Codemoji | Hacker News Reader

Codemoji

codemoji.org

59 pointsdoener10 comments

Best of luck to 'em. A few years ago I had an awesome idea for a gizmo called "Cryptotwit" where people could send their friends encrypted tweets and challenge 'em to unscramble them. I was so confident that I followed up with "Hangtwit" that let you make tweets into playable hangman games.

And it totally bombed. Nobody got it and nobody played it.

If this one succeeds, I can at least pretend that I was ahead of my time :)

When I was in Peace Corps I had a lot of free time and made a hobby of constructing crosswords and crypto puzzles. It was a lot of fun and other volunteers enjoyed them. I thought for a while about developing something around that, like a community focused on creating and publishing puzzles for fun, but never got beyond that. Tweeting integration sounds like it could have cool!

Can I ask why you joined the peace corps? I have pondered about doing so myself, thanks !

To Mozilla's credit, they're always doing interesting projects like this. This is not quite as cool as some of their other projects, which in turn are not as cool as ANY of the projects Eric Wastl puts out (Advent of Code, Synacor Challenge). But it's still cool.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010887

Shift ciphers are cool and all... but are there any learning tools like this to teach people, say, AES, or Diffie-Hellman(-Merkle)?

Well, no. This is really about teaching people the basics. Teaching people the math behind AES and DH would be madness.

> Pick an emoji and Codemoji will use it in a unique formula to scramble your message.

This seems a bit misleading - it feels like they're implying it's some proprietary algorithm, when it's just a plain Caesar cipher.

Yes, but the procession of emoji seems to be different from the order specified in Unicode, so it’s slightly more complicated than a regular Caesar shift.

Smart design--somebody had fun with this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com