The 2017 edition was the first time I participated, and I severely underestimated how much fun it would be! Am participating (and to a much lesser degree competing) again this year :D
I mean, it is additional work. Not only do you need to store the emails/passwords securely, which while it isn't _that_ hard, it is a needed consideration, but you also need to now:
- provide a password reset service
- find a way to send emails to this many people for low cost, it is a free service after all, so all of the confirmation/reset emails are an additional cost
What I wonder is why can't I just create an arbitrary username unlinked to email or anything else? This isn't a bank account we're talking about.
Oh right, because they're probably gathering personal information, which is why they want access to my Google or other accounts.
I guess since they appear to have a "reddit" auth option and I think reddit still lets you create arbitrary usernames, that would be a two step process to do it.
that's such a baseless accusation. I think it's more likely Eric just wanted to spend his time working on the problems and not setting up password resets and building forms.
I've participated in this the last couple years. It is really well done. The puzzles get progressively harder as the month goes on. I usually try to use a language im interested in but don't have a lot of experience with, but thats even more of a challenge and generally by the 15th or 20th im struggling to find enough time to complete the puzzles, but I try to go back and finish everything eventually. Always learn something new; theyre generally problems different from what I work on day to day.
Excited for this year's version. I did last year's event in OCaml which was a challenging, yet very rewarding experience. Still trying to decide what language to use this year.
Yes, Rust is my other option I'm leaning towards. In process of learning it by building a ray tracer, so doing Advent of Code would be another way to get more familiar with it.
Always had been fascinated with functional programming, but kept stumbling with Haskell. Discovered the Real World OCaml [0] book and was instantly hooked. Sadly haven't been able to use it much outside of last year's Advent of Code and a toy ray tracer.
This is my first year participating in AoC and I am going with Elixir. I think this will be a great experience as I can try solving the problem on my own and then watch Jose Valim's approach live on Twitch. Here is more information if you are interested: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/11/lets-learn-elixir-t...
I'm really excited for this year's AoC, and trying to get other devs at my work involved too!
Last year I tried to solve at least the first few days in a bunch of different languages, doing Red/Green TDD so I could learn how to set up a basic project and do tests in languages I was less familiar with. Still trying to decide if I should take that approach again this year or focus on getting every day done in a single new language.
That's what I did too and my original plan was to use 25 different languages throughout the month. However as the puzzles got harder, I found there just wasn't enough time in the day. I'm sure the puzzles remain easy for some, but for me personally they got challenging even in the languages I already know.
I'm thinking of using Red this year, although it might not be ready, depending on what kinds of problems come up. Otherwise it will "just" be Prolog again. :)
To be honest that website looks very bad to me. Fonts are too thin and that makes the text quite difficult to read. Much more than e.g. HN. And that's in my desktop PC, in mobile I went directly to close the tab.
(Update) The "high contrast" CSS style they provide is more readable, but I'm sure it should be possible to create a dark style where readability doesn't suffer that much. That font is just not the best choice.
I use Stylus with a set of rules to increase contrast and change the font. Just changing the font (with default weight 400) has a huge effect on legibility.
I got a bit too invested in this last year. I even did a write up of one of the tasks. That year I did it all using JS since it's easy to write input parsers with it. This year I'll be doing it in Rust to stretch myself a little.
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That doesn't help - time is counted from midnight, so if you solve the problem on one account and then another, the second account will have a strictly worse time. About all it can really do is mess with the score distribution.
Also, the input data for each problem is randomized per user, so you really do need a proper programmatic solution (i.e. simply copying another person's answer is unlikely to work).
You could hurt other people's scores though right? Like if you and one other competitor traded wins on different days, but you had a second account that you posted the same solution to, your competitor would get third place on your winning days (and thus fewer points).
Aside from the other responses mentioning why cheating wouldn’t work, I don’t think it’s out of the question that people can solve these that quickly. The “trick”, from my experience, has been to quickly skim the problem, extract useful information (which you can “learn” to do if you do it enough), and try to figure out how to solve the problem while you are writing boilerplate to set up the problem. Using Python or a similarly high-level language often helps.
I'm one of the people who solved problems very quickly (3rd overall last year). I'm somewhat competitive by nature, and I did ACM programming challenges in undergrad (although I was never good enough to make the local team, heh). Happy to answer any questions you might have about "competitive" AoC; it's fun in a very different way than learning new languages for the competition. I personally used Python for the last few years, and I'll probably use it again this year (assuming I try to compete).
Part of it is familiarity with the format, which of course assumes they keep things reasonably similar this year. Knowing the kinds of problems that appear (parsing, graphs, optimization, reverse engineering, etc.) helped me put together a little library of code that means I'm not spending time rewriting fundamental algorithms.
Reading problem statements is one of those skills I picked up from ACM programming competitions. The problem statements usually contain a lot of fluff - to speed-code you want to be able to pluck out the relevant bits quickly so you can start formulating the solution.
I’m not OP, but if I were solving this I’d just take the smallest square less than that number, figure out where it is (the top left or bottom right corner), and then “run” the algorithm from there, which should only require one “turn” at the most. You really don’t need to know anything about spirals in particular; just look for a pattern that you can take advantage of to reduce your work.
Oh, I didn't see that. The Advent of Code website is strangely annoying in that it makes it extremely difficult to find past problems…
Based on what I found online (which is abridged rewordings of the problem, something of a sequence sum?) I'd get lazy at that point and implement something that makes the spiral. Presumably, this shouldn't take to long, as the sequence grows rapidly so they can't give us a number that's too big…
I was not particularly fast that day. If I recall correctly, I just bruteforced it (implemented the four-turn logic). Not elegant but it runs fast enough :)
I vaguely remember hearing about this last year, and I'm really excited to try my hand at it this year. I initially taught myself Python doing daily coding challenges, but it's been over 4 years since I've done any. I'm debating trying my hand at learning a new language through this, possibly Nim or Rust, but we'll have to see if they start to get too tough.
