Advent of Code 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#41

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

aczerepinski wrote: post #26

I'm exited to dust off my Elixir skills. Jose Valim (creator of the language) is going to stream solutions on Twitch on a one-day lag.

If you want to pair for fun, hit me up! I love Elixir, and it's probably my strongest language. Email in profile.

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#42

Post by has2k1 » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

Marazan wrote: post #39

anthay wrote: post #38

I did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod... )

Never rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account

You cannot cheat that way. It tracks time since the question became live.

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#43

Post by nneonneo » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

Marazan wrote: post #39

anthay wrote: post #38

I did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod... )

Never rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account

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).

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#44

Post by pmulv » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

People have been interested in this in the past so I'll post it again: Peter Norvig's satisfying Jupyter notebook solutions from AoC 2016[0].

[0]http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20...

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#45

Post by nneonneo » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

anthay wrote: post #38

I did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod... )

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.

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#46

Post by rehemiau » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

aczerepinski wrote: post #26

I'm exited to dust off my Elixir skills. Jose Valim (creator of the language) is going to stream solutions on Twitch on a one-day lag.

Announcement link: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/11/lets-learn-elixir-t...

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#47

Post by snake117 » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

fells wrote: post #9

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.

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...

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#48

Post by mochtar » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

Last year I created a visualization of our private leaderboard [1], but that required same manual work to update the ranking each day.

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...

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#49

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Advent of Code 2018

#50

Post by aquova » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

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.