While I agree that a lot of the confusion could've been avoided by reading more carefully, part of the problem was the dissemination of information. Facebook did a really poor job of this unfortunately, as all of the information was in multiple locations, and was not at all redundant. For example, the initial rules were in the FAQs, some updates were posted in the main group (Hacker Cup), and then other updates were posted in the Hacker Cup Qualification event page. So if you wanted a complete picture, you needed to check all three. And if the answer wasn't there, you weren't going to get one, as they weren't responding to questions at all as far as I could tell (and for fairly good reason - if you didn't filter out the non-official posts, the page was nigh unreadable).

The bigger problem in my book, however, was the issues with the submission system. I tried both Firefox and Chrome, and couldn't get the "download input" link to function properly (I tried, left clicking, "save as"-ing, opening in a new tab, etc.). Add the 6-minute time limit to this, and it was pretty bad. Six minutes to get the download to work, run your code on it, and then get back to the page, paste your output, and upload. Oh, and good luck eyeballing your output to make sure you pasted it correctly -- the window you paste into wasn't resize-able, and every line wrapped, so it looked like an utter mess.

Don't get me wrong, I sound rather negative in this post, but I love the idea, and look forward to the next attempt at it. I was just somewhat disappointed to see how the process went. And to be honest, I really wish they'd do away with the 6 minute time limit, and add a time limit for how long your code is allowed to take during execution. Though I suppose they have to restrict the languages then. Perhaps a "can you finish the problem within the 3 hour time limit" is sufficient for this competition then. As it is, knowing when to optimize, and when not to takes too long to figure out in the 3 hour time limit, so you end up taking a shot in the dark as to when you should be submitting your code.

Hopefully Facebook learns from these mistakes, and comes back with a competition that is just that much better. Also, if you're interested in the problem solving for this competition, check out the Puzzle Master. It's great fun as well.

Does Facebook only want to recruit people who careful read the directions, even when they're unclear and scattered over several different pages? Maybe they do - maybe they can afford to - but they'll get a lot of false negative that way.

I read all the FAQ stuff beforehand, so I thought I was prepared. I didn't know that there were additional rules/instructions when the contest started, because no one told me there were. So the first thing I did was read all three puzzles and download the test data for them. I actually solved the third puzzle and submitted my solution inside six minutes anyway, but I ran out of time on the first one (still submitted my solution after six minutes), and I didn't even bother with the second one because their sloppily worded FAQ didn't make it clear that getting through the qualifier round was competitive and that I needed to complete all three to have a chance at advancing. Their wording wasn't technically incorrect, but it gave the impression that they were just trying to filter out people who couldn't solve a simple problem.

I am pretty sure I'm the kind of person they were trying to capture with this competition, and, well, they failed to capture me.

The main problem wasn't the fact that rules were not stated correctly or that people didn't read them (at least when i started it, it was clear that you just had 6 minutes to generate the output after downloading the input file, make sense imho), it was the shoddy implementation of the site and lack of care on things like test output (missing lines, typos...). I did it on a sunday afternoon, not having anything better to do, but just the fact that when uploading the results the top list didn't get updated... was chrome fault? was my output for those dead-easy problems wrong? Cmon, this issues should have been caught during the testing phase of this webapp. Next time, i suggest to just open a contest on topcoder...

The difference is that this test is optional. I was just perusing the competition to see what it was all about. Who wants to spend all that time reading the instructions for a test I might not even bother to take? I clicked the link to download an input file, and then realized that doing so caused me to fail that question. Not a good experience. After encountering something else that was the slightest bit confusing, I just gave up on the whole thing.