Smriti Tuteja

Bright minds exist everywhere and technological expertise is an abundance, what usually falls short is the correct recognition, strengthening and harnessing of these skills. The NASSCOM IT service council has thus taken up an initiative to enhance technology skills by providing a platform to showcase them. They are inviting and rewarding highly skilled people in the technological domain for their efforts and expertise. The initiative called TechNgage is aimed at encouraging Indian technologists to become world class techies and stands by the objective statement of ‘Celebrating technology and technologists’.

NASSCOM is looking for working professionals, entrepreneurs, innovators, students or anyone who is driven by the passion for technology. The theme for TechNgage 2016 is Your city - Smart and Secure and aims at the development of a technological solution to make the city smart by enhancing the quality of services in domains like healthcare, water, education, waste management, transport, energy and citizen services. A smart city is essentially the one with a superior quality of all these services and hence healthy and viable living conditions.

The contest comprises of 3 rounds viz. the online phase, offline phase and a 12-week challenge. You can know more about the contest at http://www.nasscom.in/techngage/.

There are cash prizes worth INR 30 lakh to be won but there is much more to the prizes than just the cash. The winners will be awarded as NASSCOM technology fellow and NASSCOM technology explorers at a ceremony that will have eminent people from the corporate, academic and government sectors. It is a great opportunity to receive the recognition and visibility that you have been waiting for. That is not all, there are other perks like an all expenses paid week trip to Silicon Valley with a pre-arranged tour of the top companies, one-year blanket pass to all major NASSCOM events, access to premium research reports and an opportunity to buy a tech gadget worth INR 1 lakh. Well, that is some great exposure and an awesome opportunity to learn.

Register for the event at the earliest, it isn’t an opportunity to be missed.

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“While learning equips you, and practice improves your skills, competition helps you prove your worth”

We at HackerEarth strongly believe in the power of them all. We understand the value associated with learning, practicing and competing. With the same goals, we started our flagship event ‘IndiaHacks’ on January 8th, 2016.

IndiaHacks soon received a lot of enthusiasm and emerged as the largest conglomeration of developers. More than 1 lakh developers across the globe registered for IndiaHacks. It has been an amazing journey so far with tremendous zeal, tough competition, and global participation. The first phase is coming to an end and we are delighted with how the event has unfolded.

As much as we believe in competition, we also believe in preparing the participants and rewarding them for their efforts and triumphs. The phase 2 of IndiaHacks is an offline conference that will be held on 19th March at Vivanta by Taj, Yeshwanthpur. The conference will have experts from various domains of technology to talk about different topics and share their knowledge with the community. The experts will be a part of events such as tech talks, panel discussions, working sessions, hangouts etc. and will speak on a plethora of topics like data visualization, big data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, fintech, competitive programming, robotics, scientific computing, open source, embedded systems programming etc.

It is a great opportunity to interact with them and gain knowledge in various domains.The conference will end with rewarding the best minds across each track.



The tickets to the conference are up for purchase and 100 early birds will receive a discount of 25% on each ticket.

Top 20 teams from each track will receive free entry to the conference. The competition doesn’t end here, there are other ways to win free tickets too.

Click on the link below to know more about the conference, what it has in store for you and what you can do to be a part of it.

https://www.hackerearth.com/indiahacks-conference/

The telecom service provider just sent out a notification that one can use their services only to call friends and family in Delhi and not in other parts of the country. How does that sound? Partial? Well, don’t worry it isn’t true. Why should the service provider decide who should I call from my phone? This post will try to demystify the Net Neutrality myth.

The internet works on a similar principle and the principle advocates for an open internet. One must be able to communicate freely across the internet. This principle is referred to as net neutrality. For the net to be neutral, ISPs and the government must treat all data on internet equal and not charge differential based on user, content, website, app etc.

There has been much hue and cry about net neutrality off late and the debate seemed to be growing exponentially over the past few months. With the biggest names in the media industry expressing their views on net neutrality, it has been the most discussed topic all over the internet. The debate started gaining attention with Airtel coming up with a zero plan that stated that the provider will charge for VOIP calls made through apps like Whatsapp and Skype, it also made certain apps free for the users. While they argued that Airtel zero is a marketing platform where the data charges will be paid by the companies whose apps are free, the others condemned it as against net neutrality. This led to Flipkart pulling itself out of the scheme.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had initially come up with a consultation paper that aimed at setting up a regulatory framework for over the top (OTT) services in India like Whatsapp and Skype but was criticized on grounds that it is already regulated by the IT Act.

