

Show HN: cubeduel (our side project) - webwright
http://cubeduel.com/

======
webwright
This was a fun side project I built with Adam Doppelt (co-founder of
UrbanSpoon). Pretty interesting data so far-- we're trending to having pretty
solid reputation data on hundreds of thousands of folks after our first week.
50% of users do 50 or more duels and 20% do 100 duels or more.

The goal of the project was to get an opportunity to work together a bit,
explore some new technology (RackSpace Cloud, MongoDB, beanstalk, bluepill,
HAML), and do some fun design work.

~~~
aditya
How did you get enough folks to sign up (without any prior announcement) to
get reputation data for hundreds of thousands of folks? Just from sending it
out to friends?

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synnik
Fun project. But highly concerning if it gains real traction -- As a general
rule, people are only on my LinkedIn profile if I already think they are good
to work with. This site makes me turn half of them into losers. That is not a
fair assessment.

Also, when I deactivated my account, it said that coworkers would no longer be
able to see me. So... people who have never ever seen this site are visible,
but ex-users are not? Something feels sketchy there.

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knowtheory
Talk about sowing the seeds of discord.

Running your coworkers, particularly if they're your friends through a series
of forced choice tasks and then displaying the results publicly is probably a
good way to hurt feelings and alienation.

Ask yourself whether you'd do this for your facebook friends.

------
viraptor
Also, as tptacek noticed on twitter: CubeDuel wins "Best HTTP URL Argument Of
All Time" badge for "utf8=✓".

Agreed!

~~~
getsat
But see his latest comment about it:
<http://twitter.com/tqbf/status/25785161895383040>

Quoted below:

 _CubeDuel was hilarious for a couple minutes. Then: horrifying. Deactivated
account. Advise you to do same. Teamicidal._

------
gurgeous
Adam Doppelt (co-creator) here. Feel free to chime in with technical questions
and I will attempt to answer them. That's half the fun of a side project!

~~~
AndyIngram
It looks like you project just made TechCrunch, what kind of traffic did that
drive?

~~~
gurgeous
TechCrunch drives a bunch of traffic, generally, especially something like
Cubeduel that plays well to that crowd. We're somewhat insulated in that many
people lack LinkedIn accounts and bounce off the front door.

The first system to fall over was our message-queue that talks to LinkedIn for
logins and refreshes. I had to spin up a separate machine at Rackspace just to
help logins along. Hopefully that'll hold things steady for a bit.

------
AaronM
It seems a bit interesting, but I see a couple of points.

1\. I have a small pool of people on my linkedIn profile, so I don't think
there are a lot of relevance to my results. IE: I will run out of battles very
soon 2\. How well does this scale to people that have a huge number of people
on their profile, for example a recruiter? They probably aren't qualified to
give their opinion.

~~~
phil
If you have a small pool of people, doesn't that mean you haven't worked with
very many people?

They're not going to be able to manufacture co-workers for you to rate.

~~~
nitrogen
Or, it means that you worked in industries where LinkedIn use still isn't
widespread, and/or places where even if people have an account, they don't
accept connections.

------
a1k0n
Suggestion: ratings should be based on some kind of logistic model (like Elo
ratings for chess) instead of the percentage of duels won. e.g., feed the
scoring history into Bayeselo or something to get a ranking.

~~~
roryokane
I've heard Microsoft's freely published TrueSkill algorithm is good. There are
some libraries to calculate it out there already.

------
dholowiski
My future career may depend on what's on my LinkedIn profile. It terrifies me
to think of logging in to a 'game' with my LinkedIn ID.

~~~
kbob
Your future career may also depend on how well you score in cubeduel.

~~~
mbm
And what a frightening thought that is.

------
nihaar
Ha! A politically correct hot or not. I found it incredibly easy to get
started and quite addicting actually. Before I knew it I had voted on over 30
co-workers.

~~~
rman666
Same here ... very easy to get started ... and kind of addicting ... not
"Angry Birds"-addicting, but addicting none-the-less. Get some ads up there
and monetize!

