Well to be honest, I'm doing just fine with my 1 GB Pi3B home server. Sure, another gigabyte wouldn't hurt, but I'm able to run influxd, zigbee2mqtt, telegraf, grafana, homeassistant (containerized), mpd and navidrome on it without issues.
One of the reasons I stopped participating was that as the second half of december was approaching I had less and less free time for solving the puzzles. So to me it is also a welcome change, I will try to finish it again this year.
I once has this half serious idea to do "Advent of Parenting", with one problem per month, and you start after Christmas. As in, youre so delayed you start in the New Year, and have time for one problem per month.
Question is, when you write down the numbers of excuses and the number of things you could so each month, as in your input .... How many months do you have less excuses available than problems you could solve? Part 2: The kids want to check whether your algorithm works correctly. For that they have devised a formula: Position of the month in the input, multiplied with the number of problems not excusable to not solve, summed up for all months of the year. What is the checksum of your excuses - problems - report?
This. The best I've ever achieved is maybe 15 puzzles on one year, with gaps for the days I missed. And this was when the puzzles were incrementally building upon implementing a bytecode interpreter, which was relatively little work per day.
Once I miss my first day, playing catch up is an effort in vain, as the puzzles start taking 4+ hours to solve each, solving multiple in one day is a full-time commitment.
Most advents of code I've fallen off sharply after day 7-10, if not sooner, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this. I think this is a welcome change.
Yeah, totally this. I've had so much fun with AoC, learning nim, elixir at the same time.
I would normally tap out around the same place on the first dynamic programming puzzle which just takes me so long to wrap my head around each time (tips anyone? :)).
I welcome these new changes, and what ever the format are very greatful for all his hard work!
They're not as magical as they seem, you just need some practice. Read over the dynamic programming section in https://cses.fi/book/index.php (pdf link near the top is the free English version), then do a few on https://cses.fi/problemset/ . You'll be able to handle the AoC dynamic programming ones with _no_ problem at all.
Most years, I end up finishing the puzzles in January. Same reason- I end up missing a day due to schedule issues. Since it's just a 'for fun' challenge, it isn't the end of the world if you fall behind a bit. That said, this doesn't work if you are doing this as part of a group.
Same, I love AoC but I just never have time for them (December is always the busiest time of year in my job).
I would have liked if a puzzle was released every 2 days though so it still spanned the whole month. Would be more aligned with the advent calendar concept. In fact in previous years the puzzles have always had two parts so if that format is still being retained there will still effectively be 24 puzzles.
Then again who has the time in the latter half of December?
I completed AoC on time every day once and let's just say it wasn't a very pleasant experience. Very similar to sticking to a too ambitious, too rigid gym schedule. Still time well spent, but it sucks out all the joy.
I participated in the very first AoC and solved all problems, but the last 6 or 7 only way after Christmas, when I had more time, holidays, and I just wanted to complete the contest.
Then there was another AoC … and no, I didn’t solve all the problems, not even close. In most years I got 24 to 36 stars, 2018 and 2020 I did not participate.
Last year I was in a good place, wanted to practice a new programming language (Crystal). And I was determined to get every puzzle solved in 24 hours. And I did it, but for two or three puzzles it was oh so frustrating. With angry screams, searching help in the IRC, for two puzzles even not understanding for many hours how it works. And then at 1:52 AM (puzzles start at 6AM for me) I found the solution. It was liberating and gratifying, but at the same time so tiring and frustrating. The only reason I went along with was the overall goal, getting a permanent record of having solved every puzzle on the first day. And I am happy about it (in hindsight, it was the last opportunity for doing so with 25*2 puzzles), and now I never need or want to do it again.
Or do I? Only 12 days of trying to get solutions are much more possible.
Agree. It was getting in the way of me spending time with the family because I was distracted mulling over the puzzles.
I had thought last year that they could peak the difficulty around the middle of the month and bring it down a bit leading up to the 25th. But just finishing it earlier is probably better IMO.
I stopped doing it because it felt like I was restarting every puzzle rather than building on top of something, and that's not all that interesting to me. I'm not judging the process, as that's just my personal perspective about what's interesting to me.
You can see aggregated results on `stats` [1] for every year. In general, half the people drop in the first 3-4 days. For last year, by day 12 there is less than 1/5 of day 01. While the stats do count people that completed later, the shape appears to track well with what I saw during the events since 2021.
This doesn’t come from the JavaScript ecosystem. Numeronyms have been in use in the computer industry since before JavaScript existed. “i18n” (“internationalisation”) has been in use since the mid-80s, for instance.
Basically you get a bunch of problems (ranging from "check if a number is prime" to complicated graph theoretical problems) and some time to figure them out and code a correct & efficient solution. Often there are computer science concepts and reasoning techniques you need to know about (like biconnected components) to figure out how to make an efficient enough implementation.
The contests I used to go to, you got 11-13 problems and 5 hours to solve them with a team of 3. However, you only have one PC to share, so a lot of the time you are discussing, drawing stuff on paper and figuring out the solution in your head. There is also a printing service during the contest where you can literally get a paper version of your code :) so somebody else can code while you debug on paper.
I used to get annoyed by these kinds of questions, but honestly I love talking about things I'm passionate about anyway and I want to get more people interested in the subject. So, I'm happy to answer questions like this and simultaneously sneak in some of my own personal experiences.
This is a nice attitude. I think HN is overall pretty nice for geeking out and also hearing other people geek out, but there is still a strain of elitism (not like StackExchange thankfully) and so I'm happy to see comments like this.
Those types can't help themselves so patterns emerge and usernames become recognizable after a while. There are some people who I just don't bother engaging with any more. Of course, those experiences are my own and maybe not the same experience as others.
1) locality of knowledge - people ask questions to clear the context of the discussion, not to learn stuff in the vacuum
2) sense of community - people ask questions because it's in human nature to teach others and learn within our groups. Programming culture is even more about joy of teaching others, so I don't understand your complaint
Could you explain why you interpreted my question as a complaint? I clearly indicated that I was asking in good faith by even providing two possible explanations that seem reasonable.
if I'm being honest... combination of grandparent comment I sympathize with being downvoted, your comment being positive, while "just google it" stance I've parsed as disapproval of people it's directed towards
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