Advent of Code 2024

I've used Go in the past few years (but I never find the time / attention span to get any further than day 6), I really like it for this kind of thing because it's pragmatic, minimal environment setup / "sidequests", most things you need (reading/parsing files, etc) are builtin, performance is great and close to the metal (few hidden performance pitfalls), etc.

I can't compare with Rust though because I've never used it. From a very superficial point of view though, it feels less pragmatic. But since AoC doesn't need memory safety or whatever criteria you have for production software, pragmatism and performance for later challenges are more important than safety.

Interested by your rust speed approaches, care to share a link ?

'd you be interested in sharing the discord? :)

I try every year to optimize for speed in zig: https://github.com/ManDeJan/advent-of-code

Go (not "Golang") has better compilation times than Rust and does not try to combine incompatible ways of using concurrency.

I have the opposite dilemma to you, I want to learn to like Rust.

How do you structure your aoc project?

I tried doing Rust, but I'm too dumb to figure out if each day should be a module or if I should use lib (I guess?) files for each day and link everything to a main entry point.

Can you share your repo (if public)?

Is there a discord every year? Interested in joining that if you don’t mind sharing

Sounds like a very interesting Discord to check :)

Last year I tried C on a real Amiga 1200 (using DICE, Matt Dillon’s compiler / runtime). I didn’t get very far, lack of memory protection makes things really hard.

This year the Amiga has an 060 upgrade with an MMU, so perhaps I can figure out how to use that and have another go.

Good luck! Personally, I'm still going with CL but decided to try it in all the languages I "know" for the first day. Including C which doesn't have hash tables (inb4 hsearch)... what a pain, let me tell you.

https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/aoc2024/tree/master/item/01

If you could post a repo link so I can look at some of the progress, I'd be grateful.

Your restrictions sound quite challenging, good luck!

Last year I solved all the problems in C without external libraries [1] and I enjoyed it a lot. It forced me implement some low-level stuff that I had forgotten how to do (e.g. a heap) and to write some numerical routines myself (easier than you'd think!).

[1] https://github.com/sebastianotronto/aoc/tree/master/2023

As long as you can make an RPC call, anything is doable within 32kb of ram :-)

Symmetrically, I would consider only using sh and standard non-Turing-complete CLI tools (grep yes, awk no). About as limiting, but without devastating memory corruption bugs.

I think there might end up being some problems which will be very challenging to solve with those resource constraints - namely memory. You will probably have to be pretty clever with your solutions.

I remember one of my naive brute force solutions from last year ended up allocating gigabtyes of memory. There were obviously more efficient solutions, but some of the inputs are pretty large and so hefty allocations might be difficult to avoid.

I tried doing it in C a few years ago but wasted so much time just not having a string library

Assembly is so much cleaner on an STM8 8-bit. If you’re into that sort of masochism

Glorious!

I think I'll follow in your footsteps. STM32F7 with 320k but with bare metal Rust :)

this is like trying to solve it in a computer built in turing complete

Do you have a public repo?

Excellent! Come and join the Swift leaderboard here https://forums.swift.org/t/advent-of-code-2024 if you haven't already -- it's super interesting to compare different solutions.

dont you find all the string parsing and manipulation to be quite painful in Swift? I tried to do AoC in Swift before and that put me off a lot. I liked doing little functional one liners but a week from now the parsing burden will be too high.

I enjoyed reading your solutions! I’m surprised how terse they are!

Are you writing the solutions / compiling / running all with Emacs? I wanted to try Swift this year as well but feels sort of silly spinning up XCode for this.

Those are the problems I loathe the most, where the real problem is figuring out how to parse the input into something more workable. Once its parsed its ezpz.

After a few days I cave and just use regex, which I of course forget every year and need to relearn.

the input parsers don't get increasingly complex over the days. The problems themselves do. Even on the most difficult days around 22 or 23, the inputs are all just lines of space separate ints or some grid of points or something, just like the trivial problems on days 1-3

It's input parsing with a fun story

i find ScanF and state machines are a lot more effective than split / explode style parsers.

Rust + nom makes it easier

Why isn’t the input a csv?

... and inevitably, a virtual machine

Claude will do it for you.

> I encourage anyone who gets value from this to donate to support it if they can. It is a passion project but nonetheless comes with real costs.

