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Comment by troebr | Hacker News Reader

I read this as "Learn to <code faster>", instead of "<Learn to code> faster". Heck yeah I want to code faster!

Me too, must be the advent of code leaderboard envy! I'm reading the puzzle text, implementing a nice little solution, debugging it a little bit, and after a few tries get the correct result. Entering the result, happy that it has worked, and realizing, that there were 4000 people faster than me again.

It does not bother me too much, but it is humbling. And I guess speed puzzle solving is a skill that can be trained like any other, so given the context I too thought, that these a website to learn exactly that.

I'm nowhere near the leaderboards, but I have built some tools that do things like scaffold the files for a solution and automatically fetch the input file. I imagine the guys competing for the top spots are doing similar things, automating as much as possible.

Another thing is having utilities and libraries that are well suited for solving puzzles, I have a whole module in my repo that implements a 2d-array style structure (in elixir), which I've been able to use on 6 or 7 puzzles.

So there are ways to increase your speed other than "just be really fast at coding" (although you definitely need that too if you're trying to get up the rankings!)

Really? I was critical of it because the bottleneck is almost never coding speed for me. xD

There are broadly two aspects to my last couple of roles: infrastructure development and operational support. My infra development isn't speed-limited, but operational support involves a lot of quick back-of-the-envelope estimates of large datasets and/or one-off automation many invocations of commandline tools.

My infrastructure work is in C++ and Python, whereas I most often reach for jq, awk, tr, sort, uniq, comm, etc. for operational support tasks.

Same.

1. Ask chatgpt to write the code

2. Debug the obvious errors

3. Ask stack overflow to find the non-obvious errors

4. Repeat

You accidentally become a better programmer like the old days when people would learn by typing in listings from compute.

Me too! I thought there was a ship that'll burn down if you don't code fast enough. The video thumbnail showing "100 seconds" made me think there was a timer.

Yea, I was thinking some kind of spaceship RPG where you'd need to quickly code up short programs to deal with various surprise situations.

"Quick, generate a prioritized list of polar coordinate firing directions based on this CSV of enemy ships in cartesian coordinates and their offensive strengths"

Edit: Chatting on AIM was how I finally learned to touch-type properly. It's funny how a small amount of urgency really improves the value of certain exercises.

This might go well with some theming based on A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, given how Vinge describes programming and automation as critical to operating spacecraft in those books.

Those were fun reads!

Typing of the Dead is another one that provides some urgency. haha

One word, my dude: Lisp.

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