The Facebook Hackathon consists of three online rounds with their finals taking care at Facebook’s headquarters in California. Each online round will be on three separate dates of January 28th, February 4th, and February 11th with only a certain number of contestants allowed to move forward if successful with the challenge.

Last year’s questions are located here. From the gist of it, it seems you should be familiar with dynamic programming and graph theory. So if you don’t have the slightest clue what they are, time to start studying before the date if you choose to enter!

Are you willing to try it out? Aside from having that great prize, its most likely you’d possibly land a job at Facebook. Facebook has been competing with other tech companies for the best talent around and a hackathon seems to attract the type of people they are looking for.

Heck, it’s 2012. If you haven’t been in a Hackathon now’s the best time to try it out!

Announcing Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup

You simply sign in with either Facebook or Google and are the presented with a list of challenges with point values corresponding to their difficulty. Each challenge comes with a description, sample input/output, and instructions for submission. You are scored based on the number of test cases your program passes and aren’t penalized for the number of submissions.

You also have access to their leader board which shows the current top Hacker at solving 18 questions with 52 submissions.

Once you have finished at least five problems you are eligible to apply the company of your dreams. If you are looking for a job soon, then this is an excellent way to prepare yourself for tough interviews as well as getting noticed by companies through Interview Street.

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

Curriculums for Computer Science usually include your typical Algorithms, Operating Systems, Security, Networks, Databases, Computer Organization, and among other classes but it’s truly lacking one critical course in my opinion, Careers 101.

This course would include most of the things that aren’t taught in regular courses such how to stand our from the crowd when applying for jobs, how to build a network, how to make yourself valuable as an engineer, and such. If I would’ve had been taught all these things before I started my career, I would’ve been a lot more prepared.

Recently an article called Don’t call yourself a programmer, and other career advice discusses lots of interesting points:

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

It’s quite long, but trust me, it’s worth the read if you plan on becoming a successful engineer.

Don’t call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

What happens to their online presence after that? Facebook allows you to Report a Deceased Person’s Profile which only allows friends to view the deceased one’s profile and keep viewing and posting on their wall. I’m not aware of what other sites do, but if you do, let us know in the comments.

The following video from Ted Talks discusses this topic in more detail.

Source – After your final status update

Do I think it’ll fail? I actually don’t. Twitter delivers 1 Billion Items, while Google+ shares 350 Billion. Google+ has 10 Million going strong. And yes, Google+ is also gaining popularity amongst the ladies. If you like, Mashable has a Complete Guide to Google+.

What I like about Google+

One thing I like about Google+ is the ability to clearly define separate groups of friends to whom to share content with. Yes, Facebook has Friend Lists, but I believe Google+ hit the sweet spot as its easier the average user to organize their friends into circles due to its simplicity. I also noticed that some of my friends who wouldn’t share much on Facebook, are actually posting on Google+ which I like.

The Hangout feature is also a really neat idea as it allows you to post to your circles that you are free to start hanging out with anyone via video chat. Anyone can join in by simply clicking on the invite in the post. This is something that Facebook was missing for a long time since group chat wasn’t particularly simple to perform on Facebook. Facebook did recently add Skype Video chat (which is clunky) and group chat which is nice but has been late in the game. Even MySpace had Skype-Powered calls back in 2007.

The best feature I love is the integration with all Google Products. I like how I receive notifications and can even reply to comments on threads I participate in while I’m checking my GMail. I got rid of the pesky e-mail notifications as I can easily see them while I log into Gmail,

The next feature I like is the integration with Picasa and Picasa Web Albums with Google+. You now can upload an unlimited amount of photos under a certain resolution and sharing with friends is pretty simple and Google+ makes it even easier.

The summary below, is also something I truly love about it.

Instead of saying, “I’m going to write a blog post now,” or “I’m going to send an e-mail” or “I think I’ll tweet something” you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you’re going to say it to.

If you address it to “Public,” it’s a blog post.

If you address it to “Your Circles” it’s a tweet.

If you address it to your “My Customers” Circle it’s a business newsletter.

If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

I’d say this is pretty revolutionary. – Google+ shared content

What I don’t like about Google+

So far I’ve grown to love Google+ but there are somethings I don’t like. For one, do we need another social network? I’m not sure, but since it directly ties well into Google Products, its hard not to use it. I also don’t like the ability to reshare your content so everyone else could see. Google+ has an option to remove this feature, but this feature should be enabled by default.

See you on Google+!

If you want, follow me on Google+. If you don’t have an account, drop your e-mail below and I or someone else could send you an invite.

Dream.Build.Play is a Microsoft competition that allows you to dream big while displaying your innovative mastery of XNA Game Studio to build an awesome world.

Interested in competing? All you need is some creativity and the motivation to transform your ideas into a master piece. Unfortunately, the submission period for this years Dream.Build.Play was just over on June 14th, 2011. If you plan on competing for next year, you have an entire year to start working on your next game.

I’ll be following this year’s competition as I have an entry from a couple of friends.

The following is another entry so you can get an idea of the type of entries that are submitted into the competition. Over 100 entries are found in the Dream.Build.Play gallery.

So what do you actually win? Well, Grand Prize winners will win $40,000 with the opportunity of a obtaining a Xbox Live publishing contract, 1st prize $20,000, 2nd prize $10,00 and 3rd prize $5,000. All you need to compete is an XBox 360. So if you’ve ever wanted to make a game, why not motivate yourself by using Microsoft amazing XNA studio to make video games, and start building one for next years competition? If you have never built a game, and think its not enough time, well its more than enough so start building!

