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Show HN: I Made a Stupid Game

weighoff.net

202 pointslast_one_in145 comments

I quite enjoyed that.

Few (hopefully helpful) bits of feedback:

1) Would be nicer if it wasn't just an endless list of question cards. Maybe have new ones sliding in on the right, with answered ones going off to the left.

2) Visually separate the question, your answer, the correct/incorrect answer and the explanation.

3) Scores! How many right, how many in a right in a row, how did your guess compare with others etc

4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.

5) Pictures? Was just thinking you could have a 2x2 grid, with number and labelled picture of object in a colum, then you click on whether you think column 1 or 2 is the heaviest.

6) Stats - maybe on landing page or as commentary on your selections "Did you know the weight of the Blue-whale has the most over-estimated mass"

7) Difficulty curve (or setting), feels a bit odd after you'd put some estimate into guestimating to just be asked "does a gorilla weigh more than 5 tins of beans?" Or maybe it just currently feels too-random. I might get 20 in a row, but I can't compare myself to somebody else who got another 20 in a row right.

8) "Is greater than" is nice, but simple <,> choice makes it too simple some times. Maybe, "Which is closest to?" - which would give you multiple options to choose from.

> 4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.

But please don't decide that you need to shove a popup in my face repeatedly to persuade me to do so. I don't have "socials" and have no intention of sharing anything. Being obnoxious about it is a "Dick Move" imo

I absolutely hate popups. Not going to be an issue. Good call.

Do you think you could add a feature that would count how many right and wrong answers you have in the current session?

IDK if it would need a cookie, just some JS variable to store right, wrong and to calculate your average percentage?

OP, it's perfect don't change a thing

It's definitely not perfect -- great fun, but lacking polish.

The site is great now and I think those changes would ruin it in my opinion.

Except maybe to make the words Correct and Wrong have colour so you don't have to read it every time. :]

came here to add some similar feedback. while all aren't necessary, giving a visual clue when you get a correct and wrong answer its

"According to my reckoning a human weighs at most 80kg" - really?

9) Coloured success/failure feedback, even just the words correct or wrong being coloured, it takes me a few moments to pick the result ouf of the new text being shown to me. This is why my bash scripts usually colour the output too.

My friends and I always talk about how big a social problem scale-blindness is, so this is awesome!

Suggestions:

1. Show progress towards some fixed number of questions so you can see your score at the end so you can see how well-calibrated you are and compare with friends.

2. Add other things than weight, so people can get calibrated for other things too. Time. Probability. Money. Risk of death. Deaths (in war or from disease, e.g.). Stuff like that!

3. Have a speed mode where you have to learn to do these calculations really fast, so that you can incorporate this awareness into your day to day life and awareness of things. 4. Have a slow mode where you are trying to get everything right, so that you learn how to proceed when you really want to be sure.

5. Have a mode where nothing is within 100 or 1000 of anything else, so that you're purely focused on scale awareness and so that your ability to estimate on a 10-100 scale doesn't matter so much.

What is scale-blindness and how big a social problem is it?

It is hard for humans to visualize in their heads the difference between 1 billion and 10 billion. Our brains weren't created to think of such massive amounts of objects. I don't think it is too big of a social problem though.

It's probably because cavemen had to carry 10 rocks at a time, 15 max. We didn't have to use such large numbers until recently in human history.

Additionally, on the other end of the spectrum, small quantities (3-4) of countable items don't need conscious calculations to be counted.

Beyond 4, we need to sum the items consciously.

Beyond 10 (or so), the error rate on quick quantity calculations is exploding. The brain is just falling back on approximation mode.

To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

I watched that with my kids a couple of weeks ago. Definitely one of the inspirations. Also been listening to the "What If?" audiobook and Randall Monroe is never afraid to think about things like 80,000 gorillas.

I did about 15 questions waiting for the game to "end", not realizing it would go on forever.

IMO if the game is infinite, count how many questions I get correct in a row, and have the game end when I get one wrong. Keep track of my high score and display it somewhere on the page, so I have a baseline target to beat. That way the game is replayable and now has a metric for how well someone plays it.

I got all questions right except for the ones involving the moon... for some reason I got all those wrong. Moon is big!

Yeah, I agree. Counting winning streaks is good. I was thinking of an acheivement system too.

Fun game!

I have a suggestion: the huge numbers are not quite readable. Maybe add the scientific notation as well. Comparing 73,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 with 844,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is tricky, especially since the numbers are not right aligned.

Adding a 73.4×10^21 vs 844×10^21 would be helpful.

