No, estimated height has nothing to do with actual measurements

Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/

It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.

Some of the best software engineers I know are ex-physics PhDs… it’s one of those “can’t fake it” skillsets that also happens to have high transferability to ML/AI fields. On the other hand, I snuck through the CS major without ever multiplying a matrix.

question: why would people pay for this when github exists

The group of people for which the problems are "too easy" is probably quite small.

According to Eric last year (https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1hly9dw/2024_...) there were 559 people that had obtained all 500 stars. I'm happy to be one of them.

The actual number is going to be higher as more people will have finished the puzzles since then, and many people may have finished all of the puzzles but split across more than one account.

Then again, I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who have only completed certain puzzles because they found someone else's code on the AoC subreddit and ran that against their input, or got a huge hint from there without which they'd never solve it on their own. (To be clear, I don't mind the latter as it's just a trigger for someone to learn something they didn't know before, but just running someone else's code is not helping them if they don't dig into it further and understand how/why it works.)

There's definitely a certain specific set of knowledge areas that really helps solve AoC puzzles. It's a combination of classic Comp Sci theory (A*/SAT solvers, Dijkstra's algorithm, breadth/depth first searches, parsing, regex, string processing, data structures, dynamic programming, memoization, etc) and Mathematics (finite fields and modular arithmetic, Chinese Remainder Theorem, geometry, combinatorics, grids and coordinates, graph theory, etc).

Not many people have all those skills to the required level to find the majority of AoC "easy". There's no obvious common path to accruing this particular knowledge set. A traditional Comp Sci background may not provide all of the Mathematics required. A Mathematics background may leave you short on the Comp Sci theory front.

My own experience is unusual. I've got two separate bachelors degrees; one in Comp Sci and one in Mathematics with a 7 year gap between them, those degrees and 25+ years of doing software development as a job means I do find the vast majority of AoC quite easy, but not all of it, there are still some stinkers.

Being able to look at an AoC problem and think "There's some algorithm behind this, what is it?" is hugely helpful.

The "Slam Shuffle" problem (2019 day 22) was a classic example of this that sticks in my mind. The magnitude of the numbers involved in part 2 of that problem made it clear that a naive iteration approach was out of the question, so there had to be a more direct path to the answer.

As I write the code for part 1 of any problem I tend to think "What is the twist for part 2 going to be? How is Eric going to make it orders of magnitude harder?" Sometimes I even guess right, sometimes it's just plain evil.

Don't drag me into this.

I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.

You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.

I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.

I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.

I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.

I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.

One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/RSVtD1W