With the sheer amount of sponsors and AoC++ users I do believe that this is not quite a small 'passion project' struggling to pay the monthly subscription to a VPS.

That being said, adventofcode is absolutely great and people should support it if they can. But I do think the author is doing quite well with the amount of support he is currently receiving.

I'm continuing my tradition of doing AoC in Whitespace[0]. The first year I did it, it was motivation to build out a standard library so things wouldn't be so tedious. Now, I find myself wishing I had finished better tooling. I debug with wsjq[1], a CLI debugger like gdb written in jq, but it's slow.

[0]: https://github.com/thaliaarchi/ws-challenges

[1]: https://github.com/thaliaarchi/wsjq

I am doing it in bash. Will see how far I can go!

I've done last two AoCs in F# (well, only the first few days too). For a person without prior functional programming experience, it was fun! Unfortunately I won't have time to participate this year, but if I did, I'd probably chose F# again.

Nice. I've started picking up F# too and am trying AoC with it this year. I'm still early in my functional journey, but I think AoC has been helpful thus far.

How's linux support? :)

What's so hard about Day 12? It's just

    +/'{x:".",x;H:(-1+;1+i-)@'+|\m*i:!#m:x=\:"#."
     R:(x=x)({[h;d;x;y;z](z#0),+\(((-z)_~"#"=x)&z_d>z)*(*y),(-z+1)_y-0^y h}. H)[x]/y
     (*|R)-R@*|0,&1_*+m}.''1({("?"/:5#,x;,/5#,y)}.')\@[;1;.:]'" "\:'0:`:i/12.txt

It ate my life for a few years in a row, I even managed to finish on Christmas eve twice. Now I don't even look, it turns from fun to stress rather quickly.

Sounds sensible. It's important to set boundaries, and enjoy time off.

For me Advent of Code is a slippery slope. The difficulty ramps up so at first it's easy, then it's rewardingly difficult. But then before I know it, it takes wayyyyy too much time. The danger is being emotionally invested by then.

A friend recently shared this with me. I think you'll like it.

https://eli.li/december-adventure

I got stuck on the graph-cut puzzle for FOUR MONTHS. I had to write a force-directed graphing engine to find the longest three edges to cut.

After I solved it I looked at other people's solutions and they used Meta's proposition solver in about 10 lines. Seemed like a massive cheat to me.

All things in moderation! Now if I can just make it through the winter without installing the new Factorio DLC...

I will probably solve the first 7 puzzles like every year and then just stop.

One reason I didn't enjoy it was that I felt the days don't build on each other well. So you get little code reuse. It was continually changing requirements, so it was especially like work.

We run a private board for Advent of Code for the Carolina Code Conference. Eligibility for prizes starts after earning only 10 of 50 possible stars precisely for this reason.

Likewise. I did it one year in college and it became a life-consuming thing almost immediately. Not AoC's fault - part of it was depression, part of it was the Minnesota winter. Now that I have a full-time job and a wife, I'm trying to be more careful with those things that I know will suck me in.

The year I did it I got lucky and solved them all within a reasonable amount of time until there was one that suddenly involved a lot of nontrivial linear algebra and I immediately spotted that this wouldn't be fun and noped out. Noticed the number of people solving dropped off a cliff on that day.

I think as nerds we need to be quite careful not to get too drawn into this kind of thing. Sometimes it's like a superpower, but other times it just pointlessly consumes your life. Kinda makes me think of gambling addiction: "when the fun stops, you stop".

I just have them lingering in the back of my brain the whole year. I solved the last one from last year a month ago. This is much nicer than sudokus or whatever: I sometimes dream about them and I keep finding better (in my mind) solutions for ones from years ago. It's lovely when you sit at another dumb crap meeting/standup so you have something to do in your head.

Ah yeah I've been there! Having done it a few years now, I've found that the approach that works for me is: if it starts looking like I'll be stuck on one for more than a few hours, I'll skip it and move on. Otherwise I'll accumulate an insurmountable backlog that becomes more of a depressing chore to think about, than a fun little christmas tradition. I'd rather have a mostly-complete set of problems by the end of the year that I can come back and clean up when I feel like it.

That said, if you'd have a better holiday season by just stepping back from the computer and relaxing then that sounds great too. Either way - enjoy!

> I can really enjoy the winter break from work

What line of work are you in that you can take a winter break, and furthermore, that you can actually not work during that break? I'm envious...

