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Comment by bhrgunatha | Hacker News Reader

My only real complaint is (according to my experience) unless you happen to understand some mathematical concept/s involved in the question, it's incredibly difficult to get some insight or clue for how to go about solving it.

The forums are a fantastic resource once you already know how to solve the problem.

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I agree with this for the most part, but I also really like the freedom/creativity that comes from having no idea how to solve a problem or whether there is even an optimal way of solving it. Some of my favorite solutions have come from hacking the brute force method in any way possible and coming up with interesting optimizations which I might not have found had I known the math-fact based optimal solution.

seeing a simpler/more elegant solution after you solve it will make you appreciate it more. It's also a strategy to teach math: first you fight the problem, then you learn the trick, and it will stick way longer. Unfortunately, this method is not used in high schools (not over here in BE anyway).

Totally agree. While I learnt a few interesting concepts it doesn't feel lasting to learn isolated concepts.

Personally I would like to have a little orientation system to pick a book to learn and get challenges focusing on the subject to reinforce them.

I definitely wish there was a hint system / forum where you could get pointers towards concepts you should read up on, and not the full answer.

There are forums for the problems where you can ask for general directions, so long as hints are not asked / provided.

Yeah, I "cheated" by using the forums a lot when I was going through Project Euler, too. One thing that helped me to understand different approaches was to write any solution that worked, and then benchmark my solution against all of the other submissions in my language of choice (Ruby at the time). There are so many other sites about learning to code, reviewing answers in the forums is kind of like giving yourself the lecture with content, and then you go do the real homework somewhere else. It doesn't matter how you learn it, as long as the learning sticks!

This is true, though there are recurring themes, and the forum discussion for previous problems often helps.

You could just look things up with Google, Wikipedia, etc. It's not like it's hard to do that for the first 100 problems.

It's hard if you don't know what you're looking for. And if you just Google "Euler problem 67" you're very likely to find a solution, which kind of ruins the point. It would be cool if project Euler came with an official multilevel hint systems with each hint getting closer and closer to giving you the actual solution .

> It's hard if you don't know what you're looking for.

Yes, that's tautologically true. You do have to put in some effort and thought.

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