Show HN: I built a word game. My Physics teacher likes it. What about you? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a word game. My Physics teacher likes it. What about you?

thypher.com

17 pointssdkpanda9 comments

Definitely not. Foremost, there's no positive example shown - ok, great, so if I happen to be in the audience who is able to spot that "mc^2" is actually "e" what happens next with that letter? Is it in the position it's going to be played? Just "somewhere" like Wordle? Repeated?

Are there even 26 well known physics forumlae that resolve to letters?

And then the first example turns that up to 11 by offering "6.67 x 10e-11" and "r x p" and I can't represent the rest of them without MathML

I am definitely not the target audience for this

The “mc^2 = E” example is confusing too as both boxes are white, so it’s not clear which part you’re given and which part you would have to fill in

well obviously you're given the equation, and you have to fill in the letter???

I draw attention to the fact that what's obvious to you isn't obvious to folks who haven't been thinking about this game and it's mechanics for as long as you have. That's why writing good instructions [for anything] is so important: you're in the best position to know what's expected by the game. What makes that process tricky is that it can be very hard to remember what it's like to be a new user and write for them but with the benefit of your expertise

i understand that, but i'm confused by what you mean by "both boxes are white"? the boxes in the instructions are filled, and when you click play, i'm pretty sure that you only see equations --- and given that it's about guessing a word, i'm not sure how much clearer i can make it. i'd love to hear what you suggest tho!

Is this the new HN meta?

I just did today's word and I thought this was pretty fun. M⁻¹M stumped me for a while, but once I got it, it gave me a good chuckle for how obvious it was in hindsight. I do work in physics, so that gives me a head-start on recognizing all these formula. From the other comments here it seems enjoyment is very correlated to amount of these formula one already knows.

Anyways looking forward to checking this the next couple of days

thank you!

way too dumb for this

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