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Comment by kevinwang | Hacker News Reader

Even though I enjoy competing for the leaderboard, the creator is pretty up-front about the leaderboard being Not The Point and advises you to ignore it, and from that perspective the midnight release time makes more sense.

(And the reason is that it's the time that the creator can be readily available: https://adventofcode.com/2020/about )

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You can't make a leaderboard and then say it's not important. Especially when you don't even opt into it, you just...get on the leaderboard.

If the creator was genuine about it not being important they'd explicitly limit the leaderboard with an opt in process. You shouldn't even be able to see the leaderboard unless you have opted into it. It shouldn't be visible or clickable.

Last year almost 100,000 people solved the first part of the first puzzle. Almost 3000 people solved the last part of the 25th and last puzzle. The leaderboard has only 100 entries.

The leaderboard is not important.

It's important to a lot of people. I get that I'm in the minority here, but I can make it on the leaderboard a lot of the time if I try. But trying to get on the leaderboard stresses me out and ruins the fun, so I instead do things like start a bit late to sabotage myself.

I still make it on the leaderboard sometimes if I get too excited about starting right away or if it's a particularly hard problem and I get lucky figuring it out. That stresses me out a bit. I'd be happier if the leaderboard weren't there.

You could always solve this problem by setting yourself an extra "day 0" challenge: write a userscript that runs on the contest website and hides all references to the leaderboard.

Did you know HN has one? https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders .. It used to be a top link across the site but they got rid of it for similar "not the point" reasons.

Admittedly I did used to spend a lot more time commenting and posting here when it existed, and have since slipped way down :-)

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