If you must look at the scores, you can now make your own private leaderboards. If you're the only member of the leaderboard, then you'll win every challenge.
This is dismissive and unnecessarily condescending. Is it possible to opt out of the public leaderboard entirely? Because if not - perhaps things have changed - the stressful part about AoC is having a publicly viewable permanent score based on arbitrary and unfair criteria. Simply “not looking at it” isn’t enough.
I did AoC a few years ago and realized that I had my GitHub profile associated to “middle-of-the-road” scores on a public list. It isn’t really a problem and I realize I may sound too sensitive: but it is a bit stressful to be ranked in a competition you have no interest in competing in. Think of an ignorant recruiter deciding to look at a “better” programmer higher on the list, etc. And in a community/society that places a huge premium on arbitrary scores like SAT and IQ, there’s a small twinge of unavoidable stress when you see “you completed 75,435th” simply because you decided to do a puzzle on a lunch break. I’d rather just avoid it entirely.
Likewise, there are many people desperately competing for a “top spot” that measures their ability to... drink coffee late at night, mostly. It’s just kind of gross and not something I feel like encouraging. Having an opt-in leaderboard would be fine, but AoC pushes it way too hard. The emphasis should be on fun daily puzzles, not an arbitrary competition based on who is most alert at a given hour.
I don't really understand this perspective at all. I've done a few of the previous AoCs to various levels of completion.
I don't think I've ever been quick enough to figure on the leaderboard. I'm not a competitive person so that aspect of it doesn't really appeal to me and I've been able to totally ignore it every year without it really intruding on me or causing me any stress related problems.
You're imaging a scenario which doesn't really exist with this "ignorant recruiter" situation. Why not just worry about that if / when it really does become a problem...?
We can look at a myriad of potential stress factors that come out of the design of so many every day items. We'd be overrun with worries if let them dominate our mind.
Just chill out and try to ignore the competitive aspect, its not that difficult
I used a cutesy synecdoche to illustrate the overall point that “AoC leaderboard ranking” is essentially uncorrelated with programming ability, despite how heavily the leaderboard is pushed on participants. Otherwise I think the rest of the comment is well-argued and I don’t think a full reading of my comment suggests that “drink coffee late at night” was literally the main deciding factor. In a literal sense, geographic location/time zone is a much stronger variable than coffee consumption. I realize the internet in general (and HN specifically) isn’t a great place for rhetoric like this.
Regardless, I feel like you’re being excessively pedantic as a means to..... police my tone without addressing any of the actual arguments.
You literally have to actively choose to look at the leaderboard. And you have to make your account link to your profile. So if you are capable of ignoring a thing that has no impact, and of not willfully publishing your connection to the site, you're in the clear.
Since only the first 100 get points, it's really easy to ignore the leaderboard. Odds are against you when (at least in the early days) 30-50k people are competing.
I just find the idea that anybody would judge you on the scores absolutely crazy. Have you looked at people's code?! Do I want to hire people who can create unreadable one liners, then rewrite them into another unreadable one liner for the second part of each puzzle? Do I want to make it impossible to hire people with jobs, kids, or people in different timezones? Would you want to work somewhere that used this sort of thing to decide how to build teams?
Advent of Code for me has always been about creativity, learning new languages, some fun with co-workers. Occasionally after finding the simplest solution, I'll try and work out algorithms with better performance, or even read papers on the underlying fundamental computer science problem involved. But I try to write the code as I would in the day job, and so I always use the example inputs to write unit tests and I always try to refactor stuff to be readable. I'd much rather see code I could imagine working with in real life on someone's GitHub profile than something absurdly terse.
All that said, the puzzles this year have been pretty simple and do seem slightly more optimised to people on speedruns than some years previously, so it's not been that stimulating so far.
Unless you are actively trying to compete, it's pretty unlikely you'd end up on any of the leaderboards. As far as I can tell, it only tracks the top 100.
I did AoC a few years ago and realized that I had my GitHub profile associated to “middle-of-the-road” scores on a public list. It isn’t really a problem and I realize I may sound too sensitive: but it is a bit stressful to be ranked in a competition you have no interest in competing in. Think of an ignorant recruiter deciding to look at a “better” programmer higher on the list, etc. And in a community/society that places a huge premium on arbitrary scores like SAT and IQ, there’s a small twinge of unavoidable stress when you see “you completed 75,435th” simply because you decided to do a puzzle on a lunch break. I’d rather just avoid it entirely.
Likewise, there are many people desperately competing for a “top spot” that measures their ability to... drink coffee late at night, mostly. It’s just kind of gross and not something I feel like encouraging. Having an opt-in leaderboard would be fine, but AoC pushes it way too hard. The emphasis should be on fun daily puzzles, not an arbitrary competition based on who is most alert at a given hour.