HackerRank

The best site for learners today. It is like an exercise book, the more you solve the more you can.

The good

• the problems give me a feeling of having truly probed for my skills
• the maximum score accurately reflects the time (in minutes, for me personally) spent on solving them.
• the feeling of progressing thousands of places at once in their user base is enjoyable and addictive.

The bad

It's hard to copy and paste to/from the site. I suspect this is on purpose, because any reasonable code editor would have this feature, and you'd have to go to great extents to break it so much.

• Cutting doesn't work even in-site, it copies instead; you have to additionally press backspace.
• Working with your own IDE is very difficult: when you paste something into the site, it progressively indents the text (at least with Python). I have complained to them about this, and they have not responded.
• Copying snippets yields the following ridiculous behavior, if you try to do too many lines:

def print_frac(frac):
 print("{}/{}".format(frac.numerator, frac.denominator))

… 
 return min_so_far, argmin_so_far

Yes, the ellipsis is coming straight from the clipboard; I did not edit them in! I can't copy my own code back from the site!

I thank AlternativeTo for existing, because they allowed me to find alternatives to this poor user experience. I will try some of them out; I'll probably pass on HackerRank's opportunity because of this copy/paste conundrum; as much as its gamification tries to hook me into addiction.

I think any site messing with your browser's basic functions infringes upon your right to use your computer. (Richard Stallman, founder of GNU, noticed that if you can't use the software, then the software is using you.)

The fact that they are doing it for copy protection or enforcing honesty among players is not an excuse. Malevolent people will circumvent the JS, but honest people are repelled by such mistreatment.

[Edited by danhaiduc, August 24]