I've always wanted to do AoC but on top of work it is too much.

Heh, I just checked. That's where I got stuck last year, too. I solved the first half.

Hahaha...I love this comment. I have just been stuck for a week doing edge puzzles and backstepping recursion, keeping myself awake aye night because it bothered me I couldn't "just" solve it.

Nice one, i like your transpose function, as python-numpy user in past years, but kotlin this year, i really missed the transpose function the most for this day one. My code: https://github.com/charelF/AdventOfCode/blob/main/kt/src/y20...

> But I don't play the game correctly any way: instead of trying to solve the problems as fast as I can, ...

FYI trying to solve the problems as fast as you can is not considered "the correct way". The author has emphasized multiple times that going for the leaderboard is not for everyone and requires a pretty questionable coding style. The main goal is to have fun and learn something new.

I try to do everything in a single pure functional expression no matter how dumb and unreadable that makes the code look.

That’s one of the many ways to do Advent of Code.

The Christmas theme is fun and it’s nice to do one problem per day with a large community.

With leetcode you’re off in the woods by yourself. Stuck on a problem? Here’s a cold write up. Finished a problem? Do another, monkey.

Think it's because certain topics, such as dynamic programming or graph algorithms, are just not something you can attack from first principles for most mortal people. I certainly wouldn't have invented binary trees. So there is quite a bit of things to read up on (though it should all be covered in an algorithms course).

Then once you do get that context... like LeetCode problems often aren't very inspiring? A lot of the time it's "just apply this technique here".

Whereas in AoC, at least in the first few weeks, it's mostly just, do the task, attack it from first principles.

AoC would be more stressful if you had to solve a problem in 30 minutes for a highly competitive job.

I’m also doing them in F# (again). Hoping to best my past attempts, never gone beyond day 12 before!

I’m never gonna do it fast but I enjoy using fparsec to get the input text in whatever format I need each time, even if writing and debugging the parsers sometimes takes up way too much of my time!

The community is most of the difference. That and the problems aren't very similar to leetcode.

Have you ever tried the LeetCode live competitions? I found those to be really fun with a great community. Just grinding problems in isolation can definitely be depressing.

That's actually a very important question I think, and sorely neglected by most educators! (and book authors, etc)

Copy your session token into .token then:

curl "https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/$DAY/input" --header "Cookie: $(cat .token)" > input.txt

You could open the dev console in the browser and copy the curl command off the network tab

I just copy and paste into a local text file, but I bet there’s a tool if you want to do it programmatically already (unless curl’ing is your idea of fun!)

Assuming you already opened it in a web browser, why not right click the page and choose "Save As"?

You can use Firefox: "Copy as cUrl" (https://superuser.com/a/1382425)

The command line tool included with this python library does just what you want once you paste your session token into an environment variable:

https://github.com/wimglenn/advent-of-code-data

I have this script:

  #!/bin/sh
  set -e
  curl "https://adventofcode.com/${YEAR:?}/day/${DAY:?}/input" --cookie "session=$(cat .token)"

then: YEAR=2024 DAY=1 ./aocdata

Do you want to add Genuary to your list? A month of daily prompts to get you producing some generative / creative coding art. Starts Jan 1. Website here: https://genuary.art/

I've promised myself that one year I will move beyond the first seven prompts ... who knew creativity could be so taxing?

Not a challenge, but it may be of interest anyway - Sergey Tihon's F# Advent Calendar: https://sergeytihon.com/2024/10/26/f-advent-calendar-in-engl...

I think there's a few of these for different languages/tech. I think they may be good for HN'ers seeking some kind of little daily advent-y fix without the potential emotional/mental investment of AoC.

Hey! Thank you. I have updated mine to include the ones from your list.

https://github.com/vimode/Advent-Calendars-For-Developers

This is great, thanks! I usually do AoC to learn a new programming language but there's no more language I care to learn right now.

