Using this for Buffet's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge (because no one is going to win that anyways!)
Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#32Awesome idea... one quick feature suggestion -- on the bracket, itself, it'd might be nice to highlight any upsets (e.g. in bold and/or red or something like that).
Typically, variance in brackets is based on the upsets picked... so by making those more visible, it would make it easier for a human to more quickly digest the content.
Just a thought. But regardless, awesome idea. Well done!
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#33This is awesome! I went to UConn, so I'll obviously hard-code a UConn win there. But I heard on NPR today that, historically, a 12 seed has a 50% chance of upsetting a 5 seed in the first round. If I'm biasing towards the higher seeds everywhere else, that means my code looks like this: function (game, team1, team2) { var winner_team = "Connecticut"; if (team1.name == winner_team) { team1.winsGame(); } else if (team2…
WOuldn't this not take into account 12 seeds winning? Since you do team1.seed > team2.seed before checking if team2.seed is 12.
Also, this would mean 12 seeds would go all the way anyway, you're not limiting it to the first round only.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#34I had this idea for multiple years and never finished the project. I started it in Python, then 2 years later re-wrote it in Ruby. Since someone else finally implemented it, you should name it after my project: March Nerdness :)
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#35Could you add the last couple years' brackets and stats as an algorithm tester? Would be cool to run your algorithm against previous years to see how it would have done so you can refine it before submitting. I'm imagining coloring the final bracket green/red for correctly/incorrectly predicted games in the simulation.
That would be great.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#36I'm not sure if the 'turnovers'/'turnovers_per_game' is a POSITIVE or a NEGATIVE. Is it that they turn it over that many times? Or they take it away?
I'm assuming it's a negative and it really means that turnovers is how many times they actually turn the ball over.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#37I think games against top 25 teams (and their win percentage of those games) would be a good thing to add as well.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#38I'm not sure if the 'turnovers'/'turnovers_per_game' is a POSITIVE or a NEGATIVE. Is it that they turn it over that many times? Or they take it away? I'm assuming it's a negative and it really means that turnovers is how many times they actually turn the ball over.
In basketball a "turnover" is when your team gave up the ball when you didn't have to, and thus is a negative.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#39This is a super neat idea. Thanks so much for making it! Some small comments: I found the tutorial video painfully slow, but maybe you're targeting beginning programmers. All I was looking for was-- what's the language, what's the api. The determining function could easily be a pure function. I.e., it could designate the winner by returning true, or false, or an enum/constant. Actually, I think I would prefer this AP…
re: your API comment: seems like putting extra functions into the outer context breaks the parser, but putting them inside the main anonymous function worked for me.
Re: Show HN: March Madness for Hackers
#40Using this for Buffet's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge (because no one is going to win that anyways!)
I went to enter my bracket on Yahoo, same as I've done for the last 15 years, and it's demanding to "verify" a mobile number for me, and forcing me to agree to accept marketing txts.
There's no way for me to "verify" a mobile number without agreeing to marketing txts. There's no way for me to create a bracket without "verifying" a mobile number.
Yeah, no.
And thus ends my 15 years of using the site for this, with an angry feeling on my side. Well done, Yahoo.