Your logic is flawed. You can be a developer and not be interested in AoC. Not being interested in AoC only shows you're not interested in AoC.

I wasn't casting logic. I'm not a developer and that when it comes to AoC I have no interest in. Nor being such.

Why post, then? No one cares about your lack of interest.

It always seemed odd to me that a persistent minority of HN readers seem to have no interest in recreational programming/technical problems solving and perpetually ask "why should I care?"

It's totally fine not to care, but I can't quite get why you would then want to be an active member in a community of people who care about this stuff for no other reason than they fundamentally find it interesting.

I wonder how this is the most straightforward way to know that?

It's all marketing, I can sell this to you and convert you.

Thing is it may have some interesting challenges, I too, wouldn't want to solve some insane string parsing problem with no interesting idea behind it. For today's problem, I did the naive version and it worked. The modular version created some issues with some corner cases.

There should be more events like AoC. Self-contained problems are very educational.