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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN (comment edition):

I know we have plenty of people here doing AoC with their own personal challenges/restrictions on top. What are yours? Solving in an eso-lang? Self-imposed resource constraints (runtime/memory)? Only using Excel? Let's hear 'em.

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I can never get myself to care enough to do more than a small handful (2 to 3 per year max, if I have time in between other hobbies/family/travel and most especially work). However, my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line as a large list/dict comprehension. Or do it all in a bash pipeline. Or find some way to express it all in a single line of Golang generics a-la samber/lo. Something silly that takes one of those first-few-days sub-30-minute problems and turns it into a sub-60-minute problem, but now with some amusing self-expression via extremely odd code.

> my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line

Ha, this is pretty much my favorite restriction too. I try to do one single-line expression for input parsing, one for the part 1 solution, and one for the part 2 solution (eg [1]). Thought sometimes I can't manage it and I just fall back to solving it normally.

[1] https://github.com/benhaney/Advent-of-Code/blob/master/2024/...

I'm trying to complete each challenge in a different language. I've written up the first five days on my blog[1]. Have completed a few more than just these, but I don't know that I'll get all of them done by Christmas.

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/12/16/aoc-2024-part1/

I'm trying to fully vectorize the first few days with RVV.

The first day started of quite challanging with number parsing, sorting and set intersection. I may have gotten sidetracked trying to beat the standard library sort for a week.

It's already half way into week three and I'm still at day 2 part 2.

I find it hard enough without restrictions (especially toward the end) so I'm not doing anything too wild, but I've been trying to solve quickly this time. My goal was to get in the top 100 on one of the days to actually get a point, but I think I missed my window where the problems got too hard for LLMs but were still doable quickly for me. At least I managed a 136 which is much better than I've ever done before.

Maybe next year I'll actually prepare some utility code for parsing grids and 2d vector math and such.

Trying to juggle two kids, a mortgage, xmas and only having 30' at night to myself to even hear my own thoughts. I'd take your artificial constraints any day.

Luckily, similar to how they made a choice for these constraints, you also chose yours. Both are artificial constraints; nobody is forced to solve problems in an esolang, and very few people are forced into having kids. You could have chosen their constraints instead. You chose a constraint set difficult for you; they chose a constraint set difficult for them, and the wonderful thing is that you both can work on the problems at your own pace, under the constraints you've chosen for yourselves.

no front, but do you even read what you write? incredibly insensitive

Same. Bathroom breaks are where I get the majority of my problem solving done for AoC.

This is my first advent of code, my initial goal was solving the challenges using APL (note: I've never used that kind of language). It didn't work. :D

I continued in C++, but kind of lost interest. Next year I'll learn the language beforehand. hehe

I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary chords.

There’s a decent VSCode plugin but I mostly use the online pad because it’s such a rich environment. Very active Discord, with an AoC channel for help and sharing solutions - the maintainer actively iterates on the language to help them solve AoC problems.

https://www.uiua.org/

(I also fall back to Clojure when I’m struggling to come up with a uiua solution or banging my head against the stack, I kinda wish I had uiua-in-Clojure like how April is APL-in-CL)

Thank you for the hint, I didn't know Uiua. I'll definitely take a look on it.

I tried the same thing with Haskell one year with a similar result (fell back to python then gave up). The beginning was nice when the puzzles were easy and I could focus on learning the language, but once the puzzles got tough it was too much trying to struggle with them and the language at the same time.

I am doing it this year with haskell. My C++ alter-ego (ab)used Data.STRef in the previous years so I am trying to do it idiomatically this time.

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