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

181–190 of 416 posts

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#181

Post by matsemann »

azkalam wrote: post #173
qsort wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also in a few local leaderboards, but I'm not "really" competing, it's more of a fun group thing. Premises: (i) I love Advent of Code and I'm grateful for its continuing existence in whatever form its creators feel like it's best for themselves and the community; (ii) none of what follows is a request, let alone a demand, for anything to change; (iii) what follows is just the opinion of some random guy on the Int…

Do you know of anything like AoC but that feels less contrived? I often spend the most time understanding the problem requirements because they are so arbitrary - like the worst kind of boardgame! Maybe I should go pick up some OSS tickets...

Being contrived, with puns or other weirdness is kinda on par for this kind of problems. Almost every programming competition I've ever been to have those kind of jokes.

Just a random example: https://open.kattis.com/problems/magicallights

But the Kattis website is great. The program runs on their server without you getting to know the input (you just get right/wrong back), so a bit different. But also then gives you memory and time constraints which you for the more difficult problems must find your way out of.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#182

Post by matsemann »

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…

When I did competitions like these at uni (~10-15 years ago), we all used some thin-clients in the computer lab where the only webpages one could access were those allowed by the competition (mainly the submission portal). And then some admin/organizers would feed us and make sure people didn't cheat. Maybe we need to get back to that setup, heh.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#183

Post by gregdeon »

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…

Oof. I had a great time cracking the top 100 of Advent of Code back in 2020. Bittersweet to know that I got in while it was still a fun challenge for humans.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#184

Post by sunrunner »

jlouis wrote: post #66
sunrunner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For both, I recommend coming prepared. Any recommendations for Go? Traditionally I've gone for Python or Clojure with an 'only builtins or things I add myself' approach (e.g. no NetworkX), but I've been keen to try doing a year in Go however was a bit put off by the verbosity of the parsing and not wanting to get caught spending more time futzing with input lines and err. Naturally later problems get more puzzle-he…

It's usually easy enough for Go you can just roll your own for the problems at hand. It won't be as elegant as having access to a combinator-parser, but all of the AoC problems aren't parsing problems. Once you have something which can "load \n seperated numbers into array/slice" you are mostly set for the first few days. Go has verbosity. You can't really get around that. The key thing in typed languages are to cook…

> It won't be as elegant as having access to a combinator-parser, but all of the AoC problems aren't parsing problems.

Yeah, this is essentially it for me. While it might not be a 'type-safe and correct regarding error handling' approach with Python, part of the interest of the AoC puzzles is the ability to approach them as 'almost pure' programs - no files except for puzzle input and output, no awkward areas like date time handling (usually), absolutely zero frameworks required.

> you can just wing things and work with a mess of dictionaries and lists.

Checks previous years type-hinted solutions with map[tuple[int, int], list[int]]

Yeah...

> but all of the AoC problems aren't parsing problems.

I'd say for the first ten years at least the first ten-ish days are 90% parsing and 10% solving ;) But yes, I agree, and maybe I'm worrying over a few extra visible err's in the code that I shouldn't be.

> if you just want to LLM your way through

Totally fair point if I constrain LLM usage to input handling and the things that I already know that I know how to do but don't want to type, although I've always quite liked being able to treat each day as an independent problem with no bootstrapping of any code, no 'custom AoC library', and just the minimal program required to solve the problem.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#185

Post by quirino »

matsemann wrote: post #182
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…

When I did competitions like these at uni (~10-15 years ago), we all used some thin-clients in the computer lab where the only webpages one could access were those allowed by the competition (mainly the submission portal). And then some admin/organizers would feed us and make sure people didn't cheat. Maybe we need to get back to that setup, heh.

Serious in-person competitions like ICPC are still effective against cheating. The first phase happens in a limited number of venues and the computers run a custom OS without internet access. There are many people watching so competitors don't user their phones, etc.

The Regional Finals and World Finals are in a single venue with a very controlled environment. Just like the IOI and other major competitions.

National High School Olympiads have been dealing with bigger issues because there are too many participants in the first few phases, and usually the schools themselves host the exams. There has been rampant cheating. In my country I believe the organization has resorted to manually reviewing all submissions, but I can only see this getting increasingly less effective.

This year the Canadian Computing Competition didn't officially release the final results, which for me is the best solution:

> Normally, official results from the CCC would be released shortly after the contest. For this year’s contest, however, we will not be releasing official results. The reason for this is the significant number of students who violated the CCC Rules. In particular, it is clear that many students submitted code that they did not write themselves, relying instead on forbidden external help. As such, the reliability of “ranking” students would neither be equitable, fair, or accurate.

Available here: [PDF] https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/sites/default/files/documents/2025...

Online competitions are just hopeless. AtCoder and Codeforces have rules against AI but no way to enforce them. A minimally competent cheater is impossible to detect. Meta Hacker Cup has a long history and is backed by a large company, but had its leaderboard crowded by cheaters this year.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#186

Post by d--b »

Personally, I never understood the grind of the advent of code. This is exactly the kind of stuff I am grateful to be able to delegate to a LLM.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#187

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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 think that whatever you know well is the best choice.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#188

Post by b0ringdeveloper »

qsort wrote: post #166
Aurornis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of the Slack/Discord groups I’m in do a local leaderboard with friends. It’s fun to do with a trusted group of people who are all in it for fun.

I'm also in a few local leaderboards, but I'm not "really" competing, it's more of a fun group thing. Premises: (i) I love Advent of Code and I'm grateful for its continuing existence in whatever form its creators feel like it's best for themselves and the community; (ii) none of what follows is a request, let alone a demand, for anything to change; (iii) what follows is just the opinion of some random guy on the Int…

There are definitely some problems that have an indirect time/memory check, in that if you don't have a right-enough algorithm, your program will never finish.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#189

Post by zerr »

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 believe the reason is that many still use CP for hiring, so people go into leetcode (or AdventOfCode) grind, sadly.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#190

Post by doublerabbit »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #14

Advent of Code is one of the highlights of December for me. It's sad, but inevitable, that the global leaderboard had to be pulled. It's also understandable that this year is just 12 days, so takes some pressure off. If you've never done it before, I recommend it. Don't try and "win", just enjoy the problem solving and the whimsy.

And this is how I know I am not a developer/programmer. I have no urge or interest in such event.
Post reply on HN