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Advent of Code 2019

adventofcode.com

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Re: Advent of Code 2019

#31

Post by cstuder »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #29
vb4 wrote: post #10

Do you still need to sign up in order to use this? I've been wanting to do AoC for the past few years, but the mandatory signup prevented me from doing so. Just give me the tasks. I don't want any leaderboards or anything like that. Edit: The aspect of customized tasks does not require sign-ups. Just use a cookie or something.

Mandatory signups on the internet, especially for tools that don't require them, are dangerous. They feel like deliberate or accidental honeypots, trying to get people's passwords. As members of the industry who have seen the problems that thrive from this practice, we should be opposed to them. The number of things you need a membership for a extremely limited. Can you imagine if you went to your local supermarket t…

It's OAUTH, the site itself doesn't require any password.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#32

Post by stefanchrobot »

harco wrote: post #19

What are you guys "using" the AoC for? Highscore hunting in your most favorite environment? Learning something new, or unusual? For me, this year, I'll give it another try to get into rust a bit more. Or maybe finally golang, after all these years of enterprisey java.

Last year I did "Advent of Elixir" at my company with the puzzles from AoC. It was slow paced but I got some people excited about Elixir! I also followed José Valim on Twitch to see how he tackled those.

If you want to stay competitive, you've got to invest some time right before Christmas, so I gave up on that pretty quickly. Instead I did the puzzles at my on pace and spent some extra time playing with the puzzles that I found especially fun:

https://twitter.com/StefanChrobot/status/1080574491535781899

https://twitter.com/StefanChrobot/status/1078448111041892352

As a bonus, you get something to show whenever you're asked to share some code when applying for a job!

And then there's the learning factor - the puzzles are progressively more difficult, but I guess still doable for the average programmer. At some point some of them start to feel repetitive, but that's great if you get a good hold on processing data in your language of choice.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#33

Post by gerikson »

jodrellblank wrote: post #24
jodrellblank wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a neatly polished programming challenge site which is both communal and competitive, there’s a bonus score (I think) for completing on the same day a challenge is released, there’s a leaderboard race for the first 100 answers each day (typically all gone within 1-2 minutes after midnight) and there’s a subreddit where people share their solutions in all kinds of languages, and it’s nothing to do with competing f…

I should have linked the Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/ and see on the sidebar on the right in desktop view, the "Solution Megathreads" e.g. from Day 5 last year there is https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/a3912m/2018_d... with tons of solutions including more oddball ones like VimScript, less popular like Common Lisp and APL, and lots of people use it as an excuse to learn/use a new langu…

The subreddit is pretty great. Tons of good discussion, feedback in the (very rare) cases when something's pear-shaped about the day's puzzle, and a helpful vibe.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#34

Post by SifJar »

vb4 wrote: post #10

Do you still need to sign up in order to use this? I've been wanting to do AoC for the past few years, but the mandatory signup prevented me from doing so. Just give me the tasks. I don't want any leaderboards or anything like that. Edit: The aspect of customized tasks does not require sign-ups. Just use a cookie or something.

> Just use a cookie or something.

Someone downloads their input, clears their cookies before submitting solution & then their solution is "wrong" because they're using an outdated input.

Seems like tying you to something more persistent i.e. a google/twitter/reddit/github acocunt is a more reliable strategy

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#35

Post by gerikson »

harco wrote: post #19

What are you guys "using" the AoC for? Highscore hunting in your most favorite environment? Learning something new, or unusual? For me, this year, I'll give it another try to get into rust a bit more. Or maybe finally golang, after all these years of enterprisey java.

I don't get to code much in the day job, so having a bite-sized puzzle is great entertainment.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#36

Post by alexfoo »

Found it in 2016 and have done it ever since (and in the early days of December 2016 I went back and did the 2015 puzzles I'd missed).

I was one of the 271 people who had all 200 stars (i.e. completed all puzzles) when Eric tweeted out that stat.

Usually takes anything from 5 minutes to an hour do most puzzles, quickly hacked together in perl. Very occasionally there's one that takes longer than that. Sometimes I redo them in different languages (Go to try that out, C to remind me how bare bones the base language is, etc).

Can't wait for it to start this year.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#37

Post by yCloser »

mesaframe wrote: post #5

I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?

problems are quite interesting (after initial days, those are usually trivial)

e.g. once in 2017 you had problem1: implement an interpreter for this asm-like language. ok, 5 instructions, super easy. ...problem2, run this asm-like program. You couldn't, it was 10^n iterations, would take days. You had to read, understand and optimize the asm-like code.

last year I was amazed writing a function to check if two rectangles intersect (you can do it in like 2 lines)

so, TLDR, you get a lot of "hey that's cool! I never thought about it"

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#38

Post by fyp »

jodrellblank wrote: post #8
mesaframe wrote: post #5

I'm have seen people being really excited for AoC. What's so special about it?

It’s a neatly polished programming challenge site which is both communal and competitive, there’s a bonus score (I think) for completing on the same day a challenge is released, there’s a leaderboard race for the first 100 answers each day (typically all gone within 1-2 minutes after midnight) and there’s a subreddit where people share their solutions in all kinds of languages, and it’s nothing to do with competing f…

I wouldn't say "1-2 minutes" but definitely within 1-2 hours even for the harder problems.

This guy finished in the top 10 last year and streamed(not live) his solutions so you can see how fast you need to be to be competitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgv6d6rrQxo&list=PLZhotmgEsC...

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#39

Post by lilsoso »

stefanchrobot wrote: post #32
harco wrote: post #19

What are you guys "using" the AoC for? Highscore hunting in your most favorite environment? Learning something new, or unusual? For me, this year, I'll give it another try to get into rust a bit more. Or maybe finally golang, after all these years of enterprisey java.

Last year I did "Advent of Elixir" at my company with the puzzles from AoC. It was slow paced but I got some people excited about Elixir! I also followed José Valim on Twitch to see how he tackled those. If you want to stay competitive, you've got to invest some time right before Christmas, so I gave up on that pretty quickly. Instead I did the puzzles at my on pace and spent some extra time playing with the puzzles…

Do the problems require familiarity with say more serious algorithmic techniques such as graphs?

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#40

Post by Freak_NL »

JeremysIron wrote: post #6

This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give? As I recall, most of the time the input is delineated by spaces or linebreaks and it helps if you can carve it up easily right off the bat.

I tried AoC in Rust two years ago, and you really don't need anything beyond the excellent standard library. Rust has lots of nice features that make working with the type of input AoC gives trivial.

By limiting yourself to the standard library at first, I find that you can get a good feel for the language itself.

You could look up some of the published solutions from last year to get a feel for what is possible.

Example: https://github.com/bertptrs/adventofcode/tree/master/2018/sr...

This person kept a minimal common library for recurring functionality and a small wrapper application that launches the code for each puzzle. It looks like a really clean approach.

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