Yeah, I'd find that more readable too. I aimed for something anyone could understand.

Maybe greek prefixes or even spelling out the bigger units? I.e. 9.4 gigagrams or 54 billion kilograms.

Of course you might have the issue of short scale vs. long scale billions but a footnote should solve that.

Yeah. A friend was playing with a group in a room and one of them was trying to read out the questions. Not a problem with 800 gorillas but it is with bigger numbers. Hmm, not sure what to do. The Greek prefixes I find really hard to remember! For simplicity and debugging it was easiest to just slap the numbers up.

Perhaps a toggle?

Could you just have a simple bar graph that showed their relative sizes? Two numbers with a bunch of zeroes are hard to compare.

That'd be great to see!

I like the big numbers with lots of zeros: works for kids as well.

IMHO it could lose some of the silly charm with scientific notation.

But having the numbers aligned for easy comparison would be great.

---

To OP: I really like this! Will be guessing some with my kids who are around 10 year old. Combined weight less than an elephant.

OP here. Thanks! Will be testing with my 6 year old later. He actually hasn't seen it yet. Yeah, I agree. I wanted something that everyone can read and where the physical size of the number on the screen gives a great idea of the size (in terms of order of magnitude). Alignment is a great idea. I'll have a think about that one.

    4,200,000,000 (4.2 billion)  
        1,000,000 (1 million)
          900,000 (900 thousand)

This kind of formatting would be great - for kids learning about bigger numbers and their names.

Oooo, I like that. That's really clear.

Advice: make the answer much more visible. First text, visually separated (bigger font, bold, line ...), green/red. Separate the explanation part into its own block of text.

Don’t do green red for colorblind.

As long as there's also a non-color differentiator (like a checkmark / X) I think it's fine. Just like traffic lights having different positions. The word itself is possibly enough, although on the other hand words take longer to process than shapes/colors so best to offer a shape if also offering a color.

At least one question has its figures wrong. It asks which is heavier, Space Shuttle or 747, and goes on to say that the Shuttle weighs 2 million kg. But that is not just the shuttle: “The stack, as the composite of orbiter, tank and boosters is called, has a gross liftoff weight of 2000 tonnes” (which I presume includes liftoff weight of fuel as well).

Edit: perhaps it was just luck that it compared a 747 with the Space Shuttle, since that is something we know how to compare due to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Carrier_Aircraft

Fun! Thank you, last_one_in. @last_one_in, it was not obvious to me at first that you were the author - adding that to some comments would have helped me!

Glad you like it! It's my first ever post to HN. I've been reading it daily since forever. Had to create an account to post.

I did the shuttle in a rush TBH. I have no idea if that's with the main tank and boosters or not!

No way, I had the Airfix kit of the shuttle+747 combo when I was a kid. poof mind blown.

I haven't really had time to recheck all the values. If there are any chemists here who can help with the weight of a caffeine molecule (in kg) then I'd appreciate it!!

Someone posted on HN a few days ago about always including your units in the variable names. Good advice.

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=molecular+weight+caffeine “Caffeine/Molar mass 194.19 g/mol”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit) “The mole is defined as exactly 6.02214076×10²³ elementary entities”. 194.19 / 6.02214076e23 calculates one molecule is about 3.2246008e-22 g ~322 yoctogrammes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

“The Space Shuttle weighed 165,000 pounds empty. Its external tank weighed 78,100 pounds empty and its two solid rocket boosters weighed 185,000 pounds empty each. Each solid rocket booster held 1.1 million pounds of fuel. The external tank held 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen (1,359,000 pounds) and 383,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (226,000 pounds). The fuel weighed almost 20 times more than the Shuttle. At launch, the Shuttle, external tank, solid rocket boosters and all the fuel combined had a total weight of 4.4 million pounds. The Shuttle could also carry a 65,000 payload.”

Edit: that’s approximately 3e-25 kg per Caffiene molecule and I’m not a chemist, but I do enjoy captivating books about chemists/chemistry like Ignition[1], PiHKAL[2], Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks[3].

Edit 2: From above I noticed 1 litre of liquid Hydrogen is unexpectedly light at 0.15604 kg and one litre of liquid Oxygen is similarly heavier at 2.517 kg - I hope you find more things to add that challenge our intuitions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29006010

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30827112

[3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/review/uncle-tungsten-memorie...

No way! I got the weight of a caffeine molecule right! I am so proud of myself right now. Thanks! I've got water as 3e-26 but that doesn't seem right. Water molecule x10 lighter than caffeine molecule?

