Comment by andypants | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andypants | Hacker News Reader

What's up with the sign up form? What the hell does @name mean?

A twitter username? Does it have to be twitter? Is it just a regular username? Then why does it have an @ sign? Do I need to enter an @ sign or are you going to prepend it after I submit the form?

Edit: okay, so it prepends the @ as you type. Now I'm even more confused about whether or not it's supposed to be my twitter username or not.

Edit 2: Signed up, seems to be just a username. The website refers to usernames in the same way as twitter? The top bar says '@<username>' and links to the account settings. On the home page it links two @usernames to twitter, not a website profile. On the ladder, it shows more @usernames but don't link to twitter and look like they will link to user profiles.

Please don't mix twitter usernames with your site's usernames, it's confusing, especially when some are internal links and some are twitter links.

Anyways, awesome site, reminds me of the google ai challenges. I hope you keep this open perpetually though, or keep running different challenges. Sucks that the google ai challenges only run once a year.

Seriously? You guys will nitpick about anything.

I typed in a username in the field and pressed enter. It worked fine. Mystery solved.

Yeah, I signed up too, I never said the sign up form was difficult. Doesn't solve the mystery of whether this has anything to do with your twitter account, since there's no reason why that @ sign should be there.

My edits make the comment a bit dramatic, but that wasn't my intention.

I'm posting again as a reply, since it's kind of separate from my parent comment.

What kind of environment does the code execute in? What standard javascript functions/libraries do we have access to?

The browser version runs in a WebWorker (each team gets one). I didn't even know what WebWorkers were before I programmed this. The server side runs in a NodeJS process (each team gets its own), and your code runs in a fresh VM context. These both provide commonly expected JS such as Math and Date, but not other stuff such as console (which I provide in the webworker case and send messages back to the browser).

Any plans to release the nodejs code? Coding in the browser is ok, but it'd be much nicer to be able to code in my usual editor and test locally using the nodejs version.

You should submit this to the Mozilla dev derby (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/devderby). This month's theme is Web workers.

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