I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!)
The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!
HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.
FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.
This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city
That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle.
One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
Some feedback: On mobile, why is there a custom keyboard? I found it pretty annoying. I kept getting missed taps, and at least one wrong guess due to a typo I didn’t catch before. It doesn’t seem like the system keyboard’s spellchecking would interfere with the puzzle, so why not just use it? Is it an issue with layout consistency?
- Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear.
- Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example:
[to ___fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] = cat
[do this or cut bait] = fish
[taking a pay one is a bummer] = cut
[rocks when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode] = pop
The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.
Congrats! Great game - I did todays, and then immediately did them for the last week - it's really fun, tricky, and gives that nice little dopamine hit when you untangle the answer.
Contra several other people here, I also like that you _can't_ skip ahead - yes, I know that's probably "Venus", which is a good clue for working back up to the clues I _can't_ figure out. It's the journey, not the destination.
I'd really like to be able to just answer the puzzle without answering any of the intermediate stages. It is a much more challenging feat to just hold it all in your head and then type out the one long answer than to answer the individual stages. It promotes some real mental modelling skills that way.
The game, played as-is, is almost no challenge at all. It just feels like busywork.
big fan since you posted!
I agree with the feedback on matching brackets. Additionally the fake keyboard is driving me nuts… I get a lot of errors from phat fingering it when my hands are conditioned to use the native ios keyboard. NYT web games had/have similar issues…
I realize it might be easier to write a puzzle than solve one. Writing them seems quite hard at first, but you have the solution and can choose words to break into clues, and from there do the same again until you have a properly complex puzzle.
Congratulations on getting it picked up by the Atlantic.
Very cool how some websites are still hunting for actual fun content and rewarding creators even in the middle of the internet's enshittification there are still a few bright spots
Re: many comments: The puzzle (as I think of it) is NOT to get the top-level answer. The puzzle is to get all the answers. If you figure out an outer answer earlier, that acts as a clue for an inner answer, just as inner answers act as clues for outer answers. A crossword isn't speedrun by just filling in the bottom-rightmost word.
I've been playing and enjoying this game since it was first posted on hn. Doing this is absolutely key to getting a good score. Eg, for the final answer in today's puzzle, I had the outer answer, and had to work backward 3-4 layers. The other good thing to do is, if you have an answer to work forward a couple layers. Once you know that an answer makes the next couple questions make sense, you're much less likely to give an incorrect guess.
Really fun and clever! Super super creative. Congratulations!! I just love it when somebody comes up with a new idea like this, it's inspiring.
My only nitpick: I totally get that you have to solve the inner clues before solving an outer clue, and that outer clues can help you solve an inner clue.
BUT, the ergonomics/UX of that is just impossible... There was an inner clue that was super-stumping me, and I could solve "downwards" from like 5 clues above, but trying to keep track of which brackets were which and which level was which was maddening.
It really feels like it needs a way to answer outer clues even if it won't collapse them. Just to keep track of them. And then a better way of tracking so many levels of nesting. I don't know if the answer is indented nesting like in code, or what. But the current UX only effectively allows you to work inside-out, when outside-in is clearly a necessary piece of the puzzle, because sometimes you get inner clues that are just stumpers that you have no other way of figuring out.
Can you color code the brackets so it’s easy to see how the clues are nested? Like outermost brackets are red, one level of nesting is blue, next level of nesting is orange. My brain is having a hard time parsing all of the clues.
I have the same feedback. Very creative and fun game but it’s giving me flashbacks to years of looking for mismatched curly braces and parentheses in code.
I was wondering if that is also part of the puzzle, trying to match the open and closed brackets, sort of like how excel highlights the corresponding parentheses when one is selected in the formula bar. This might be second nature for folks who code, but it requires a lot of focus for me.
As someone who speaks English but doesn't live in the US or any other English-speaking country, this game is hard! I wish there was one for my native language and country culture to see the difference it makes.
i'm a native english speaker and even i can't complete most of these because it's so US-centric. this is virtually unplayable for non-americans, which is a shame because it's a really good game.
I'm curious why you opted for a custom keyboard vs the built in one. It's not as good and unlike worldle it doesn't seem to really take advantage from custom keys.
If you use the built in keyboard I imagine you have to continuously deal with the page resizing to avoid the keyboard, and potentially people not having easy access to an English keyboard.