"The fuel weighed almost 20 times more than the Shuttle" - makes me want to go play KSP.

Yep, I think I've got the fully loaded shuttle + external tank + boosters weight.

Thanks a lot!

I made a game which asks questions like "which weighs more? 8,000 bumblebees or a gorilla"

I did about 20 questions and didn't miss one. Because most plants, animals, etc are made of water, you really just have to compare volume. I found that visualizing the order of magnitude of the volume was a pretty good strategy for estimating weight. (Water has a density of about 1000 kg/m3)

Edit: sorry, misread. Wow. My best is about 5 and I've played it. Solidly for the last 3 days!

I don't know if I was just lucky but I also did a lot of them (where's a counter?) and had all of them right.

I think the game should try to pick answers that are closer to each other. Perhaps even have an inconsistent difficulty so some questions are easier than others.

It picks choices where the winner is about 10 times the weight of the loser. Very simple. Still trying to come up with something better that increases difficulty over time.

"10 cans of baked beans" vs "A gorilla"

A real stumper there, gotta check my math on baked bean can sizes!

To be honest, I weighed a can on my kitchen scales :-)

And how did you weigh the gorilla?

According to my reckoning, on his kitchen scales ;)

Aww man, I couldn't even fit a gorilla in my kitchen let alone on my scales.

It doesn't say the age of the gorilla!

Hug of Death. I'll try again in a couple of hours.

Yeah right. I'm trying to send messages of apology to my sysadmin (a FOAF). I bet they hate me.

It's now redirecting to http://arrowloans.co.uk for some reason.

I never knew Halley’s Comet was heavier than 6e10 grizzly bears

OP here. Glad to have helped expand your knowledge.

> 1000 tons of bricks

This option was strange, because all other options don't compare concrete weigh but weight of objects.

That's definitely heavier than 1000 tons of gorillas!

They are the same

wrong.. one of them is bricks whereas the other is gorillas

1000 tons is definitely heavier than 1000 kg.

Ahh, it's joke data: { name: "a ton of bricks", plural: "tons of bricks", frequency: 0.01, weighWord: "weighs", min_mass_kg: 1000, max_mass_kg: 1000 }, { name: "a ton of feathers", plural: "tons of feathers", frequency: 0.01, weighWord: "weighs", min_mass_kg: 1000, max_mass_kg: 1000 },

Nitpicking: I use 1 ton = 1000 Kg, but world wide it's more complicated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton

Bah! Well spotted!

Another comment about the joke: I think in English the standard joke is "What's heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?" but here in Argentina the standard joke is "¿Qué pesa mas un kilo de plumas o un kilo de plomo" ("What's heavier, a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of plumber?".

Also keep in mind that a kilogram of steel weighs more than a kilogram of feathers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA

I know this is going to remind us to watch the "Monty Python Witch Trial" scene.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg

Aww man, I'm going to have to watch that again tonight. True story: in one of my tech jobs me and my boss had a game to try to get Monty Python quotes into meetings. In a client meeting I talked about search engine behaviour and how you don't want the search engine to just return any old results like "I found this spoon" (Life Of Brian). My boss nearly fainted trying not to laugh. Nobody else got it.

Watching Holy Grail was the perfect way to unwind at the end of a very very long day. Thanks!

"According to my reckoning a human weighs at most 80kg"

Yeah..... um, so I picked min max ranges which would accomodate 50-90% of something. The human one is probably a bit narrow. It was a manic day of googling. Trying to work out what one molecule of caffeine weighs nearly broke me.

For those that are curious (yes, I realize this takes no effort to find):

https://weighoff.net/data.js

I love the todo list at the bottom.

Doh!

Chrome is flagging your SSL cert as being invalid, just an FYI.

That's because it's forwarding the traffic to some entirely unrelated website for some reason. Not sure if the DNS went screwy, but something is not right.

Think the guy got hacked mid launch.

OP here. It all came out right in the end! The server was bought to it's knees. Sysadmin thought I (as a very new customer) was up to something bad (my email address is james@rootdev.com and he feared I was a bad actor) and froze my account. The webserver didn't know what to serve and decided the best bet was to serve the first thing (alphabetically) that it could find (some insurance company beginning with the letter A). Now on a different server. And got to meet my lovely sysadmin who put everything right straight away (who wasn't even pissed off at me). What a day.

Thanks for the postmortem. Sorry things got a bit more hectic than you'd hoped but it's interesting to know why.

Yeah, things did get hectic. Still pretty busy today. The support and feedback from here was amazing though. I didn't expect that. It really helped me get through. And takeaway food. I literally posted to HN just as I was about to go shopping cos I didn't have any food - I didn't make it, still haven't!

