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

Advent of Code 2019

adventofcode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 124 posts

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#5

Post by Barrin92 »

Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#6

Post by m1kal »

Barrin92 wrote: post #5

Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles

Day 15 took me about 8 months, but I finally discovered I had made one wrong assumption that corrupted my solution for special cases...

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#7

Post by forrestthewoods »

Last year was my first year and I loved every second of it.

I strongly recommend using AoC as a tool to help learn a new language. Many people, myself included, use it to learn Rust.

The best part about AoC is the community. Everyone is super helpful and kind. The daily Reddit thread has solutions in every language under the sun.

My better half is a designer and is going to participate this year to help learn JavaScript.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#8

Post by cjauvin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #5

Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles

I can totally relate about that particular one, I remember that it destroyed a good part of a weekend for me, and I wrote that about it on Twitter, back in January of this year:

"I have thought about the particular challenges of this year's Advent of Code (which I greatly enjoyed once again, with some intermittent mixed feelings), and my conclusion is that some problems might very well be of similar difficulty levels, but with nevertheless very dissimilar frustration-inducing levels. And I think the frustration level is strongly correlated with the feedback signal one can use to debug. Case in point: Day 15, which was almost impossible to debug, once you had a working solution, versus Day 17, which was actually fun to debug, since the visual signal you could use was so strong."

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#9

Post by donatj »

I always have a ton of fun with these sorts of things. I always wonder how they come up with these sorts of puzzles. That's not a skill I have.
Post reply on HN