The custom keyboard makes all the tools you need a first class component of the game.
My one piece of feedback is to improve the keyboard (if that’s at all possible). I regularly miss points because of typos even if I had the correct answer.
I've been playing now the last few days (really enjoying it, so thanks a lot!) and have a couple small suggestions that I don't see mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
- it would be nice to have a list of the incorrect guesses that you've made. Sometimes I come back after a while and can't remember if I already guessed something or if I just thought about guessing it but wasn't sure... Of course this also dovetails a bit with what some of the other people mentioned about guesses being counted as incorrect even when they're guessed early because then if you have a list of all earlier incorrect guesses then an earlier incorrect guess might now be correct, so I would also change that, that a guess which is only incorrect because it's not available yet isn't counted as incorrect, and instead it says something like "not yet!". Another related problem for me though was I got stuck once and it turned out I had just made a typo in my earlier guess and hadn't noticed, which is why it would be nice to see your earlier guesses. Oh, and also related, I think it counts multiple incorrect guesses of the same word (again not 100% sure since I couldn't see my earlier guesses)
- it would be nice to improve the stats, maybe give you some kind of distribution to see how you're doing, maybe on the calendar you could colour code to show what days you've done well and what days you did worse or something
One little nitpick is that while I prefer hardmode for puzzles like this, on mobile (where I prefer to play such games), it's WAY too easy to misclick on the keyboard. I had "8 excess keystrokes," but those were all due to mistyping then deleting a single mistyped character (e.g. "ee" -> "er").
Not sure how to keep the essence of the skill-based approach, without the frustration induced by typing on a mobile keyboard.
I love this! Just sent it to some friends. Like others - minor nit -- I can't see what words I've already guessed. I'd guessed a correct word and mistyped it -- took me a long while to try it again.
Congrats — well deserved! I love the game and play it every day; it's actually the first thing I do in the morning. A big fan of Hard mode! My best friend has also started playing it and we share the results with each other.
Just one feedback - on desktop browsers, I can see the list of answered clues below the textbox, but on the phone (Brave or Firefox on Android), I don't see that list. I am not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it’s a feature I miss when playing on my phone. Seeing those answers gives that little “aha!” moment of satisfaction.
I also made a custom GPT - Bracket GPT [0] that helps in solving the clues when I am stuck. It doesn’t directly give the answers, but offers hints to help nudge you to the solution. It’s a fun companion when you're totally blanking.
Awesome [hunted [___ crackers are ironically vegan]]! I found the d[[not amateur, abbreviated]gramming construct preceding "else"]ficulty just [___ to remain [___ but deadly]].
Countering some recurring feedback here: I find the design decisions you’ve made strike a good balance between simplicity and inviting the player in to find their way round. I’m viewing on mobile.
- I can’t easily parse a top-level clue structure but the lack of colours keeps it neat
- Guess history would have been useful but omitting it keeps each guess low stakes for a first time user
- The keyboard is fine, don’t let the unicode universe in for an ascii input field
> Meet your next word-game obsession: Bracket City. Today we’re announcing that this fast-growing word puzzle - created earlier this year by an independent game designer - has a new home at The Atlantic. // In Bracket City, players solve nested layers of clues to uncover a fact about the given day in history. Each solved bracket reveals a part of the next, creating a chain reaction that eventually resolves the whole puzzle into a single sentence. Players earn city-themed ranks for success, such as “Commuter,” “Mayor,” or the coveted “Kingmaker” for a perfect puzzle. // Bracket City was created by Ben Gross and has rapidly amassed an audience of loyal players. Ben will continue to create daily puzzles with Caleb Madison, the director of games at The Atlantic.
This is cool, I immediately did 4 puzzles in a row.
In addition to saying congratulations, I wanted to ask, since you say you're the one writing the puzzles: how do you define a puzzle? What does it look like from your perspective? Do you literally just write all the nested clues out with brackets and everything, and then validate that it works—because that would drive me nuts, I think—or is there some tool you wrote to help?
These puzzles need to be handcrafted and a UI built. So they could hire other people to do it or hire the person who already has it done and start monetizing immediately.
Some other newspaper would quickly run a "The Atlantic stole a game developers game and you wouldn't guess what happened next" article, people would be upset for a day or two, original author might/might not sue and then business as usual unless judge rules in authors favor.
