I don't really see a problem with it.

There was no restriction on a minimum thread size, so there's no reason to throw away one-article threads.

Thank you!

My solution is written in Go. I'm planning to publish its source code on Github after the end of this contest.

First of all, that's a duplicate: Hairy Lemur already posted a comment about one-article threads. Maybe we need to group issues here too, so I don't have to repeat myself.

Secondly, I still don't see how this implementation is incorrect. If the dataset contains a single article about some event, it should be turned into a thread with only that article. It would still constitute a group of news articles about the same event (just with a size of 1).

Imagine you're a user visiting a news aggregator. You probably want to see all topics, not just the ones represented by two or more articles.

I'm not talking about money either. All I'm saying is that you didn't prove that your code is faster.

Any language can be used write fast or slow programs. And any program can perform very differently on different hardware. That's why any testing should be performed under the exact same conditions.

You're right, my ranking is based on multiple different factors, and the size of a cluster is just one of them. I was trying to match my own feeling of what's important and what's not.

I don't think this claim "my entry is better" should be considered an issue of my work.

Even so, your submission runs language detection in ~2.5s per thousand files (mine in ~0.2s, so it's 12x faster, not 2x slower). Cannot say anything about clustering because your submitted version does not produce top/threads at all.

To correctly compare timings you'd need to run code on machines with the exact same specifications (same CPU and disk drive).

Saying that your code works faster (on your computer) than mine (on the test server) does not mean anything.

The advantage is clearly visible to everyone: 2.5s vs 0.2s, this is the officially confirmed timings.

If judges will decide to re-run your solution and it will be confirmed to work faster, I will stand corrected.

I really think that those comments would be more relevant under your own entry. They have nothing to do with mine.