Finally, after a lot of debates TRAI has come up with a decision that is in favor of net neutrality.

On Monday, February 8th, 2016, they barred the service providers from charging differential prices for data services and hence phased out Airtel Zero and Facebook’s Free Basics in their current form.

The decision encompasses the following points:

1. No service provider can offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content.
2. No service provider shall enter into any arrangement, agreement or contract, by whatever name called, with any person, natural or legal, that results in discriminatory tariffs for data services being offered or charged by the service provider for the purpose of evading the prohibition in this regulation.
3. Reduced tariff for accessing or providing emergency services, or at times of public emergency has been permitted.
4. Financial disincentives for contravention of the regulation have also been specified.
5. TRAI may review these regulations after a period of two years.

This decision that favors net neutrality will also favor the users who are free to access any content on the web, after all, it is the worldwide web and access to all websites must be easy and hassle-free. It will also favor startups and new business owners by giving them the opportunity to showcase their products and services without being discriminated against the big giants that can easily pay money to be free to the users. Net neutrality hence supports a competitive marketplace. It also promotes freedom of speech.

A word with a Facebook spokesperson reveals that they are disappointed about TRAI’s decision but will make further efforts to promote their idea of 'Free Basics' for the unconnected. Telecom providers may also come up against the decision but for now, the battle is won and our Internet is free. This success can be attributed to our efforts to understand net neutrality and raising a voice against the abuse of our privileges by the influential giants. The victory of net neutrality is our victory.

Let’s celebrate this victory by sharing our joy by letting everyone know that the internet is infinite and we are free to use it according to our wish. And what better way to start than participating in some of the exciting challenges that we are conducting.

There isn’t much time left for the regional level of ACM ICPC coding contest. It is the most prestigious contest globally, and considering the exposure and charisma that it holds, as one nears the timelines, stress levels increase and one tends to doubt their preparation.

We at HackerEarth, understand this and conduct a 5-hour practice contest as a build up to the ACM ICPC.

The contest was styled similar to the ACM ICPC contests, wherein 5 hours were provided to solve 11 programming problems. The problem set, as described by the team involved in preparing, testing, fixing, and conducting the contest - was relatively easy for expert programmers, and we could feel the wave of submissions coming as soon as the contest became live. In the first hour itself, 8 out of 11 problems were solved by a lot of teams. The three remaining problems according to the team were difficult, especially Legendary Graph - and they were right! Only two teams could manage to crack that problem in the duration of 5 hours.

Though, the problem set ended up having one issue - which was the 10th problem.

So, before the prizes are distributed and sent, we need to clear the confusion regarding the final standings of the contest.

Game of sweets! (the 10th problem) did not have a clear problem statement, which resulted in a lot of teams interpreting the question differently than they should have — and ended up submitting a lot of apparently wrong solutions — some of which were correct according to the alternate interpretation of the problem statement. So, to sort that out, we decided to manually evaluate the submissions for the top people in the rank list — by checking if their solution passed either of the two interpretations of the given problem and then update the rank list for the top 3 people and the top 3 Indian teams.



The contest received participation from about 25 countries across the globe. A total of 1384 teams participated. Some of the best international programmers like anta, Lewin, Errichto, Xellos, Natsugiri, waterfalls also participated.

The top 3 teams were Anta, bloody_unko, and Lewin - where Anta and Lewin participated individually, and not in a team! They would be awarded vouchers worth $100, $80 and $50 respectively. The top 5 Indian teams were Faceless Men, DaFruitsSalad, Rex_Regum, Heuristics, Mobius_Treap. The top 3 Indian teams in this contest, who also qualify for ACM ICPC Regional will have their ACM ICPC travel expenses reimbursed.

The practice contest has been successful in equipping the participants with the format of the regional level of ACM ICPC contest. It has also succeeded in bringing to light several competent programmers on the global level. The zeal that this contest received globally, encourages us to come up with other similar contests in the future.

PS. You can find the editorials for all the problems in the contest here.