Exciting news! I recently launched a daily puzzle game I created based on an idea I had in the shower: (https://everything.io) I’ve been seeing lots of people here sharing their projects, and it’s been inspiring—some seriously cool ideas out there!
My game is a bit different—it’s all about combining emojis to find the hidden emoji. Sometimes it’s wordplay, sometimes conceptual, and sometimes just plain silly.
Congrats to everyone building and sharing—loving the creativity here!
I feel like your game could fit into a similar bracket format where everything is displayed on one page. I don't know how the UI of selecting emojis would work there though.
It took me longer than it should have to realize the last puzzle was made up of all my previous answers.
Spoiler: I also failed miserably at the last puzzle since I was thinking watergun and not gun so I thought it was a firefighter. I also couldn't tell that one emoji was a jail so just sort of ignored it. So that's mostly on me for having trouble understanding some of the emojis.
This game is somewhat stupidly implemented in that for clue "exercise in a pool" the guess swimming doesn't count, as the answer is swim.
But more importantly we can see here that actually just getting user input with a keyboard is actually made stupidly hard on mobile, and getting a reasonable result actually requires reimplementing the virtual keyboard, which often sucks because it has a tremendous amount of complexity!
The thing that bugged me was that I also knew a BUNCH of intermediate steps. I wished I could enter them and get feedback instead of "Incorrect answer". I don't mind having to do all the pieces.
I think what might work is just if it says "Too early" and makes a list of stuff below the puzzle that you've solved too early and just put a checkmark next to it once it's ready and let you click it to enter it.
Right now it's giving negative feedback, I think it should be a positive to recognize pieces of the puzzle early, even if you still need to do the whole puzzle.
Does anyone think it would be really fun to see an animation that replays the steps in which the puzzle is solved? When the puzzle is complete have the display replay the clues and answers in the order they were guessed. Here's a prototype:
i have an idea for a game but i really dont have enough time to implement myself. it would be a MMORPG but with discreet time steps, so every hour or so all the players would get a message that contains a picture depicting the point of view of their player character and a list of actions/options that they can take. rendering the game out of real time would allow hyper-realistic graphics and also physics simulation or environment destruction/modification. it would also allow for many, many more concurrent players in the same game world than other games and would allow for a much larger game world. and taking one "turn" only once every 30 minutes/hour would lend the game a special character that might be highly appreciated by some people in the context of todays popular games. my vision for the game is being able to peer into a vast, photo-realistic world, buzzing with a hundred thousand people trading, mining and fighting, one picture at a time.
While I spend quite a bit of time here on HN, I missed the original post but started playing daily after Paris Martineau mentioned it on the Intelligent Machines (formerly This Week in Google) podcast.
I’ve been wondering how long it’d take to get picked up by some publication. It’s just too good.
Love the game. The only thing I suggest is showing a history of failed guesses. Sometimes I walk away from the puzzle and forget what I've tried when I come back to it
(I know you have to control the keyboard and I need to read my answers before submitting, but I’m learning how much I lean on autocorrect when putting in an answer 4x misspelled the same way)
Maybe it's just my device, but on my Samsung Android phone using Chrome or Firefox, the character after the date is showing up as a missing symbol icon. So something about that font is odd.
I didn't catch it in February, but WOW what a lovely game! Always impressed at how many variations on word games that can be created, very well done and congratulations.
Stupid question but I assume this licensing actually invoked being paid real money for it? I’m assuming this wasn’t 7 figures.
Clearly you made it as a labour of love, but if you were honest with yourself would you have made more as an uber driver, or maybe a tech employee, for the time you invested.
The payoff for this kind of creation needs to be evaluated over time. The creator not only makes money for the puzzle, but they also gained e.g. a worldwide audience and a great resume booster. In the future, if they want to launch another puzzle or write a book or get a job doing this, the door is wide open. There is no such upward path as an uber driver, unfortunately.
Very cool. I was very curious to see how AI would do. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro:
> whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words?
> the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not the [[[a mechanic might look under it] color for a little girl with a wolf problem] spandex halloween costume, maybe]]
Response:
Okay, let's break this down piece by piece:
["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] -> "middle" (middle of nowhere), but being sent to "your room" gets you grounded. Let's stick with room.
[your [room] one can get you grounded] -> room (as discussed).
[two-dimensional [room] puppet projected on a wall] -> A 2D projection on a wall is a shadow. (The 'room' clue seems less direct here, 'shadow puppet' is the key).