Ada.Integer_Text_IO with Get will happily read across all whitespace, including new lines, to find the next integer. This is true for most (all?) instances of Get, though that may not always be what you want.

  with Ada.Integer_Text_IO;
  use Ada.Integer_Text_IO;

  procedure main is
    Left : Integer;
    Right : Integer;
  begin
    Get(Left);
    Get(Right);
    Put(Left);
    Put(Right);
  end main;

If you give it any of these pairs it'll work as expected, put it in a loop and you'll get all of them:

  1 2
  3      4
  5
       6

Sometimes thinking about lines is a red herring in AoC, the lines often don't matter, only getting each value into the appropriate collection (a pair of vectors in this case since you don't know the size). For the counts, you can use a hashed map, they're built into the standard library. If you learn to use them now that'll help you out in later days, they're a commonly used collection (for me) in these challenges.

The vast majority of people are doing it for fun or learning purposes and not to compete on the leaderboard, and it wouldn't quite be fair to compare much else in a competitive setting but time of completion and correctness, since you'd be at a disadvantage just by language choice in many other metrics. Unless you are someone with experience competing in competitive programming you almost certainly won't make the leaderboard anyway.

If your goal is to compare solutions, lots of that happens on the subreddit for it where people post solutions in their language of choice on the daily threads.

I just do it for fun. When I was younger I'd actually do them at release (11pm in my timezone), now I don't even bother and just used them as sort of a brain teaser to start my days and compare with coworkers who also do it, a lot of us in different languages.

I try to get it done within a day, so they don't back up, but I've never tried to compete. I am PST which opens at 9PM. I try to get through part 1 then, so I can sleep on part 2.

The subreddit /r/adventofcode contains discussions of solutions with lots of different skill levels.

I've done AoC for five years to learn new languages and try solve all of them myself during the month of December. (Dunno if I'll run the whole thing this year - I have another project.) Others try to get on the leaderboard, and some will implement solutions that they've seen sketched on reddit.

Last year a few people used Z3 for one of the problems, and I went back and tried that to get some experience with Z3. And I've occasionally gone back and tried another approach or new trick that I saw on the subreddit. (In the years that I've used Lean, I've sometimes gone back and added proofs for termination or array indices, too.)

I think most people don't participate for the competition. I did it several times to increase my coding skills, have fun or get more practice in a new programming language.

Can you propose other metrics that don't involve executing stuff in a whole lot of languages? The point is to let people work in whatever they want, as only the solution matters. If only the solution matters I don't really see other options beyond time.

That's like saying you don't want to go for a run, because professional marathon runners are so focused on time

Here's a website that appears to be about competing on the performance of each solution: https://codspeed.io/advent

> If there is a community for those who use other rules to compare actual solutions instead of answers I would be interested to hear about it.

Generally you have the main community on reddit (memes, questions, daily thread for sharing solutions), then the language specific subreddits or hosted forums where you will see solutions discussed and shared, plus a couple of new users asking questions.

Also, within the daily main community thread you will see the niche sub community of people posting their code-golfing attempts.

I also don't like it, last year we had a private leaderboard at work and I realized being crazy enough to wake up at 5:50 every and solve at least part 1 would give me an edge. But the "wake up at 5:50" part is what I enjoyed the least.

However, there are other ways to rank yourself against others. You can order your private leaderboard by number of stars, or make your own leaderboard using their APIs.

It could be interesting to find the shortest solution. But the site is not set up for verifying solutions in various languages.

I wouldn’t use an AI to solve the problems, but I wonder if an AI could give good feedback on a solution I cook up?

While I personally wouldn't find it a ton of fun to solve the puzzles that way, that's pretty cool. Nice work.

Is there a place where you're blogging this or at least aggregating the links so we can see how far you get with it as the puzzles get more challenging?

Erlang lifted it as the comma, semicolon, dot convention. When I was writing a lot of Erlang I found myself wishing it was in other languages. After not writing Erlang for a long time, I wrote a few functions recently and it was jarring. Then again I usually prefer the conventions of whatever language I'm using most at the time, unless I really dislike the language (Javascript).

My approach here would be to make an index.html file with a script tag and drag it onto whatever browser is available. Then again I have made peace with JavaScript!

(I think you could even use typescript with this method with the on the fly babel transpiler (you just include a script tag) but I haven't tried that.)

I use Excel for the first few as well! I actually find it to be easier than using Python/Javascript, at least early on.

Color aside they also ignore a number of solutions for font resizing that follow the users accessibility settings. I can think of at least three easy ways to do this with html/css alone, and yet hear we are; a site that is unreadable to me.

I love what Advent of Code does, but when your site is all text, there's just no excuse to not let the user resize it by default.

