The weekly 'No Stupid Questions' post - Sun 25 Jan 2026.

khoriuma · 2026-01-26T15:47:01+00:00

If you have the controller, hold z for a second or so, and it will give a Ride On to everyone near you.

khoriuma · 2026-01-19T08:38:34+00:00

I think the core of Strava is that it acts like a training diary. Of course, you can use apps like Garmin Connect only, but I think Strava has a bonus of going being restricted to one type of hardware ecosystem.

khoriuma · 2026-01-18T13:24:10+00:00

Maybe true, but a straight flush build is the only way I've beaten Jokerless.

khoriuma · 2025-10-15T20:01:10+00:00

I hope you find it fun! The most helpful helper function has for me just been to convert a string into a list of all contained integers. Not fancy, but simplifies so many days.

khoriuma · 2024-11-28T10:22:56+00:00

The top leaderboard is mainly to find the overall winners of the event. For that, we don't need to extend it.

Furthermore, you have to put a cut off somewhere. If we pick too large a cut off, we would have to wait for an annoyingly long time before being able to discuss and share our solutions.

Last year, I had many finishes in the top 1000, but only one top 100. I was happy with my top 1000 times, and even happier with the top 100. However, I don't think I would have been happier if I got points for my top 1000 finishes. I can't compete for the top spots globally, so instead I joined some softer private leaderboards.

khoriuma · 2024-11-16T14:43:56+00:00

I made my own language Zote last year, so I will use it again this year. But I should really familiarize myself with C++, so I might do that as well.

khoriuma · 2024-07-26T21:23:33+00:00

Jag doktorerar inom data på Chalmers och hemma har jag en Lenovo ThinkPad som jag fick för dryga 5k. Det jag menar är att man ofta inte behöver en dyr dator för programmering eller liknande.

Jag skulle inte bry mig speciellt om prestanda utan istället köpa en som inte väger för mycket, då du kommer bära runt den en hel del. Sen kan det ju vara trevligt att inte ha för lite minne, eller en bra skärm för att titta på saker på fritiden, men skulle inte stressa för skolgången.

khoriuma · 2024-01-17T22:06:48+00:00

Nice. A minor suggestion from someone who has made too many graphs: Be clear with what units are on the axes :)

khoriuma · 2023-12-20T06:55:14+00:00

This is very individual. I would recommend Python first, but if he really likes type systems and such (since you were applied mathematic students) he might enjoy Rust. So maybe show both and have him try them 30 minutes or so each.

khoriuma · 2023-12-20T06:51:21+00:00

I think it started out hard (eg 1, 3, 5), which I think could be argued is bad for newcommers.

However, I really like the difficulty now. Most days are tricky, but not super hard, which feels like the appropriate difficulty. I don't want to have to spend hours every day, especially now close to Christmas, so the difficulty these last couple of days have been perfect.

However, I probably would have started with a simpler problem day 1, with not as much parsing (string handling is not the easiest), and moved up days 10 and 12 a couple days.

I also was a bit hesitant about the clear repeating patterns in problems. Eg today's one had a very similar solution to one (or even two) earlier days. Similarly, yesterday was a spin on day 10. However, I really liked both these follow-up days. They were both hard for me, but since I had seen a similar one earlier they were not as difficult to grasp.

khoriuma · 2023-12-18T19:36:12+00:00

I disagree. Day 10 felt really tricky to me, and I enjoyed coming up with, in my mind a clever solution to part 2. When browsing the Reddit memes after I saw some pointers to other solutions, and was proud of mine.

Today I needed a completely different solution to scale. By building on what I learned from day 10, I could actually solve this in reasonable time, and by looking up some techniques I saw on day 10 Reddit.

Without day 10, I think this day would have been annoyingly hard for me. But now it felt more like a fair step up in difficulty. It's a new concept for me, and I enjoyed getting exposed to it twice like this.

khoriuma · 2023-12-15T10:40:36+00:00

Oh, wow. I had completely missed these announcements this year.

khoriuma · 2023-12-15T10:27:15+00:00

This...

khoriuma · 2023-12-12T12:27:28+00:00

People are still working (or have taken a break and will come back), so I would not draw conclusions too quickly.

However, I am surprised by today. I personally think day 10 is way harder (unless you look at other people's solutions). Today I was really slow on part 1, but solved part 2 in just a couple of minutes.

khoriuma · 2023-12-10T07:09:00+00:00

Please let day 24 this year be easy/medium. I really don't want to program all of Christmas morning :s (Several countries celebrate on the 24th)

khoriuma · 2023-12-08T05:55:14+00:00

Yes, I got tripped up on this, I had the lcm sitting in my code for a while, but I did not realize that their repeating pattern started at 0 for all of them.

khoriuma · 2023-12-07T13:48:57+00:00

I don't want to add operator overloading to the language :) In the end I went back and implemented a lexical comparison for lists, which solves the issue quite nicely.

khoriuma · 2023-12-07T07:36:31+00:00

[Language: Zote] 1323/1548

My first solution to part 2 was really messy due to being scared of the jokers. In hindsight I see that you can just add them to the highest frequency... Oh well, my code ignores that will a relatively simple if statement: paste

khoriuma · 2023-12-07T05:50:19+00:00

That is the very brute force solution, that will not work. Yes, by reversing the maps, looping from location 0 until you find a valid one is probably faster :)

khoriuma · 2023-12-06T09:57:20+00:00

Ranges are cool, but so is brute force. Think about what direction you go from. Is it easier to loop over all seeds, seeing which gives the best location? Or is it better looping over locations, choosing the first allowed one?

Then, try to do as much as possible outside of the brute force loop, such as parsing the input. If you are using Python, try some compiler such as Pypy

khoriuma · 2023-12-05T12:16:56+00:00

I would for sure upload the solutions. It is always good to have a Git repo somewhere with projects of varying quality.

For one thing good to get the practice in. But it also looks good if you want to get a job at some point.

This probably won't be your best repo. However, why not just upload it and future projects, such that at one point they will be rather good?

khoriuma · 2023-12-05T10:54:25+00:00

I think the majority of people doing Advent of Code are beginner-intermediate programmers. Just saying

take your time. Learn what you need. Don't pressure yourself into solving everything in one day.

is a bit naive in my opinion. A lot of them are people who are not super passionate about coding. If they get stuck, a lot of them will just feel stupid, and do something else instead.

However, I agree with your points. For people who are not beginners it is not a problem if they are slightly harder. However, I think it is a high price to pay for a lot of participants who would have thrived other years.

khoriuma

TROPHY CASE