[dial ([shadow]-based clock)] -> A clock using shadows and a dial is a sundial.
[second rock from the [sundial]] -> The "sundial" represents the Sun. The second rock (planet) from the Sun is Venus.
[vehicle that's a palindrome ] -> racecar.
[kind of stop for a [racecar]] -> pit (pit stop).
[a mechanic might look under it] -> hood.
[[hood] color for a little girl with a wolf problem] -> Little Red Riding Hood's color is red.
[[red] spandex halloween costume, maybe] -> This describes something that is not the pitchfork. A pitchfork is not a red spandex costume. This part confirms the item described earlier.
[guy with a [pit]chfork that's not the [red spandex halloween costume, maybe]] -> Combining "pit" and "chfork" gives pitchfork. A guy with a pitchfork, especially in a Greek context finding an artifact, is likely a farmer (or peasant).
Putting it all together:
The Venus de Milo is discovered by a Greek farmer.
I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment:
1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader.
2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the puzzle themselves.
This about jives with my normal experience with the LLMs - a superficially valid answer that falls apart when you start interrogating how and what it actually did.
In Firefox+uBO and in Firefox on iOS it works. You do have to enable one of those cloudflare domains, though. It seems to contain the essential scripts.
brgross|10 months ago
The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!
HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.
FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.
This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city
T[Tom who befriended a volleyball] HN
PS my original post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542
NobodyNada|10 months ago
One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
InitialLastName|10 months ago
comex|10 months ago
Otherwise I quite liked the puzzle.
darrenf|10 months ago
JoshTriplett|10 months ago
(If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether the terms are confidential, assume they are, and don't put anything at risk.)
aequitas|10 months ago
Glad to hear you will still be making the puzzles yourselves.
There is one point of feedback and it's that I would like to have a native keyboard on iOS instead of a virtual one. For the rest this game is great.
felideon|10 months ago
- Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear.
- Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example:
The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.roughly|10 months ago
Contra several other people here, I also like that you _can't_ skip ahead - yes, I know that's probably "Venus", which is a good clue for working back up to the clues I _can't_ figure out. It's the journey, not the destination.
mk_stjames|10 months ago
I'd really like to be able to just answer the puzzle without answering any of the intermediate stages. It is a much more challenging feat to just hold it all in your head and then type out the one long answer than to answer the individual stages. It promotes some real mental modelling skills that way.
The game, played as-is, is almost no challenge at all. It just feels like busywork.
purple-leafy|10 months ago
Did you approach Atlantic, or did they approach you?
I’ve had a word game in-mind for years, and several attempts to implement it. It’s a tricky one but I’ll crack it one day :)
My plan is to be acquired by a news company.
So, how did you go about this? I have some ideas myself
rileytg|10 months ago
Sardtok|10 months ago
I realize it might be easier to write a puzzle than solve one. Writing them seems quite hard at first, but you have the solution and can choose words to break into clues, and from there do the same again until you have a properly complex puzzle.
Congratulations on getting it picked up by the Atlantic.
adamesque|10 months ago
fidotron|10 months ago
Did they take your product as is in those two weeks or rebuild it?
jsnell|10 months ago
mperham|10 months ago
adamc|10 months ago
anon1094|10 months ago
p3rls|10 months ago
noman-land|10 months ago
ehmorris|10 months ago
Chinjut|10 months ago
Laremere|10 months ago
supportengineer|10 months ago
delgaudm|10 months ago
crazygringo|10 months ago
My only nitpick: I totally get that you have to solve the inner clues before solving an outer clue, and that outer clues can help you solve an inner clue.
BUT, the ergonomics/UX of that is just impossible... There was an inner clue that was super-stumping me, and I could solve "downwards" from like 5 clues above, but trying to keep track of which brackets were which and which level was which was maddening.
It really feels like it needs a way to answer outer clues even if it won't collapse them. Just to keep track of them. And then a better way of tracking so many levels of nesting. I don't know if the answer is indented nesting like in code, or what. But the current UX only effectively allows you to work inside-out, when outside-in is clearly a necessary piece of the puzzle, because sometimes you get inner clues that are just stumpers that you have no other way of figuring out.
ajjenkins|10 months ago
lobsterthief|10 months ago
hydrogen7800|10 months ago
dominicrose|10 months ago
yungporko|10 months ago
treve|10 months ago
CivBase|10 months ago
tjlingham|10 months ago
The custom keyboard makes all the tools you need a first class component of the game.
