Oh. I wrote this post. I didn't expect it to make a second round here.
I'll elaborate on anything in here if anyone wants to know things.
Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#12Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
Trying to juggle two kids, a mortgage, xmas and only having 30' at night to myself to even hear my own thoughts. I'd take your artificial constraints any day.
Same. Bathroom breaks are where I get the majority of my problem solving done for AoC.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#13Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
I find it hard enough without restrictions (especially toward the end) so I'm not doing anything too wild, but I've been trying to solve quickly this time. My goal was to get in the top 100 on one of the days to actually get a point, but I think I missed my window where the problems got too hard for LLMs but were still doable quickly for me. At least I managed a 136 which is much better than I've ever done before.
Maybe next year I'll actually prepare some utility code for parsing grids and 2d vector math and such.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#14Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
This is my first advent of code, my initial goal was solving the challenges using APL (note: I've never used that kind of language). It didn't work. :D I continued in C++, but kind of lost interest. Next year I'll learn the language beforehand. hehe
I tried the same thing with Haskell one year with a similar result (fell back to python then gave up). The beginning was nice when the puzzles were easy and I could focus on learning the language, but once the puzzles got tough it was too much trying to struggle with them and the language at the same time.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#15I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs. I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though. > The logical way to output the solut…
Senior developer here, it is challenging. It's designed to be. I'm to the point now though that im a bit burnt out on it. I miss a weekend and then don't have a desire to catch up.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#16I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs. I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though. > The logical way to output the solut…
Don't beat yourself up. This guy - "I do actually know Rust, but I never learned how to use it. I just started writing it because I was born with an innate knowledge of the language, similar to how I know Java or Kotlin despite never having learned them." My first words were "Dada!". This guys was "public static void main(String[] args)"
There’s a breed of programmers around who just like making things harder for themselves, and are somehow good at it. It’s like being a competitive power lifter or something like that. More weight, more weight, and at some point you get excited by more weight.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#17Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
This is my first advent of code, my initial goal was solving the challenges using APL (note: I've never used that kind of language). It didn't work. :D I continued in C++, but kind of lost interest. Next year I'll learn the language beforehand. hehe
I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary chords.
There’s a decent VSCode plugin but I mostly use the online pad because it’s such a rich environment. Very active Discord, with an AoC channel for help and sharing solutions - the maintainer actively iterates on the language to help them solve AoC problems.
(I also fall back to Clojure when I’m struggling to come up with a uiua solution or banging my head against the stack, I kinda wish I had uiua-in-Clojure like how April is APL-in-CL)
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#18Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
I am doing it this year with haskell. My C++ alter-ego (ab)used Data.STRef in the previous years so I am trying to do it idiomatically this time.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#19Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
I can never get myself to care enough to do more than a small handful (2 to 3 per year max, if I have time in between other hobbies/family/travel and most especially work). However, my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line as a large list/dict comprehension. Or do it all in a bash pipeline. Or find some way to express it all in a single line of Golang generics a-la samber/lo. Something silly that takes one of those first-few-days sub-30-minute problems and turns it into a sub-60-minute problem, but now with some amusing self-expression via extremely odd code.
Re: Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
#20Ask HN (comment edition): I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.
I can never get myself to care enough to do more than a small handful (2 to 3 per year max, if I have time in between other hobbies/family/travel and most especially work). However, my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line as a large list/dict comprehension. Or do it all in a bash pipeline. Or find some way to express it al…
> my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line
Ha, this is pretty much my favorite restriction too. I try to do one single-line expression for input parsing, one for the part 1 solution, and one for the part 2 solution (eg [1]). Thought sometimes I can't manage it and I just fall back to solving it normally.
[1] https://github.com/benhaney/Advent-of-Code/blob/master/2024/...