OP here. Everything went screwy! Should be working again now. I don't even work in tech anymore. I haven't been involved in a website launch in over a decade. It's been one hell of a day. My plan for the day was literally to put the site up and then do some craft work, spinning wool into yarn for making my friends a couple of hats (it's wool from their sheep). I'm not even joking! My day went so off the rails.

I like it.

I got most everything right until it asked about the moon compared to some huge number of elephants and again with tyranosaurus rexes. I picked moon both times and was wrong. I felt like those are mathematics questions that don't test your sense of scale as much as the rest because there's just no real-life experience.

simple idea executed well, that's what makes the best games, maybe this will be the next wordle? :)

Really fun game! There's no social incentive to share with others, or hook to return to play again, though. I learned a lot about how much thing weigh though.

Thank you! Yeah, I have been meaning to add that. I just copy and paste! I want to keep a track of your best winning streak and have achievements.

Aww, thank you. My friend suggested weighdle as a name but I already had the site up!

I added a share results button. Thanks everyone for such amazing support yesterday. Much appreciated. Thanks for feedback on the weights. I think there are definitely some mistakes in there. I'll be checking them this morning. After I finish my coffee!

This is fun! I don't know if this would make it too easy, but it would be helpful to have the numbers in scientific notation (like 1.6e12), at least as an option. It would make it much easier to read for the larger ones.

That was wonderfully silly. But some comparators are vague, like "a can" or "a teabag" (used vs unused is a lot of weight difference). But making things more specific could detract from the silliness.

I feel like modern statistics has taught me that no matter how big you think the moon is, when you have 3 quadrillion of something....

the moon weighs more than 3 quadrillion of the rockets that we used to get there.

space is big, human brains are small

3 quadrillion Saturn 5 rockets would be more than it would take to cover the surface of earth (standing up) - but would have less mass than the moon.

Sorry- this question blew my mind.

OP here. Awwww, I love how much great positive feedback this is getting. I literally have tears in my eyes.

> a space shuttle weighed 2,040,000kg

It's common sense that a space shuttle would be heavy, but this heavy? The thrust needed to lift the damn thing must be weight x 9.8m/s^2 = 19,992,000 Newtons.

Why can't it be lighter?

I think the weight listed in the game is for the shuttle, boosters, and a full load of fuel

OP here. I was absolutely frazzled creating data to chuck into it. Yeah, I think the shuttle data should be correct for shuttle, external tank and boosters. And fuel. A whole lot of fuel. See robocat's answer.

I love that you are using plain JS for this. I was the kid who unscrewed the Rubik's cube and screwed it back together because I am too dumb solve that.

What is the deal with min_mass_kg and max_mass_kg?

Thanks. Simplest thing that works. I haven't programmed in years. I just had the idea. The last game I had released was in 1991. Seriously. I check min mass of the heavier * its multiple against max mass of the lighter times its multiple.

It was really fun, but maybe throw a few combos closer in weight in? I played for maybe 5 minutes and didn't get any wrong. I would have played longer if I got some wrong.

You're much better at it than me then :-)

Bait and switch? User account was created an hour ago.

Does seem to be a lot of effort... well I guess if everybody is off playing "the long game", there's probably a gap in "short"

OP here. Nah man, not bait and switch. The server got fried! Username is my reddit username. Of 11 years, although I hardly use it. I read HN daily but never created an account (not that I can remember anyway). Should all be getting fixed now.

Fun! Some feedback:

1. Spruce up the design to make seeing the answer more of a "fun" experience

2. Button to share an answer on social media

2. Button to send a question to a friend

TBH my HTML and CSS is so rusty. I haven't built a webpage in about a decade! I love number 2 and number 2. That's awesome, especially sending a question to a friend. Love it.

I texted my kid a photo of my monitor as a workaround :)

2 and 3 now implemented. Just gone live. Hopefully working :-) Check the about page too.

This is fun, well done!

Also: 700,000,000 peas weighs more than a tyrannosaurus rex?! I need to re-evaluate my perception of the weight of a pea.

700M drops of water weigh (.05g * 700M) which is 35,000 kg and a pea weighs more than a drop of water

That is a lot of peas. I might have some maths wrong in there I'll admit. I hacked it all together in day.

Nice! I think you have a type in "heaver", it should be "heavier" maybe?

No way! You are the only person to spot that. Fixed. Thanks!!!

Haha! Just clocked your username. One of my prize possessions is a signed copy of Neuromancer.