But yes, it's currently a little clunky.
ahussain|10 months ago
My one piece of feedback is to improve the keyboard (if that’s at all possible). I regularly miss points because of typos even if I had the correct answer.
HellzStormer|10 months ago
mNovak|10 months ago
I'd be very curious if you could share what that process looked like in general? Did they reach out to you, how did they find you?
Were they interested in the gameplay alone, or the player count / growth?
Was it much work, technically, to get integrated on their website?
And of course, how long does it take you generate one full puzzle?
mmoustafa|10 months ago
JSoet|10 months ago
- it would be nice to have a list of the incorrect guesses that you've made. Sometimes I come back after a while and can't remember if I already guessed something or if I just thought about guessing it but wasn't sure... Of course this also dovetails a bit with what some of the other people mentioned about guesses being counted as incorrect even when they're guessed early because then if you have a list of all earlier incorrect guesses then an earlier incorrect guess might now be correct, so I would also change that, that a guess which is only incorrect because it's not available yet isn't counted as incorrect, and instead it says something like "not yet!". Another related problem for me though was I got stuck once and it turned out I had just made a typo in my earlier guess and hadn't noticed, which is why it would be nice to see your earlier guesses. Oh, and also related, I think it counts multiple incorrect guesses of the same word (again not 100% sure since I couldn't see my earlier guesses)
- it would be nice to improve the stats, maybe give you some kind of distribution to see how you're doing, maybe on the calendar you could colour code to show what days you've done well and what days you did worse or something
nsagent|10 months ago
One little nitpick is that while I prefer hardmode for puzzles like this, on mobile (where I prefer to play such games), it's WAY too easy to misclick on the keyboard. I had "8 excess keystrokes," but those were all due to mistyping then deleting a single mistyped character (e.g. "ee" -> "er").
Not sure how to keep the essence of the skill-based approach, without the frustration induced by typing on a mobile keyboard.
Anyway, great job and congrats again!
thrance|10 months ago
smj-edison|10 months ago
vessenes|10 months ago
PebblesRox|10 months ago
annjose|10 months ago
Just one feedback - on desktop browsers, I can see the list of answered clues below the textbox, but on the phone (Brave or Firefox on Android), I don't see that list. I am not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it’s a feature I miss when playing on my phone. Seeing those answers gives that little “aha!” moment of satisfaction.
I also made a custom GPT - Bracket GPT [0] that helps in solving the clues when I am stuck. It doesn’t directly give the answers, but offers hints to help nudge you to the solution. It’s a fun companion when you're totally blanking.
[0] https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67e0f124cd408191943faadb3d70c6df-bra...
a_cardboard_box|10 months ago
io84|10 months ago
Countering some recurring feedback here: I find the design decisions you’ve made strike a good balance between simplicity and inviting the player in to find their way round. I’m viewing on mobile.
- I can’t easily parse a top-level clue structure but the lack of colours keeps it neat - Guess history would have been useful but omitting it keeps each guess low stakes for a first time user - The keyboard is fine, don’t let the unicode universe in for an ascii input field
mdp2021|10 months ago
# Introducing Bracket City: The Atlantic’s New Word Game
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2025/04/i...
> Meet your next word-game obsession: Bracket City. Today we’re announcing that this fast-growing word puzzle - created earlier this year by an independent game designer - has a new home at The Atlantic. // In Bracket City, players solve nested layers of clues to uncover a fact about the given day in history. Each solved bracket reveals a part of the next, creating a chain reaction that eventually resolves the whole puzzle into a single sentence. Players earn city-themed ranks for success, such as “Commuter,” “Mayor,” or the coveted “Kingmaker” for a perfect puzzle. // Bracket City was created by Ben Gross and has rapidly amassed an audience of loyal players. Ben will continue to create daily puzzles with Caleb Madison, the director of games at The Atlantic.
karaterobot|10 months ago
In addition to saying congratulations, I wanted to ask, since you say you're the one writing the puzzles: how do you define a puzzle? What does it look like from your perspective? Do you literally just write all the nested clues out with brackets and everything, and then validate that it works—because that would drive me nuts, I think—or is there some tool you wrote to help?
echoangle|10 months ago
snarf21|10 months ago
diggan|10 months ago
hidelooktropic|10 months ago
My game is a bit different—it’s all about combining emojis to find the hidden emoji. Sometimes it’s wordplay, sometimes conceptual, and sometimes just plain silly.