AoC day one challenge… make website responsive

It is terrible for me on my desktop too :(

On iOS you can switch to Reader view, and I imagine Android has something similar.

Could you use a cartridge type that has enough swappable memory banks?

what is the dev cycle like on that? can you attach to it and operate it remotely via something like a repl or do you have to compile something to a cartridge and boot it from that?

Very interested in this - I have a SNES flash cart, I wonder if there's a good basic library to handle printing to the screen and such.

At least on iOS, Reader mode in safari fixes it right up

I'd pretty much decided I wasn't going to participate because it would take up too much time, but now you've both made it way more complicated and way more appealing...

I did this, and it's been very satisfying! Here's where I'm at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r99-nzGDapg

No stars are required at all. You can also skip some days if you don't want to do them. Or only to the first stars. However you like. First/silver stars will also increase your score in the leader boards.

Same. Especially when it gets really hard later on. Despite studying CS, I still struggle with it.

I've been doing a lot with SQL for the first time in my life, this is tempting. I posted some SQLite CTE dark magic the other day but I certainly didn't understand it.

Edit: Someone else posted an "Advent of " list which included https://adventofsql.com/, perhaps those problems will be a little more pedestrian for SQL.

As every year, I try to solve it with 1 sql statement for every challenge, https://gitlab.com/feike/adventofcode/-/tree/master/2024, likely going to get stuck again around day 12/13 or so!

I've solved some days in past years with sqlite + enough awk to transform the input into something that can be imported into a table. It can be a fun challenge.

"Participate" doesn't mean "win". You can look things up as well. I haven't done a ton of AoC, but the harder ones from it I've seen were not very hard to search/research for the correct algorithm (even avoiding "what's the answer for day X" searches).

Anecdote to support your comment: The Chinese Remainder Theorem has featured in Advent of Code at least twice IIRC. Not an algorithm the average programmer (average is a very fuzzy term, yeah) would know.

AoC doesn't require any particular algorithmic knowledge to solve its problems. Sometimes knowing algorithms is useful to quickly write your solution, but IME it's never a requirement. Unlike leetcode-style challenges, AoC tasks usually don't even try to punish you for solutions that are specific to your particular input. You can get some stars with just pen and paper.

It's more like a set of logic puzzles. Programming and algorithms are only incidental.

I feel like those threads would make great research opportunities. We often hear people say that code should be for people to read, incidentally for machines to execute, just be amazed at how much the readability varies from answer to answer.

Skimming some, the core of Part 1 after people have parsed and sorted:

Python:

    sum([abs(x-y) for x,y in zip(left,right))

TypeScript:

    list1.reduce((acc, cur, i) => {
        return acc += Math.abs(cur - list2[i])
    }, 0)

Common Lisp:

    (reduce #'+ (mapcar (lambda (l r) (abs (- l r))) sorted-left sorted-right))))

Julia:

    sum(abs.(list1 .- list2))

Rust:

    Ok(zip(left, right).map(|(l, r)| l.abs_diff(r)).sum()

F#:

    Seq.map2 (fun x y -> abs (x - y)) xs ys |> Seq.sum

APL:

    +/|-⌿

Haskell:

     map abs $ zipWith (-) column2 column1

and then all the submissions which don't do anything like this, and have manual loops and indexing and clunky data representations or performance-optimized data representations, etc. etc.

Interesting, do you publish your AoC solutions in rcl somewhere?

EDIT: nevermind, found it! https://github.com/ruuda/adventofcode/tree/master

There are a few Elixir solutions fo Day 1 here, including mine: https://elixirforum.com/t/advent-of-code-2024-day-1/67786. I'm using it as a motivator for actually learning the language/libs.

The global leaderboard is so fast that any AI assistance would literally slow them down, here's one of the guys who tends to score highly solving today's puzzle. (https://youtu.be/ym1ae-vBy6g), and on the more complicated days that's even more pronounced because anyone who is even somewhat decent doesn't need to ask chatgpt how to write Dijkstra.

Obviously if you're doing it recreationally you can cheat with AI but then again that's no different than copying a solution from reddit and you're only fooling yourself. I don't see it having an impact.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the results. I like to think that despite problem 1 being easily solvable by LLMs, just about everyone (sans qianxyz) read the FAQ, and decided that they would forego a leaderboard spot for the sake of this coding tradition.

