lpnotes's comments

Ah -- can you share which browser you're on? I hadn't heard of any bugs with instrument selection so far (until your comment). Thanks!

> I think the easy mode could be easier - people without perfect pitch need to warm up a bit first

Will think about that, thanks! Maybe immediate visual feedback to give you a hint if you're close to the note, or the first two notes are given instead of just the first note? Otherwise I can't think of other ways to make it more easy, but am open to ideas!

> There should be a hard mode where there are no pitches generated while choosing notes.

I challenge you to the "bird_tweet" instrument in "hard" mode, lol. The bird tweet notes are almost indistinguishable it might as well be silent. It's hard even for me!

@aidos Did you try "hard" mode, out of curiosity? If that's still easy, maybe an "impossible" mode with 3 listens, 8 tiles, and no backspaces is something we can do...

> It seems to adjust octaves for you automatically, but that's not at all clear.

Thanks for mentioning it! I really struggled with this octaves decision, and wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38410228

However, starting to also think that maybe I should just write a note on the page explaining what it's doing, lol.

Thank you for checking out the game and for the feedback! :)

> please let us manually scroll the keyboard

Letting people change octaves instead of letting the game pick the right octave for each note was something I really struggled with, because I think it would make the game a lot harder.

For example, if the right note was "C5" and the user picked "C4", they would hear "C4" when they played the note on the keyboard to input it, but if they clicked the button on the right side to listen back on their guess, should they hear the note in the correct "C5" pitch, or the wrong "C4" pitch?

If we accepted the entry even though it was in the wrong octave, it might be a little confusing since the playback would be different from what they heard when they input the note.

However, if we did not accept the entry because it was the wrong octave, we'd have to refactor to adjust the tiles to show the full octave number (like "C4" or "C5" instead of "C" or "Bb4" and "Bb5" instead of "Bb")... and maybe this would be a good candidate for a harder mode than the current "hard" mode.

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Letting users scroll the keyboard to change octaves is something I definitely want to put into the future "practice" mode, though! Since the feedback will be quicker, it will be easier to tell a user immediately if they chose the right note but the wrong octave.

On mobile, the backspace on the piano keyboard should work!

> I didn’t realize I needed to scroll down to see the keyboard (on mobile)

Oof... we'll have to make sure the piano keyboard is more visible earlier in mobile mode :sweat-smile: I'm glad it worked for you in mobile, though! I've gotten mixed feedback about the notes sometimes not playing in mobile.

> I also wish there was a way to play more than one. Maybe allow me to do the previous days?

That's a great idea! We were originally thinking we needed to add support for user accounts to support this, but actually, it shouldn't be hard to allow people to toggle back to previous days as is. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the question! The octave will shift according to the solution note.

For example, if the solution was:

Bb3 Bb4 Dd5 Db5 C5 Bb4 (the first 6 notes of a "Believer" melody)

... the piano octaves will be [3,4,5,5,4]

In today's puzzle, the first note is in octave 4, and the second note is somewhere in octave 3.

In a VERY early version of the game, we didn't show where the octave positioning was, only 7 white keys, and people got confused because even when they accurately thought that the next note was higher based on the interval, it actually ended up being a "lower" note because it was a lower note on a higher octave scale.

So now we give you the octave positioning.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, @jrajav!

We originally just thought of the game as "musical wordle" since we didn't want to infringe on the "wordle" name itself in case there were copyright issues, and PPP seemed like nice alliteration, which is how we ended up with the current branding. But I've started to realize that people have expectations when they hear it -- i.e. I've heard someone ask if the game was only for musicians who have perfect pitch, and that was not my intention at all!

Re: intervals -- right now in "easy" mode, we give users the first note, which gives them a start at identifying intervals. But I'm starting to wonder if maybe a given first note should be the default "normal" mode, now. And maybe "easy" mode will give more visual cues, maybe? (Just thinking out loud here.)

> melodies in a key other than C Funny story -- it took me forever to add in support for sharps and flats to the game, which is why the first ~50 songs in the database all had melodies whose first six notes had to be in C major. Luckily this is not the case anymore (we're at Day 111 now).

> If you haven't already it would be good to give Earmaster a try and see how they approach it Thank you for the recommendation! I've checked out a few other online ear training games but not Earmaster yet.

Thanks for checking out the game! "Hard" mode actually used to be only 6 tiles, but some folks complained that it was too easy, so it became 8 tiles

I think we'll definitely have to do more brainstorming to figure out the right features for each difficulty level; I think I saw some ask for an even more difficult mode.

We originally wanted to stick to the daily simplicity of wordle, but a "practice mode" is on our roadmap! (I agree, more practice would help people improve their auditory skills faster.)

Thanks for the bug find! That's one browser I didn't test against :facepalm:

A friend of mine recently joined a FAANG company as an engineering manager, and found themselves in the position of recruiting for engineering candidates.

We caught up.

I'm the creator of a remote-first community/open source project called CodeBuddies (a not-for-profit), and we built Jitsi into our hangouts (meetings anyone can schedule to pair program or study together) -- i.e. whenever someone schedules a hangout to meet with someone else in the community, we embed Jitsi as an iframe onto the event page.

We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.

I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have stumbled upon a couple of issues with it: - higher rates of audio or screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer. - screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out

We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for folks on older machines.

Really looking forward to this, after having missed PyCon!

We've had a couple of virtual study group Google Hangout meetings about this book at CodeBuddies -- http://hangouts.codebuddies.org/category/data-structures-and...

IMO this is one of those books where it helps to talk about the material out loud/screenshare. The material can sometimes be dense.

Haha. NEXT SIDE PROJECT!

:)

Right now, if your study group corresponds to either HTML/CSS, Javascript, Python, or Ruby on Rails, you can propose a new hangout in one of the above Google Groups and invite people to join the hangout for the topic/tutorial you're interested in reviewing with others.

In the near future, though, my hope is that a platform will replace the Google Groups and make the study group creation process around supplementary resources (besides the ones I picked to experiment on, that is) much easier. Can give you updates on when the beta platform is up if you join the mailing list or send me a PM.

The study groups are google hangout-based, so people can participate from anywhere.

Pretty cool... are you planning to switch from Mailchimp, though? It lists $240/month as the fee for 25K-50K subscribers. I'm curious about the business model behind something like this.