Congrats to everyone building and sharing—loving the creativity here!
JaggedJax|10 months ago
It took me longer than it should have to realize the last puzzle was made up of all my previous answers.
Spoiler: I also failed miserably at the last puzzle since I was thinking watergun and not gun so I thought it was a firefighter. I also couldn't tell that one emoji was a jail so just sort of ignored it. So that's mostly on me for having trouble understanding some of the emojis.
reassess_blind|10 months ago
emilfihlman|10 months ago
But more importantly we can see here that actually just getting user input with a keyboard is actually made stupidly hard on mobile, and getting a reasonable result actually requires reimplementing the virtual keyboard, which often sucks because it has a tremendous amount of complexity!
This is something that really should be fixed.
jjmarr|10 months ago
furyofantares|10 months ago
I think what might work is just if it says "Too early" and makes a list of stuff below the puzzle that you've solved too early and just put a checkmark next to it once it's ready and let you click it to enter it.
Right now it's giving negative feedback, I think it should be a positive to recognize pieces of the puzzle early, even if you still need to do the whole puzzle.
acrophiliac|10 months ago
https://codepen.io/ewhymper/pen/gbOJzmZ
AI_beffr|10 months ago
noitpmeder|10 months ago
slig|10 months ago
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/01/whats-a-five-letter-w...
bell-cot|10 months ago
yard2010|10 months ago
diggan|10 months ago
MortyWaves|10 months ago
haswell|10 months ago
While I spend quite a bit of time here on HN, I missed the original post but started playing daily after Paris Martineau mentioned it on the Intelligent Machines (formerly This Week in Google) podcast.
I’ve been wondering how long it’d take to get picked up by some publication. It’s just too good.
j_bum|10 months ago
I shared it with all of my friends and family when you first posted it, and we’re all hooked.
FiddlerClamp|10 months ago
pgreenwood|10 months ago
dwighttk|10 months ago
(I know you have to control the keyboard and I need to read my answers before submitting, but I’m learning how much I lean on autocorrect when putting in an answer 4x misspelled the same way)
russellbeattie|10 months ago
extraduder_ire|10 months ago
I was kind of spoiled on today's (9th April) one because I saw a bluesky post about the same topic by depthsofwikipedia earlier today.
patmcc|10 months ago
bon0r|10 months ago
from now on you gotta doublecheck your Signal groups though :-)
TomK32|10 months ago
leoedin|10 months ago
davidjhall|10 months ago
ieatfood|10 months ago
SubiculumCode|10 months ago
AndrewChamp|10 months ago
awakenmyrub|10 months ago
pcalcado|10 months ago
kadomony|10 months ago
tvchurch|10 months ago
Now get the Word of the Day ported over too!
stephenhandley|10 months ago
marsavar|10 months ago
scottru|10 months ago
brcmthrowaway|10 months ago
altncatchfire|10 months ago
I've been playing through the archives, and they are challenging but fun. My criticism is that sometimes the answer is very ambiguous.
For instance, (spoilers ahead), in this case
> there[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]
I know the answer is "therefore". But the inner bracket could be shout/scream/yell.
It's quite frustrating when I get docked for this, hopefully the clues can be better constructed/beta tested in the future?
Thanks again for the fun game :)
chgs|10 months ago
Clearly you made it as a labour of love, but if you were honest with yourself would you have made more as an uber driver, or maybe a tech employee, for the time you invested.
tibbar|10 months ago
ofirtwo|10 months ago
BiraIgnacio|10 months ago
nimish|10 months ago
Oras|10 months ago
djoldman|10 months ago
> whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words?
> the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not the [[[a mechanic might look under it] color for a little girl with a wolf problem] spandex halloween costume, maybe]]
Response:
yesfitz|10 months ago
1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader.
2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the puzzle themselves.
roughly|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
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curtisszmania|10 months ago
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linkerdoo|10 months ago
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infinghxsg|10 months ago
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scambrowser|10 months ago
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pknerd|10 months ago
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trollbridge|10 months ago
tgv|10 months ago
SeanInVa|10 months ago
fuzzer371|10 months ago
kristianp|10 months ago
imglorp|10 months ago