Either that, or there were hundreds of people trying and none were able to get it working despite the basic problem. I like to imagine most people reading the rules and being a good sport.

Even before AI I was never fast enough for a respectable global rank, but it's still fun to compare solutions with friends.

All the people I know already participate on private boards. AI enshitification will only speed up the process of moving there.

This is how most of the top of leaderboard works.

Gl. I've yet to meet anyone that actually finished AoC. At some point the problems take 8+ hours to solve and people give up :).

Meant for another discussion?

Every day is mostly independent of the others. I generally don't reuse code because most of the common code is easy enough to rewrite, sometimes I copy/paste earlier code in to a new solution.

The main exception is 2019's Intcode VM/interpreter which was used over about a dozen days (I mentioned it elsewhere, he hasn't done anything like that since). Occasionally, beyond basic algorithms there is some continuity between 2-3 days but that's not terribly common, I don't think there were any pairs of puzzles like that last year or the year before.

If you want to make one code base, you'll still have 25 or so separate solutions. You might have some continuity with common algorithms (like A*) that get used a fair bit in search problems or abstracting out the input handling when you identify common structures for parsing.

What do you do then?

and more advents...

https://pdl.perl.org/advent/index.html

Just give up on the main leaderboard. Maybe join another, preferably with people who share your time zone and schedule.

Modern LLMs are very good at solving programming puzzles like that. As soon as it recognizes which algorithm needs to apply, it's just massaging the data to the right format.

Not sure if it would take away from the experience, but there's this repo which is made for AoC that handles getting the input from a text file, sets up a source file for each day, etc

https://github.com/TanklesXL/gladvent

It’s only ever elves finding and losing things

It’s ssv — space separated values

What does "Go is too slow" mean in this context? Were you expecting similar performance to Rust or C++?

I'm doing it in K2 this year (a language that has a single data structure: a vector). If you can do it in K2, you can do it in Go.

Sure, but it starts to get hard a few days in so beginners won't be able to finish. However, I think that makes it an amazing learning opportunity. There's plenty of write-ups on solutions on the internet.

That seems rather slow for yours, and not very fast for an optimised one. It can speed up a lot from a cold start to a warm run, my tuned code can show 8 ms in powershell 7.4 after a few runs.

My hack-it-out code: https://pastebin.com/PDQhxDc9

Faster code: https://pastebin.com/6xwaVkwq

The hacky code uses slower techniques like:

- Get-Content which adds metadata to every line.

- @() arrays with += which copies the array in memory to a new one-larger memory location for every addition.

- Pipeline overhead e.g. ForEach-Object and Measure-Object.

- Filtering the whole second column for each number in the first column, repeated wasted work.

and it's still in the region of your ChatGPT one.

The faster one addresses these with:

- ReadAllLines() .NET method to get plain strings.

- [system.collections.generic.list[int]]::new() which don't box integers and can grow more quickly.

- plain adding numbers into sum variables.

- Building a hashtable [system.collections.generic.dictionary[int, int]]::new() to count each number in the second column.

- Swapping -split for string split() which may have a tiny bit less overhead.

- no pipelines.

The code isn't completely different, it's the same blocks doing the same things, leaning more on .NET lower levels, and years of experience of the basic PowerShell performance hits.

It seems it does not work now now?

It's best for me when I do something that I ordinarily don't do for AoC.

I find no particular pleasure in using an everyday language like Python for it, because as you said it's too easy.

I have used Haskell, Racket, and in some easier cases APL and it's been fun. Treating it more like a puzzle than an actual programming assignment.

When learning new languages, it's best to do something that actually makes you think in a different shape. If you know Python, don't do Ruby. If you know Java, don't do C#.

- https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/1

- https://adventofcode.com/

It's an advent calendar design, one puzzle unlocks each day, the rows in the picture where the number and countdown are. You can click rows 1 and 2 now.

I actually enjoy it in this context, not so much in JIRA.

I participate almost every year but I don't care about the leaderboard. The timezone play a crucial role in being able to be ready at the right time, so actually who cares? I prefer to build private leaderboards with my friends and colleagues.

Yep, there was; they even wrote so in their commit message before removing it: https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1h3w7mc/2024_...

Caring about the leaderboards is the problem. Are you (impersonal) seriously doing AoC for clout or something?

