Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advent of Code 2025

adventofcode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 416 posts

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#131

Post by amitav1 »

chongli wrote: post #13
zwnow wrote: post #3

> Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind. And yet I expect…

I am so glad there is no leaderboard this year. Making it a competition really is against the spirit of advent calendars in general. It’s also not a fair competition by default simply due to the issue of time zones and people’s life schedules not revolving around it. There are plenty of programming competitions and hackathons out there. Let this one simply be a celebration of learning and the enjoyment of problem sol…

I agree with the first point but the second point feels irrelevant. Yeah, people's life schedules don't revolve around it, but that doesn't mean shouldn't make iy a competition. Most people who play on chess.com don't have lives that revolve around it, but that doesn't mean that chess.com should abolish Elo rankings.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#132

Post by Alex_L_Wood »

fainpul wrote: post #20

Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).

Not sure if Kotlin is non-mainstream, but being able to use the vast Java libraries choice and a much nicer syntax are great boons.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#133

Post by jeroenhd »

bitbasher wrote: post #106

I'd like to play, sadly you can't without logging in with google, github, etc.

Having done my own auth I get why they do it this way. LLMs are already a massive problem with AoC, I imagine an anonymous endpoint to validate solutions would be even worse.

Having done auth myself, I can also understand why auth is being externalised like this. The site was flooded with bots and scrapers long before LLMs gained relevance and adding all the CAPTCHAs and responding to the "why are you blocking my shady CGNAT ISP when I'm one of the good ones" complaints is just not worth it. Let some company with the right expertise deal with all of that bullshit.

I'd wish the site would have more login options, though. It's a tough nut to crack; pick a small, independent oauth login service not under control of a bit tech company and you're basically DDOSing their account creation page for all of December. Pick a big tech company and you're probably not gaining any new users. You can't do decentralized auth because then you're just doing authentication DDOS with extra steps.

If I didn't have a github account, I'd probably go with a throwaway reddit account to take part. Reddit doesn't really do the same type of tracking Twitter tries to do and it's probably the least privacy invasive of the bunch.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#135

Post by evil-olive »

letmetweakit wrote: post #112
quirino wrote: post #107

Small anecdote: In the IEEEXTREME university programming competition there are ~10k participating teams. Our university has a quite strong Competitive Programming program and the best teams usually rank in the top 100. Last year a team ranked 30 and it's wasn't even our strongest team (which didn't participate) This year none of our teams was able to get in the top 1000. I would estimate close to 99% of the teams in…

Man, those people using LLMs in competitive programming ... where's the fun in that? I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.

> I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.

reminds me of something I read in "I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education." [0,1] emphasis added:

> During my sophomore year, I participated in my school’s debate team. I was excited to have a space outside the classroom where creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual rigor were valued and sharpened. I love the rush of building arguments from scratch. ChatGPT was released back in 2022, when I was a freshman, but the debate team weathered that first year without being overly influenced by the technology—at least as far as I could tell. But soon, AI took hold there as well. Many students avoided the technology and still stand against it, but it was impossible to ignore what we saw at competitions: chatbots being used for research and to construct arguments between rounds.

high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun. now they're using chatbots in order to generate arguments that the students can just regurgitate.

the end state of this seems like a variation on Dead Internet Theory - Team A is arguing the "pro" side of some issue, Team B is arguing the "con" side, but it's just an LLM generating talking points for both sides and the humans acting as mouthpieces. it still looks like a "debate" to an outside observer, but all the critical thinking has been stripped away.

0: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/high-...

1: https://archive.is/Lda1x

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#137

Post by jeroenhd »

I find it interesting how many sponsors run their own "advent of ". So far I've seen "cloud", "FPGA", and a "cyber security" one in the sponsors pages (although that last one is one I remember from last year).

I'm also surprised there are a few Dutch language sponsors. Do these show up for everyone or is there some kind of region filtering applied to the sponsors shown?

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#138

Post by auxym »

fainpul wrote: post #20

Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).

I've had a lot of fun using Nim for AOC for many years. Once you're familiar with the language and std lib, its almost as fast to write as python, but much faster (Nim compiles to C, which then gets compiled to your executable). This means that sometimes, if your solution isn't perfect in terms of algorithmic complexity, waiting a few minutes can still save you (waiting 5 mins for your slow Nim code is OK, waiting 5 hours for your slow Python isn't really, for me). Of course all problems have a solution that can run in seconds even in Python, but sometimes it's not the one I figure out first try.

Downsides: The debugging situation is pretty bad (hope you like printf debugging), smaller community means smaller package ecosystem and fewer reference solutions to look up if you're stuck or looking for interesting alternative ideas after solving a problem on your own, but there's still quality stuff out there.

Though personally I'm thinking of trying Go this year, just for fun and learning something new.

Edit: also a static type system can save you from a few stupid bugs that you then spend 15 minutes tracking down because you added a "15" to your list without converting it to an int first or something like that.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#139

Post by udev4096 »

tgv wrote: post #103
ahoka wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose Advent of Outage: just pull a random plug in the server room every day.

How about something like while [1]; do kill -9 $((rnd * 100000)); sleep 5; end Probably needs some external tool for the rnd function. On a serious note, I just saw this: https://linuxupskillchallenge.org

That's hardly an "upskill" imo. You would know almost all of it by running a linux server for a month or two

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#140

Post by AstroBen »

fainpul wrote: post #20

Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).

This question is really confusing to me because the point of AoC is the fun and experience of it

So.. a language that you're interested in or like?

Reminds me of "gamers will optimize the fun out of a game"

I'm pretty clojure-curious so might mess around with doing it in that

Post reply on HN