Live data from Hacker News

Project Euler

projecteuler.net

121–130 of 142 posts

Re: Project Euler

#121
post #76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious if LLMs are good for this problem. ChatGPT-5.1-Thinking one-shotted a correct Python script without any library use ( https://pastecode.io/s/jg6ggxpm ). Claude Opus failed to solve after trying for a while.

First of all, don't do this. No one cares. Secondly obviously every Euler solution is going to appear in the training data many times over. It's no surprise at all that an LLM can regurgitate data that was given to it.

I do care. I appreciate /u/webo's comment. If you're a hater, don't generalize to others. There are still people out there embracing new technologies and change, and with an intact engineering spirit driven by sheer curiosity.

Re: Project Euler

#122

12 years ago I was a failed computer science student, wasting my time on drugs. Having failed so many classes I did not see any future at all, and I was considering killing myself to get out of the anxiety and stress. My confidence regarding programming etc was 0. I decided to apply for a junior developer job. I got an interview and to prepare for an interview I found this site, Project Euler. I did ten or so tasks.…

Great story. Are you willing to share more about your SaaS?

I'd love to but I can't be too specific due to the personal stuff I shared in the original comment.

It's a system that helps services companies within a certain industry to digitalize all their paperwork, report to the national goverment agencies etc. They do a lot of manual work which can be digitalized easily.

I found this opportunity by just randomly throwing out in a big community that I build software and is looking for ideas, and some guy answered that ended up being my business partner for 3 years now. We are not rich from it but earn like $2000 each a month after tax which is quite a lot for us since we live in a country where healthcare, schools, parental leave etc are covered by taxes. And we dont need to put more than a few hours a month on support. I have put in basically all my spare time for 2 years to get to this point though, the biggest reward is not the money but the process of sitting through the nights being completely in the zone and building this stuff knowing that it will be great :D

Re: Project Euler

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great story. Are you willing to share more about your SaaS?

I'd love to but I can't be too specific due to the personal stuff I shared in the original comment. It's a system that helps services companies within a certain industry to digitalize all their paperwork, report to the national goverment agencies etc. They do a lot of manual work which can be digitalized easily. I found this opportunity by just randomly throwing out in a big community that I build software and is loo…

No problem, what you have shared here is very insightful. Cheers to continued success and evenings in the zone.

Re: Project Euler

#124
I was trying to create an account but it kept saying the confirmation code was wrong. Idk if that's a bug but... I was using the audio captcha. Still, the website seems pretty neat!

Re: Project Euler

#125
post #50
post #47

No one tells you that they delete inactive accounts. I used to have over 300 solved problems htere. Now it is all gone, all the effort, but the skill remained of course.

A few years back (10 maybe?) they had a disk crash, and there was a notice that for people with 100 or more problems solved they'd do an extra effort to recover their solutions and add you back, not sure if it was only posted on the main website. I was lucky to get my account back at the time

Ah okay, I was active there 9-12 years ago, so it migh been before the crash. I remember checking it, however, 7 years ago, and I was still able to log in.

Re: Project Euler

#126
post #47

No one tells you that they delete inactive accounts. I used to have over 300 solved problems htere. Now it is all gone, all the effort, but the skill remained of course.

So, I gather that you treated your solutions as throw-away code, rather than keeping them? Kind of surprising, considering that some problems build off of each other, or otherwise benefit from sharing code; you never know when the code for one solution could be useful later. For example, a prime number generator/tester is necessary for many of the problems. (I have all my solution code, in source control no less, so…

> So, I gather that you treated your solutions as throw-away code, rather than keeping them?

I kept the code that I found clever or useful, but I had a very borderline approach to archiving my stuff in general back then. I was still in high school.

Re: Project Euler

#127

The most fun on this site is solving a problem and then having your mind blown by solutions in Apl/j/k and trying to guess what they mean without knowing anything about those languages

I've solved about a hundred PE problems in Livecode, maybe 40 in Python, and about 20 in J. I highly recommend giving it a try in a language you don't know, it's fun! Especially with something as obscure as J.

Re: Project Euler

#128

Whelp, the opening “problem zero” stuffed me up. > A number is a perfect square, or a square number, if it is the square of a positive integer. For example, is a square number because ; it is also an odd square. The first 5 square numbers are: , and the sum of the odd squares is . Among the first 881 thousand square numbers, what is the sum of all the odd squares? I wanted to use Uiua, and hence: /+ⁿ2+1⍜÷⇡ 2 881000 B…

This will become a practice of implementing bignums in your language of choice, which is a valuable exercise itself.

I did this (bignum) library for Livecode specifically for PE. https://github.com/gcanyon/bignum

Re: Project Euler

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great story. Are you willing to share more about your SaaS?

I'd love to but I can't be too specific due to the personal stuff I shared in the original comment. It's a system that helps services companies within a certain industry to digitalize all their paperwork, report to the national goverment agencies etc. They do a lot of manual work which can be digitalized easily. I found this opportunity by just randomly throwing out in a big community that I build software and is loo…

Congratulations!
Post reply on HN