothing more. It's more important for me to understand that the platform contributes to the life of the community and the community is alive. Rounds, posts, trainings, championships and camps are all part of our community life. I plan to continue developing Codeforces so that it is useful, convenient, and irreplaceable for the community.

Hi! It's not about money! It's a delivery issue. Since the start of the pandemic, there have been huge delivery problems. Many countries (including Brazil) don't accept parcels from Russia. A lot of packages are lost in the process or are returned to us after 4 (or more) months. In addition, the customs rules of the countries began to change a lot. The same problems affect manufacturers. This all complicates and slows down the work. :( We sincerely apologize for the delays and are working hard to remedy the situation. This is very frustrating for us too.

And I’m sorry I answered instead of Mike. But it’s kind of more my thing. :)

Rather yes than no.

Let's wait. But the value 4000 is really very symbolic. It seems to me that such a success will really deserve something special!

Yes, of course, the type of problems changes over time. This reflects the mood in the community. Both from the side of the participants and from the side of the writers.

Personally, I am not so thrilled with the large number of math puzzles in our rounds. I am absolutely sure that sports programming helped (was crucial) what kind of developer I became.

You know, in fact, in the 2000s, the type of problems was more biased towards implementation. And I loved it. For some reason, I knew how to enjoy the fact that again I quickly wrote non-trivial logic of some kind of modeling. Or implemented some parser again. Each time I did it a little differently. I wrote faster and more reliably. And it brought joy. Maybe it even looks a little like a dance: the music is the same, the movements are the same, but it's cool again and again!

It is important to understand that fluency in coding is one of the most important things you can learn from our contests.

On the other hand, coordinators have a much better understanding of today's problem needs than I do. I trust them. They can handle it!

With a small team, we can't just develop the API, invest a lot of effort into it without a strong reason. Let's say there are some specific successful tools that help the community and are objectively is popular. And these tools need some API improvements. I think then their developers should try to discuss this idea in the form of a post here. Most likely, in this case, the post will have a lot of support. This can be an argument for investing efforts in this direction.