The old Dark Signs were a lot like that - you "hacked" into computers by, say, finding bugs in the scripts they ran. It was really fun.
You can still find the game by searching through http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://darksigns.com - amazingly enough, the files are still present on the present-day site, they're just not linked anymore.
I don't know - there was a site back then (died because of admins, not hackers) called, I think, Digital Evolution (dievo.org?) that hosted a lot of security-related games, covering web-based stuff like SQL injection and going on to shell-based games where your focus was to elevate your privileges, usually by exploiting a small program given to you - sometimes with the source, sometimes without it.
And as far as I can remember, they never got "really" hacked. Damn, I miss that place. There were riddles, math games, sigh...
I'm always torn when I see simple introductions into programming like this. One one hand, I like the idea of a free, good resource and a gentle introduction for those who need it, and on the other hand, I fear that some people really shouldn't be exposed to programming in the first place, and too gentle an introduction leaves them with an unwarranted feeling that they actually know what they're doing. On the gripping hand, I've been known to have my moments of being an elitist bastard, so bear with me here.
Well, it's optimal, not optimized. So let me re-phrase that in a way that's more realistic - I trust my algorithm choice to be optimal, and my code expresses those algorithms in a simple way, which get a good speed to cleanness ratio. :)
Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition".
I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the former case, and I'm simply grateful in the latter case. And if I rewrite someone else's code for the better, I do feel good - not because I "beat" him, but because the code is better now. And isn't such a stepwise refinement a worthy goal?
I see. This is still anecdotal evidence, but now it's better than most, for what it's worth. While I think that a dedicated Lisp hacker could have done far better, without seeing the code in question this is all a moot point on both sides, really. Edit: Especially since it's not big news than non-optimized Lisp is slower than heavily-optimized C. ;)
I should know better, but I'll bite as well - were those Lisp programs, by chance, written as quick prototypes without any optimizations or by people who didn't really grok Lisp? Saying that "algorithms were the same" isn't terribly informative - after all, using the worn out factorial example, both the tail-optimized and stack-using versions of it would still use the same algorithm.
And likewise, watching selectively is even easier with some peer-to-peer networking and file sharing sites. You can see almost any show you happen to fancy at the moment - and you get to skip the commercials or pause when convenient. Also, most of the time your watching habits aren't recorded by shady companies for unspecified marketing reasons. Even better, there's absolutely no chance of accidentally ending up watching something you didn't plan to, which is the main idea behind corporate TV.
Also - as far as this individual is concerned, popular culture is overrated.
Well, taking your dedicated work machine off the internet - or maybe at least blocking it on the router with a script every hour or so, forcing you to make a conscious decision about going online seems to work for lots of people.
Then again - reading tech news, for example, isn't all that bad, so how about just mapping Youtube and similar time-sinks to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file?
By never developing a TV habit and instead relying on the internet to provide me with the few things I find enjoyable to watch, I've managed to reach a stage when I'm surprised that people actually watch TV, given the choice. If you've never done so before, try living for a week without your usual multimedia hit, there's a fair chance you'll like that extra few hours.
You can still find the game by searching through http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://darksigns.com - amazingly enough, the files are still present on the present-day site, they're just not linked anymore.