That was fun! The first one I got wrong was:

"80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gorillas vs Saturn".

Good fun!

It's gotta be the Gorillas right?

You got it!

I quite enjoyed that as well. I was quite surprised when I finally got one wrong.

OP Here, Considering how much I've played it, it still doesn't surprise me at all when I'm wrong. Glad you enjoyed it.

i wish i could dare to make a game this stupid. it's simple. and a touch stupid. but definitely enjoyable for a little bit. that was fun. way more fun than cow clicker. don't tell ian bogost.

OP here. Haha. That's sums it up perfectly. I don't mind coming across as stupid.

Feels like I'm answering questions my 4 year old always asks me.

Weird you should say that. The idea came to me after a long conversion with my 6 year old. He was telling me about a friend of his who said he was god or a god and we talked about how you could test to see if he was. That seemed to trigger off a whole synaptic storm.

You have Mars set to 4.8685e24 kg, but it should be 6.4171e23 kg.

Wow. That's quite wrong. I was out by at least 1.861674e+22 gorillas. Thanks! Fixed now.

Hint: Almost everything that sounds like a trick question is.

I was wrong alot and it mad me angry to be wrong so much.

Feedback Highlight Correct in green, Incorrect in red

Stupid game is my favourite kind of game. Great job!

Stupid username is my favourite kind of username. Great job!

so weird game but cool :]]

I was redirected to some loan company.

me too!

Me too. Here's the result of nmap -p 443 --script ssl-cert weighoff.net:

    Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-03-31 17:24 CEST
    Nmap scan report for weighoff.net (213.175.208.197)
    Host is up (0.056s latency).
    rDNS record for 213.175.208.197: charlie.awebserver.co.uk

    PORT    STATE SERVICE
    443/tcp open  https
    | ssl-cert: Subject: commonName=arrowloans.co.uk
    | Subject Alternative Name: DNS:arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:cpanel.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:cpcalendars.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:cpcontacts.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:mail.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:webdisk.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:webmail.arrowloans.co.uk, DNS:www.arrowloans.co.uk
    | Issuer: commonName=cPanel, Inc. Certification Authority/organizationName=cPanel, Inc./stateOrProvinceName=TX/countryName=US
    | Public Key type: rsa
    | Public Key bits: 2048
    | Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption
    | Not valid before: 2022-01-21T00:00:00
    | Not valid after:  2022-04-21T23:59:59
    | MD5:   087b d643 652c f167 689e 71fb 2acc ef07
    |_SHA-1: d212 d954 f09d 7ff7 9068 6e90 4012 b592 cc2d c64f

    Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.58 seconds

Edit: that's funny, http://weighoff.net/ (not https) shows the content of charlie.awebserver.co.uk :D

How odd - I'm now seeing https://www.webs.limited/

I got the Bad SSL Cert warning in Firefox and just backed out.

Aww man, really sorry. Not my doing. Trying to sort it out. My hosting account's been suspended. It's all gone a bit pear shaped. Oopsie.

When you get some time to breathe, I would love to hear a "retrospective" about how an account suspension turned into a redirect to a loans website. Did a bad actor notice your account was suspended, took over it somehow and then they sent traffic to their website? Is this standard protocol for your hosting provider (similar to those domain landing pages which link to all sorts of weird crap)?

The sysadmin thought I was up to no good and suspended me, which seems pretty reasonable to me. He was really cool and not even pissed off that I wiped out a server. All got cleared up. The site is on a different server now.

figured that you got suspended, but it sounded like the url starting going to some other site vs just erroring out. right?

Yeah, because I got suspended the webserver decided to just serve the first site alphabetically. Nice behaviour. I scared the ** out of me, I thought it had been hacked.

Yeah, really sorry about that. Wasn't my doing. The rather unexpected surge of traffic fried the server. Hopefully resolved now. I was never expecting to hit the front page of HN let alone number 1.

The site forwards me to some UK home loans website?

Same, very curious what's going on here.

Apparently the author was hugged to death. Hosting provider started to redirect the traffic elsewhere.

Yeah man, the server got hugged to death. My provider was awesome solving issues and all back up again. I could do with a hug after all that!

Firefox refuses to show me the site due to a bad certificate, apparently its certificate is valid for domains belonging to arrowloans.co.uk - this is consistent with other reports saying they're being forwarded to a loans company.

Looks like your site got hacked, or maybe some weird DNS problem?

Oopsie. I totally took out the server. Should be back again later.

Doesn't resolve at all.

Site seems compromised?

I'm seeing this as well. Sends me to some home loan page.

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