121–130 of 150 posts
I wonder how the persons on the leader board manages it? First person today solved part1 after 39 seoncds, and was done with part2 after 53 seconds! I felt I was quite fast in being done with part1 after 3 minutes and part2 in 4 minutes (rank ~1000). I even tried to skimread the explanation to be fast, have a script to download the input and run it etc., but still no match!
I really like how the Advent of Code is structured. Not only it makes you think about how to solve the problem, it pushes you to architecture your code defensively so when you get the new requirements in part 2, you have the least amount of code to change. I remember being bitten in a problem involving a keypad: I didn't think the keypad shape could change!
First day was a pretty fun start. Just heard about this for the first time this year and going to give it a go. Tangential question - why does the HN crowd hate these types of questions in interviews but apparently likes to do them on their own time? Different folks answering to different posts? Honestly curious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would it be optional in an interview? You want a job, I want to know that you've seen software development before. (Now for context, the interview questions I typically would recommend are a order of magnitude easier than AoC's typical bar, in the language of the candidate's choice, ideally on a real computer and not a whiteboard. Tonight's question though (a warmup) wouldn't be a bad one. It's straight-forward,…
Personally i just think it's not a good way to assess. Such challenges are mostly about coming up with "creative" solutions. I think that pressure can be good for creativity but it can also be it's death. However, motivation is important for creativity. Competing online with other like minded people is a good motivation whereas a job is something you need literally in order to survive. It's not really comparable imo.
No, or you're strawmanning the type of interview that is being suggested here. No, the challenge is about solving the problem; it doesn't take "creativity" to find the maximum in a list of integers, and the problems a SWE is going to encounter in the real world far dwarf such a question in terms of difficulty or "creativity" required to solve.
Some of the rougher AoC problems are harder, yes a bit more so. But a.) I qualified that that's not in context here in the original comment and b.) even there, it often isn't creativity that's required, it is knowing your basic principles, e.g., what data structures exist and when to apply them. But HN has an anathema when it comes to this sort of stuff; heaven forbid that SWE requires skills.
> I think that pressure can be good for creativity but it can also be it's death. However, motivation is important for creativity. Competing online with other like minded people is a good motivation whereas a job is something you need literally in order to survive. It's not really comparable imo.
This is mostly non sequitur. There's no eliminating stress completely from an interview, but depending on what tech I have handy, allowing the candidate a full REPL, access to reference material, coding in an IDE and language of their choice are all there to reduce stress and let the interview focus on what hopefully the candidate is good at.
I'm not attempting to compare competing online with an interview: you're not competing online in one of my interviews. The sort of problems, however, as an example of what might be asked in a coding question is the scope of what is being compared here. The point is: a. they're not the infamous sewer lid question b. they don't require "one clever insight" to solve and c. they in many ways mirror real-world issues. (E.g., parsing an input, taking an english description and turning it into relatively simple code.)
First day was a pretty fun start. Just heard about this for the first time this year and going to give it a go. Tangential question - why does the HN crowd hate these types of questions in interviews but apparently likes to do them on their own time? Different folks answering to different posts? Honestly curious.
Because they are fun! But in an interview environment it can feel like being tested on whether you are cool under pressure and less like you are being assessed for merit.
(We do not ask in interviews questions of the same nature as the last third of AoC. If anything, most of our interview questions are below AoC day 1 in difficulty. And yet they screen absurd numbers of candidates.)
Is there any way to play without logging in (for previous years, if necessary)? I couldn't find anything on the About page that clarifies this. Edit: I see anonymous users in the leaderboard, so it seems like it might be possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2019 was excellent. Each day, the puzzle would have you adding new features (new instructions, addressing modes, input/output handling) to the emulator. The early days were fairly simple, but things got progressively more complicated. On one day the puzzle input was code that played a game of Breakout. Your task was to implement an emulated joystick that would play perfectly. The solution was the final score. On anot…
One of the things I really loved about the IntCode problems was best exhibited by that Breakout game. One way of solving the problem was to create a joystick, as you said, but if you had built an IntCode inspector/debugger, you could also dig into the game code itself (your puzzle input) and find out where the blocks were in memory, and how much each one was worth, and just sum it up directly. It reminded me of Wastl…
I'm using Elixir and a Liveview notebook this year to go through it. Using Liveview notebooks is so nice, as you can even add and run `ExUnit` tests within one. So, it's just a single document in which to work with syntax highlighting, formatting, modules, tests, etc. I may also do it in F# and .NET Interactive notebooks using the Polyglot Notebooks Visual Studio Code extension, but I suspect the solutions will look…