Ask HN: Is it OK to look at AoC solutions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it OK to look at AoC solutions?

7 pointsifh-hn11 comments

I'm yet again attempting AoC. I've never completed one yet. Mostly I get too busy on the run up to Christmas but sometimes I just get stuck.

This brings me to my question. If you are stuck is it OK to just look at a solution?

For me, I got stuck on Day 1 Part 2. No amount of hints worked, so I just found a solution. I managed to get the code to produce the correct answer. I still don't understand why, I'm not good at maths. AI can't ELI5 either.

So is it good to see how others solved the problem? Or just remain stuck, and not understanding why?

Personally I feel better about knowing a solution to the problem even if I didn't solve it myself, mostly because not knowing is worse.

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Yes, it's ok to look. I generally don't until I've solved it, and then mostly to find hints on faster ways to solve it.

Instead of hints, try asking for, or finding, test cases. Several of us posted additional test cases that found most people's problems in part 2. Once you have a test case (with a small input size, so you can easily step through it by hand) you can usually identify the particular problems in your solution. This will also help you understand why it works.

If that still doesn't work, then find working solutions and try to understand them. Some people's solutions get really clever, don't worry about those. If it's not even remotely clear to you what's happening in it, it's not a solution you need to study yet. Find the simplest, brute force solutions first. Then find ones that look similar but are optimized in some way.

I usually give myself 30-60 mins to solve. If I can't do it by then I will look up solutions and -study- them (also break it piece by piece and see if I can generalize it for future problems). I would look at solutions even after solving it by myself.

I find that to be the best balance between challenge and learning something new. You will mentally burn yourself out if you keep bashing against the wall for hours or more, not quite a healthy thing to do :)

Meanwhile, people who actually try to compete on this stuff have already developed rich library of specialized algorithms to leap ahead of average programmer. Well, I guess nowadays a lot of it is LLM assisted too.

Yeah, I definitely think there's benefit in seeing others solutions, and in this situation I want to learn from it, if I can ever reason out why it's working.

Certainly using nushell means anything beyond the true basics seems to be beyond most LLMs.

When I first started programming it used to get me down if I couldn't solve these things. But as I've got old and a little more experienced, I can now admit things like AoC are just not my thing. It's like crossword puzzles or low level algos. I find them extremely hard to reason about.

The more you struggle at something the more you will learn. That works up to the point where the struggle is beyond your capacity for struggle - then you just get stuck. So ideally (assuming you are doing this because you want to learn something) you want to reduce the amount of struggle to just below your capacity.

Just copying someone else's solution, or getting an LLM to fix it for you will be very low struggle, so you won't learn much.

To add some struggle, maybe look up a solution in a different language and translate to your language? You could choose a solution in a language similar to your language, so if you are solving in C, perhaps look up a C# solution or to make it harder look up a solution in a different paradigm. Find a Haskell solution or a Prolog one and see if that gives you enough hints.

I can see the benefit of the struggle, but in relation to Day 1 Part 2 I literally had no clue why what id written wasn't working or what I needed to do to fix it.

I'm using nushell this year for AoC. It's functional by nature though you can make it imperative, so it's out of my comfort zone.

However the problem is math based whatever language you're using, involving modulo and int division. I had an hunch it was about that but no sense of what to do or how to approach.

Having looked at multiple ways of doing it I still have no clue what's going on, only that it works.

Ask for help explaining it. Check if a similar question has been asked already, but if not post your code to the subreddit and ask for help understanding why it works. The subreddit is friendly, people will answer if they see the question and can understand the code.

It’s better to look at other solutions, analyze and understand them to learn something new rather than giving up and not learning something new

https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/tree/main/ipynb Look at Norvig's solution - which are a good learning point for even those who are able to solve everything!

Not being flippant.

You would probably learn more vibe coding a solution than just reading code.

Because your engagement would be active, you would practice useful technique, and have an opportunity to iterate.

Good luck.

Nothing flippant about an honest opinion.

I think there's something to this except if you're using a language the llm doesn't know, like I am with nushell.

Day 2 for example I easily completed on my own with 2 very similar regex strings. However knowing regex to be slow I went looking for a more optimised solution. I found some python code that I mostly understood and attempted to rewrite the iterative solution into the functional nushell style and failed miserably. I turned to an llm for help only for it to waste my time with nonsense because nushell appears to be too new and changing too quickly for it.

except if you're using a language the llm doesn't know

This is exactly what I was getting at.

You will learn more from trying to vibe nushell code than reading solutions.

From thinking about how nushell is like other languages that can be vibe coded to considering why you want to learn nushell.

Or to put it another way, the dog did not actually eat your homework.

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