Would be cool if they asked for information after you completed a puzzle for the day - scale of 10 how hard did you consider the puzzle, did you learn something new, what language did you use to complete it - would be super interesting data I bet.
I think the three I mentioned would be a great place to start.
- On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you could do it with your eyes closed, 10 being you thought it was nearly impossible, how difficult was this puzzle for you?
- Did you learn something new because of this puzzle? Could be something about your language or a library or a new algorithm that helped you solve it.
- What language(s) did you use to solve this puzzle?
It could let you compare yourself with other developers - if you thought it was hard and most others didn't then you would know you might need to practice something more. It might be something that would best be combined with some profile level questions - like their experience level and primary languages that they use day to day.
It could tell us that people who used python found this particular puzzle easy (maybe because of some built in function in the stdlib) but people using some other language didn't.
Year over year it would be awesome to compare the languages that people use. Nobody is doing this for their job supposedly so these are either languages that people enjoy or find practical. I bet you'd find some correlations though too between language and how many puzzles they complete in a year - ie people using language x tend to finish the whole year but language y tend to drop off after day 10.
I'm just curious about why this is billed as an Advent calendar, when really the only thing it has in common with an Advent calendar is that it terminates on Christmas.
Is there anything about it that has anything to do with Advent, i.e. the Christian liturgical season that precedes Christmas?
It's a pretty common thing to call something "Advent of x" or "x Advent calendar" nowadays, if it involves something happening once each day between 1st and 25th of December. For example: https://24ways.org/
With an Advent calendar, you open a surprise, tiny gift every day of December until Christmas. With Advent of Code, you open a surprise, tiny code puzzle every day of December until Christmas.
100 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadhttp://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/
- provide a password reset service
- find a way to send emails to this many people for low cost, it is a free service after all, so all of the confirmation/reset emails are an additional cost
- etc
disclaimer : just a paying client here.
[1]: https://www.back4app.com/product/what-is-parse-server
Oh right, because they're probably gathering personal information, which is why they want access to my Google or other accounts.
I guess since they appear to have a "reddit" auth option and I think reddit still lets you create arbitrary usernames, that would be a two step process to do it.
And accusing someone of storing personal data without any substance is something that I don't consider to be in the HN spirit.
Not quite sure what language I'm going to do this year though
[0] https://dev.realworldocaml.org/
Last year I tried to solve at least the first few days in a bunch of different languages, doing Red/Green TDD so I could learn how to set up a basic project and do tests in languages I was less familiar with. Still trying to decide if I should take that approach again this year or focus on getting every day done in a single new language.
(Update) The "high contrast" CSS style they provide is more readable, but I'm sure it should be possible to create a dark style where readability doesn't suffer that much. That font is just not the best choice.
https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1067699713745530883
Stylus - https://add0n.com/stylus.html
Question: should I go with Racket or Chicken Scheme?
https://qubyte.codes/blog/advent-of-code-2017-day-20-task-2
2017 I solved in kotlin and got all the way to the end. I remember closing my laptop on Christmas Day and feeling elated/tired
It is such a fun way to pick up new langs
Also, the input data for each problem is randomized per user, so you really do need a proper programmatic solution (i.e. simply copying another person's answer is unlikely to work).
(Please don't do this!)
Part of it is familiarity with the format, which of course assumes they keep things reasonably similar this year. Knowing the kinds of problems that appear (parsing, graphs, optimization, reverse engineering, etc.) helped me put together a little library of code that means I'm not spending time rewriting fundamental algorithms.
Reading problem statements is one of those skills I picked up from ACM programming competitions. The problem statements usually contain a lot of fluff - to speed-code you want to be able to pluck out the relevant bits quickly so you can start formulating the solution.
Anyway I’m sure I won’t ever encounter that spiral as long as I live but if I do, I have code prepped for it :D
Based on what I found online (which is abridged rewordings of the problem, something of a sequence sum?) I'd get lazy at that point and implement something that makes the spiral. Presumably, this shouldn't take to long, as the sequence grows rapidly so they can't give us a number that's too big…
Huh? Click [Events], click on the year, click on the day.
[0]http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20...
[0] https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Advent%2...
So for this year I've converted it to a browser extension, so it fetches the data automatically :) Available for both Firefox [2] and Chrome [3].
[1] https://github.com/amochtar/aoc-ranking [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aoc-ranking/ [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aoc-ranking/jbnlaf...
- On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you could do it with your eyes closed, 10 being you thought it was nearly impossible, how difficult was this puzzle for you?
- Did you learn something new because of this puzzle? Could be something about your language or a library or a new algorithm that helped you solve it.
- What language(s) did you use to solve this puzzle?
It could let you compare yourself with other developers - if you thought it was hard and most others didn't then you would know you might need to practice something more. It might be something that would best be combined with some profile level questions - like their experience level and primary languages that they use day to day.
It could tell us that people who used python found this particular puzzle easy (maybe because of some built in function in the stdlib) but people using some other language didn't.
Year over year it would be awesome to compare the languages that people use. Nobody is doing this for their job supposedly so these are either languages that people enjoy or find practical. I bet you'd find some correlations though too between language and how many puzzles they complete in a year - ie people using language x tend to finish the whole year but language y tend to drop off after day 10.
I'm just curious about why this is billed as an Advent calendar, when really the only thing it has in common with an Advent calendar is that it terminates on Christmas.
Is there anything about it that has anything to do with Advent, i.e. the Christian liturgical season that precedes Christmas?
More here: https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/advent-calendars-des...