We were a Nintendo family when I was a kid (back when that was a meaningful distinction and cross-platform games were very rare) and I continued buying Nintendo systems and games up until the Gamecube era. But at some point I came to a realization and haven't bought anything of theirs since.

Nintendo doesn't take good care of their customers.

There's the confusing half-step hardware upgrades which can potentially leave you with hardware that doesn't technically play the latest games, or has compatibility problems. There's the bizarre hoops you have to jump through to play games with friends online.

But the biggest thing that stops me from buying any new Nintendo platform is that it's going to expire in a way that no modern system should anymore. I have Steam and Microsoft accounts that have records of my purchases from 10 or 15 years ago, and all I have to do is log in and I can download and play them on any new system I get. I don't know how it works on Sony's systems, but I imagine that it's similar. My account is credited with the game, and I can play it when I want to.

When I hear about how people have to keep continually buying classic Nintendo games on their own built-in download service, or lose access to all of their games when they buy a different console unit of the exact same console, or give up on playing with their friends because they can't just tell the service "Account X is my friend," I'm just gobsmacked.

This article makes the case that this attitude of contempt extends to their own employees as well. I think they'd do quite well to eat some humble pie, but I'm not expecting much.

I just got one myself and in my system, it seems like a fairly hot puppy. I see it idle around 50-60C and load at 70C or more. This was with an aftermarket cooler, although I may not have applied the thermal paste well. I haven't done any thorough testing but it seems hotter than the rather old i5 that it replaced.

In my own writing (such as it is), I find that putting down my thoughts too often means that when I go back and look at what I've written, the quality isn't very good. I have to sit and stew a while and write something carefully if I want it to stand up.

For very prolific authors, I wonder how much of their work is genuinely great and how much is just rephrasing something they'd written earlier or just uninteresting. I'm not sure I have enough time to read any to find out!

You're presented with a pretty unique, bite-size programming challenge every day. Everything is themed around Christmas so there's a short story about how you have to help Santa's elves fix their machinery or something like that.

Different people get slightly different problems, so you have to do your own work to solve for your puzzle input. You feed it back into the site to see if it was correct or not. Getting a problem right was a great feeling, and it progressively unlocks more of a Christmas-themed ASCII art picture.

I would have a tough time explaining it to someone who doesn't do any programming, but it's free to try if you're curious!

This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give?

As I recall, most of the time the input is delineated by spaces or linebreaks and it helps if you can carve it up easily right off the bat.

I tried AoC in Rust two years ago, and you really don't need anything beyond the excellent standard library. Rust has lots of nice features that make working with the type of input AoC gives trivial.

By limiting yourself to the standard library at first, I find that you can get a good feel for the language itself.

You could look up some of the published solutions from last year to get a feel for what is possible.

Example: https://github.com/bertptrs/adventofcode/tree/master/2018/sr...

This person kept a minimal common library for recurring functionality and a small wrapper application that launches the code for each puzzle. It looks like a really clean approach.

I would recommend against a common framework if this is your first venture into rust: I tried exactly this last year, but since I was learning a lot about the language along the way I kept having to go back and update previous days to reflect framework updates.

I tried using it to learn Haskell last year. Warning: it gets hard, and you will want to concentrate on the problem solving, not on compiler errors. It definitely helped my Haskell for the first week or two, but then I switched to Python. I like Rust and recently learned it, but honestly doing AoC in it while learning sounds really painful.

You can do that with the standard library, just do File::read_to_string and String::lines or String::split_whitespace.

Last year I attempted it during a comically short time (only 3 days), but was able to settle on something like this: https://github.com/j1elo/advent-of-code-2018-rust/blob/maste...

i.e. pass the input from standard input, and just build an on-the-go Vector of some data type that is appropriate for the problem at hand. Day 3 was different from 1 and 2 in that for the first time the parsing was not immediate; using Serde and Recap modules did a fantastically succinct job of parsing the text input. Of course it depends on how much you want to rely on external crates.

Let's see if this year I can do more than 3 days worth of AoC :-)

I did part of last year in rust and found that indeed iterating over lines and splits worked quite well.

Also had a good learning experience using the nom parser combinator package [0], but this takes a bit of code (that you can often reuse between days).

If you are aiming for fast solutions, the !scan macro of serde-scan [1] is made for exactly this, but then you are far outside the core language...

[0]: https://crates.io/crates/nom [1]: https://docs.rs/serde_scan/0.3.2/serde_scan/macro.scan.html

> This year I really want to try to use this to learn Rust. Are there any good practices or crates to handle file input like most of the problems give?

Last year I asked the same, and I found this answer on SO:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31046763/does-rust-have-...

See the answer which mentions the "text_io" crete.