

Ask HN: Review my side project: Sqrt(2) - drewcrawford

Hey there, HN!  In our spare time, we've been working on this side experiment: what would happen if a social news site required people to demonstrate intelligence in order to submit / vote on news stories?<p>Thus is born Sqrt(2), here's 100 invites:<p>http://1.414214.com/login.html?m=newsyc<p>We're really concerned about scaling, so we'll increase the ceiling on the invite code as quickly as we can confirm our server's not going to explode.  If you can't get in, try again in a few hours.<p>Heading off a couple of things:<p>Yes, our presentation <i></i>sucks<i></i>.  How can we make it better without annoying everyone with a long-winded description every time they log in?  We've agonized over trying to make the WTF page clear without wasting anyone's time, but you guys are the test of whether it actually makes sense.  Remember, the audience is smart, cool people such as yourselves, not grandma.<p>"But I don't have time to solve crappy puzzles!"  I'm busy too.  But I enjoy solving little puzzles as a break from coding.  If you don't "have time" to do X, it's because you don't make time to do X, because you view X as inferior to whatever else it is you're doing.  Which is fine.  But I want news from people who occasionally make time for logic/critical thinking, so if you don't, I don't particularly care for your news.  No offense.  Complaints about the specific nature of the specific puzzles are, of course, perfectly valid.  I've coded some things that interest me, but I would love suggestions on what interests you.<p>Is this going to work?  Has something similar been done before?  We have no idea!  It just seemed like a neat experiment and it was painless enough to code.  What do you think?
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travism
Nice to see that I'm not alone in trying to build a better social news site as
a side project. And by the way, when you say "we", we all know there's only
one of you. And forget about scaling. Learned that long ago myself...

My side project is at <http://mushpot.net>, and I think the goals are similar
to sqrt(2):

\- multiple votes

\- make it harder to game the system

\- give more productive members more influence over the content

But instead of having users solve puzzles, on Mush Pot, the amount you get to
vote depends on how many votes your submissions have received. And since I'm
already started, here are some of the other ideas behind it:

\- long posts, not just links (posts can have hyperlinks)

\- there's no difference between top-level posts and comments..anything can
appear on the front page

\- make users provide a reason for downvoting (or pile onto a reason given by
another user)

\- tags, ability to weight your front page using tags

And it also lets you login with Facebook and post your submissions back to
your Facebook feed.

Wow, I'm impressing myself with the length of this feature list, although I
have been building the site for quite a while. Now, everyone, at the count of
three...click...HERE!: <http://mushpot.net>

~~~
drewcrawford
Actually, there are three of us: <http://www.experimenthouse.com/bio> (Come
on, the link was in the profile... seriously?)

Not to start a flamewar, but did you really look? We've got markdown support
(which means images, links, long posts, emphasis, lists). We also hand out
currency based on received votes (as well as puzzle solves).

The "anything can hit the front page" is an interesting idea though. I thought
about that, but I wondered how well it would work for discussions, which often
don't make sense out-of-context. I poked around, but I didn't see any comments
hit the mushpot FP. How well does that work in practice?

Instead, we moved a few "best" comments for each story into the RSS feed.
Hopefully that will give good comments high visibility while also providing
some context for what's going on.

------
dfens
I registered just to see what the puzzles were. Some thoughts:

I found that you can answer the same puzzle multiple times, which you probably
want to change.

For three of the puzzles, if you submit a blank form the website breaks.

You should make it more obvious how many sickles a user has. And why are they
sickles anyway?

I don't know if this breaks your idea, but maybe add trivia questions as well
as puzzles. That might be helpful when you're struggling to find new puzzles,
and if a theme built up it might help build a community.

~~~
drewcrawford
Good find on the blank submission. :-) Just pushed up a new build

Answering the same puzzle multiple times is by design: most of them randomly
generate (except meaningoflife). And in theory our algorithm scales your
reward based on the real-world difficulty of the problem. I'm sure it will
take some tweaking, but it looks like meaningoflife is handing out 5-10
sickles at the moment, spiralling downward with each solve, while the resistor
lattice is in the hundreds of sickles.

Sickle balance is on the page footer. Did you miss it? Should we move it to
the top somewhere?

What kind of trivia questions do you want to see?

~~~
dfens
I didn't realise most puzzles change, I just answered the Meaning of Life
three times and assumed I was cheating.

As for the sickle balance, I did find it, but think having username and
balance on the top right works well on HN. Somewhere near the top would be an
improvement on having it in the footer.

I didn't have any trivia questions in mind, I just figured the kind of people
who like puzzles are probably mostly the same as those who like trivia. Maybe
that's too easy to game though.

------
sam_in_nyc
Your first puzzle sucks: I hate registering to see things. Let us try it right
now!

You really need a not-logged-in version.

~~~
drewcrawford
I agree. We're paranoid about scaling right now (loading the frontpage is a
massive task, even with memcache), so that's why it's login-only for right
now.

~~~
eatenbyagrue
Generally speaking, it's better for new web apps to be paranoid that no one
will care about your app, vs paranoid too many will be.

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tokenadult
I've thought about this for a long time. (I've been an online moderator since
1992, on a variety of networks.) I would prefer a system of testing people on
specific knowledge of specific subjects, and giving them visible badges to
show other users they know about, for example, economics or education policy
or computer industry issues. Then use the people's knowledge badges to weight
karma scoring (and introduction to moderation privileges) behind the scenes.
If you program it, I and my friends will visit the site.

~~~
drewcrawford
An argument could be made that the resistor lattice is a "specific knowledge"
test of electricity, and that mastermind is a specific knowledge test in
combinatorial logic.

What type of knowledge are you looking to assess specifically? Economics and
education policy are particularly troubling to assess objectively (I'm a fan
of the Austrian school, but there are a few smart Keynesians, for instance).
How do you assess economics knowledge? What sort of questions would you ask?

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tokenadult
You have to let users see the site first to get them interested. Logging in
should be for posting privileges, not just for viewing.

See my other comment in this thread about why I prefer specific knowledge
tests to puzzles. Puzzles neither screen out the people who most need
screening out nor draw in the people who can add the most value to the site if
drawn in.

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shaunxcode
is it a bug or feature that I can keep just answering one puzzle over and over
and build my "sickles"?

Also it seems pretty that this could be hi-jacked by a cabal of users sharing
answers to puzzles and "block voting" on stories. I like the general idea
though and I am trying to think of a suggestion for how puzzles could not
easily be manipulated like that.

Maybe having a much larger pool of generated puzzles which when answered
correctly are taken out of circulation permanently? At least this would make
people looking for answers have to learn the general theories behind the
puzzles and thus in a round-about way rehabilite the cheaters. haha!?

~~~
drewcrawford
If you're talking about "meaningoflife", that's mostly something we're using
to benchmark our difficulty algorithm. The difficulty is approaching zero
pretty quickly, meaning it won't be handing out sickles for very long. Sorting
out problem difficulty algorithmically instead of arbitrarily makes it harder
to game the system--if someone writes a bot, difficulty will go to 0 pretty
quickly without us having to do anything.

Most of the other ("realer") puzzles randomly generate after you solve them
the first time. This keeps the difficulty (and sickle handout) up.

------
asciilifeform
I have been sporadically working on a site quite like this one, but with a
very different puzzle type. Congratulations on bringing out a working first!

~~~
drewcrawford
Interested in your project. Care to share any details? E-mail in profile

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jgalvez
That's incredibly hilarious.