It was, of course, an AI-generated solution; they posted it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20241201052156/https://github.co...

Later, after being called out on it, they posted an apology to their GitHub profile (https://web.archive.org/web/20241201064816/https://github.co...): "If you are here from the AoC leaderboard, I apologize for not reading the FAQ. Won't happen again."

Both the repo and that message are now gone.

For comparison, here's how long it took in past years:

    2015 - 10:55
    2016 -  7:01
    2017 -  1:16
    2018 -  1:48
    2019 -  1:39
    2020 -  7:11
    2021 -  1:07
    2022 -  0:53
    2023 -  2:24

And this year's second place was 0:54.

OpenAI did something similar with their o1 model. Ran a coding problem through o1 thousands or maybe millions of times and then checked if the solution was correct.

I can imagine a great pipeline for performance optimization: 1. have an AI generate millions of tests for your existing code 2. have another AI generate faster code that still makes the tests pass

So I guess all I want for Christmas is a massive compute cluster and infinite OpenAI credits :P

AI coding assistants ruined the global leaderboard experience. AoC might as well nerf it by discarding the quickest x percent of submissions, or something...

I wonder how many seconds could be won by the organizers if the challenge included a blant prompt injection breaking the result.

Without condoning cheating, I am impressed with the automation aspect of it. 9 seconds sounds more or less like the inference time of the LLM, so this must have been automated. Login at midnight + lots of C&P may not have done it.

Perhaps there is a scope for an alternative AoC type competition aimed at AI submissions...

...though of course that would be experimenting to get us all out of work. Hmm.

As with real life, the speed generally doesn't matter as long as you get a working solution and you find it fun. If you find "copy and paste into an LLM and then copy and paste the answer back out" fun, then I suppose you do you.

I didn't realise it was be timed, which is good because I casually set up a new rig to give future puzzles some kind of rig. I used C# which, although probably more wordy than other solutions, did the job and LINQ made light work of the list operations. Ended up with about 6.5 minutes for each one but most of that was refactoring out of pedantry.

At this point, it just shows that Advent of Code is completely worthless given the ease and accessibility of AI-assisted tools to solve these problems.

RIP Advent of Code.

And the timeless tradition of HN commentators cynicism

It's a simple webpage. If you don't like it, you can customize the CSS with a few custom rules in your browser.

Reposting a comment below: I used Stylus[1]. There are already some considerably more readable themes by the community.

[1]: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

Personally I love the esthetic and hope they never change it.

Yeah, I made a userscript for myself to fix that up: https://gist.github.com/xPaw/4fffaf776fe14d15c9602991f51dbfa...

You don’t have to do it in December. I was still working on last years in March.

Self-response: Stylus is useful here[1]. There is a list of already more readable styles than the default that the community has prepared.

[1]: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

I have used Stylus for CSS tweaks: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/

You can hit the "Reader" button on Firefox (ctrl-alt-r), I think Chrome also has that? Or an extension that does the same thing would probably work.

Bit simpler than writing an override or fetching the HTML.

There are CLI tools to fetch and submit solutions. At least one of them allows you to download the puzzle description as markup: https://github.com/scarvalhojr/aoc-cli

On thing you can do is fetch the html and extract the main content to display it in your favorite way, it's been stable for years, and you can use the (stable) session_id cookie, it's how many people approach the challenge.

I'd just create a bookmarklet or run JS in devtools: `document.body.style.fontFamily = "sans-serif";` etc

Advent of Code is fun, I like having fun! I have no shortage of challenges and things to be proud of, but when I’m old I don’t want to look back and realize I didn’t take the time to find little moments of joy along the way.

Everyone’s different, and it sounds like AoC isn’t for you, but remember not everyone is you :)

> Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't.

So if some activity [work] doesn't contribute to your ability to never have to work again [retirement], you shouldn't do it?

What if I've retired, am I allowed to do AOC then? Or then does the first rule of, only do something the future you would be proud of apply?

What if all of the things I'm proud of are just a false sense of accomplishments? How do I know when I'm actually allowed to be proud of it, or if it's just a false sense of pride?

Or use it to practice a language that you just wanted to give a spin.

Yet you're on HN instead of working on your sideproject.

Learn to let go of the constant need to be productive.

I’m gonna do a side project because it’s more fun and useful to me.

> help with an earlier retirement.

Like car accident?