I’ll be following this competition closely as winners will be announced around August-September. Let me know which games you think will be the winners and if you plan on competing in next year’s competition.

Photo by digitalpimp

Let’s start with what an online merchant account can do for your customers. You may have experienced a situation in which you were asked to pay for something online via check or cash, or even through a sketchy-sounding third party. None of these payment methods quite inspire the same amount of confidence as being able to pay up front with a credit card online, and then immediately see that whatever it is you have paid for has been shipped to you or made available to you. It’s simply a quicker and more trustworthy system, and seems more professional on the part of the merchant from whom you are buying. If a website offers a credit card payment service, we are generally more likely to think of that website as a legitimate and professional store or business.

A merchant account can also benefit you as a business owner. The obvious perk is that as customers begin to trust you more, and as they find quick and easy ways of paying you, your sales will almost definitely increase. More trust means more returning customers, and more customers means more sales. In fact, statistics even show that websites with merchant accounts tend to have better sales rates than others. The other benefit, for you as the owner or businessman, is that you will never have to deal with bad or bouncing checks, or faulty cash payments. A credit card will either work or it won’t, meaning that transactions will only go through if legitimate. Ultimately, if you’re trying to sell a service or product online, a merchant account on your website is almost too helpful a feature to ignore.

Have something you want to share? Feel free to contact me and we’ll make sure we can get your content to our audience.

So if you were wondering what is your best bet after graduation, you should check out the following interesting read. What do I think? Making your own start up would be even better.

When I graduated from college in 2008, I don’t think I knew anyone who was going to work for a startup, but things are very different on the East Coast, where it seemed like getting a full-time offer from Google or Goldman Sachs was the ultimate achievement. I worked at Google for two years after graduation, and then left to explore other opportunities and ended up at Pulse, a small startup in Palo Alto, where I currently work.

Read more at Startup or Big Company After Graduation?

I tried writing a bio, but the one given to us at UCLA for the seminar does a much better job:

Vinton G. Cerf is VP and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Cerf served at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, at DARPA and as a member of the Stanford University Faculty. Cerf co-invented the architecture and basic protocols of the Internet. He has received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, ACM Turing award, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Japan Prize. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of ICANN and as founding president of the Internet Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Cerf holds a BS degree from Stanford University and MS and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA. He has received eighteen honorary degrees. – UCLA

The main point of the presentation was to gain interest in fellow MS and Ph.D. students in order to re-think the internet as there are lots of tough internet research problems out there. Below, I’ll summarize some of these major problems he addressed:

• A universal method of authenticated one self on the internet instead of using passwords that can easily be lost, forgotten, or stolen.
• The challenge of going for IPv4 to IPv6 as some devices will require to have both addresses since some services on the internet only can serve either IPv4 or IPv6
• The notion of a broadcast. Packets are currently sent one by one to multiple recipients. What if we wanted to send the same packet to hundreds of users such as a radio broadcast?
• How do we address bit rot? When the software that is needed to interpet these bits is not supported anymore in the future?
• How do we determine what packets that are transmitted are safe? Some of these are sent crypted and when the destination opens this packet, it might be malware/virus/trojan horse. Security on the Internet?
• How do we integrate cloud computing to make significant changes in the internet’s ecosystem?
• How do we use satellites orbiting in our solar system to become nodes in order to create an Interplanetary extension of the Internet?

So there you have it. You have any ideas on how to solve these problems? If you do let me know. Approaches to these problems would certainly be great projects for obtaining a Ph.D.

Before I close off, I’d like to share the most memorable quote from his speech. Vint mentioned that when there was about 400 computers on the internet, he wanted everyone to start adopting TCP/IP but no one would do it. So he decided to do the following:

He mentioned after that, the adoption rate steadily increased. Then he did it again, and again when it would plateau in order to continue having everyone adopt the new protocol.

If you haven’t and are interested, make sure to check out the talk above.

Anyways, if you ever wanted to impress your friends or even have fun yourself typing like a mad men while your screen pours out with code, you should check out Hacker Typer.

You simply visit the site, choose a few options such as the type of console, background color, speed of typing, and then you are off coding. The image above is a result of my great skills in action and yours too if you try it out.

The website gained unprecedented traffic due to numerous high profile websites pointing to it. At the time I wanted to show it with you, but unfortunately it was down at that moment. Below is the message the author has on his site.

Dear my fellow Hackers,
as many of you might have experienced Hacker Typer is under pressure.
We did not expect what was coming and so we were not ready for millions of hits in this short time. There are every second at least 10 people smashing their keyboard to hack something.

A lot of users are asking for more features, more than everything, submitting files.
At the moment this would lead to kill the server and a huge bill for me. this is way.

For this reasons, if you liked Hacker Typer, if it made your day better, it made you laugh or just smile,
Please, consider donating. Even as little as 0.5$ will make a difference.
Also to thank you i will make page where i can add a link to your website!
Hack Typer makes thousands of hourly visits so this can also be a great opportunity to get visibility!
No metter the topic of your website! Just send me a link in the donation note or email to hackertyper *at* gmail *dot* com

Thanks,
Simone

So there you have it. Go and check it out and impress your friends. Just don’t show them your secret. Ok, maybe you can after a few weeks of them asking.

Hacker Typer