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bambax
This is a small detail, but this checkbox:

    
    
        <input checked="checked" id="s" name="s" value="1" type="checkbox">
        Save your name and work history.
    

could use a <label> so that it works when one clicks on the text as well as on
the box.

------
ryanpetrich
It's Facemash for the office.

------
serichsen
"No Cookies

I'm really sorry. I wanted to show you cubeduel, but it looks like you have
cookies disabled. Please turn on cookies and try again!

Try Again"

No Cookies

I'm really sorry. I wanted to take a look at what this was about. It would
have been nice to see some sort of description without having to let you mark
my computer.

Try Again!

------
jroes
I had a lot of fun with this.

That being said, I do wonder if LinkedIn is the right venue. The premise is
very similar to something like "hot-or-not," and I'm just not sure that the
"professional" crowd on LinkedIn is going to take to it.

Maybe you can consume another social network's API with a younger audience
though.

------
oziumjinx
This could be a goldmine for HR and recruiters to help vet someone's
likability before sending them on an interview.

Any plans to roll out a ranking badge that people can embed on their
sites/resumes/linkedin page that gets dynamically updated as more votes come
in for each person?

------
iantimothy
The interface and mechanics of the site looks like an emerging pattern in data
collection to understand the relations between nodes on the social graph.
Seems like a throwback to the days when psychologists would show physical
cards and ask us to choose one.

Reminds me of this family of card games I used to play when young -
[http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/377365/top-trumps-some-
good-...](http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/377365/top-trumps-some-good-and-
some-bad-)

------
acgourley
I know it was just meant to be a little fun thing, but that said it sometimes
asks absurd questions like, "Would you rather work with the marketing intern
or the CEO?"

~~~
Timothee
I'm not sure that's such an absurd question, depending on the CEO and the
intern.

I can right away think of one intern I've worked with that I would really like
to work with later on, and I've worked with one CEO that I would never want to
work with again... (only _one_ intern and _one_ CEO because I haven't worked
with that many of either in fact)

------
daveschappell
I think this has huge implications, not just in this space, but in others
(which restaurant? which vacation? other facets of favoriting co-workers? ways
a person could improve) -- ties in very well with Jon Bischke's article on
Reputation Graph:

[http://jonbischke.com/2011/01/07/reputation-graph-one-of-
the...](http://jonbischke.com/2011/01/07/reputation-graph-one-of-the-webs-
largest-opportunities/)

------
Mrblankman
What's the gaming algo you are using to decide who to duel against whom? I'm
assuming your not simply randomly displaying pairs from the same company N
number of times? Do winners get pitted for more duels then losers?

------
ivankirigin
You need to make the level after 100 high and have some power.

Also, could you have a nice-rank algo that weights votes by the nice-rank of
the voters? Or is that how it works?

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elliottcarlson
I like the concept - easy to start playing, and it kind of sucks you in -
especially when you start contemplating coworkers that you haven't seen and
worked with in ages.

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goldins
I am having an issue where CubeDuel thinks that I only have 2 connections, and
keeps bringing them back. Not sure why this is happening, or if you've seen
this before.

~~~
gurgeous
That can happen if we can't find good overlap between your work history and
the work history of your LinkedIn connections. We make reasonable attempts to
normalize the resumes, but we can't account for variations, or even plain ol'
typos. Double check your work histories and see if you can line them up
better.

~~~
PakG1
Still, wouldn't it be better to not do repeat votes? Easy enough to do a query
to see if a duel's already been done between 2 folks, though I wonder if that
would cause too much of a load increase on your database for you then?

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tlrobinson
Hmm, it seems coworkers might be able to infer who voted against them if only
one person in their office has voted. What sort of protections do you have
against this?

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dickeytk
Absolutely fantastic welcome page, I got it immediately

------
atuladhar
"Whom would you rather..."

~~~
goldins
"With whom would you rather work"

:-)

------
bkaid
When voting on duplicates, how many people end up switching their vote the
second time around?

