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Show HN: Wordle over DNS

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11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from on 5 unique letters but have a strong preference the other way. The possibility of double letters adds a lot of interest to the game for me. But I can see how someone would find it annoying too. I'm curious about the singular nouns or infinitive verbs suggestion though. What's the thinking there? Also to be clear, are you advocating for no adjectives/adverbs, or are you just restricting…

The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and certain other verb forms to any significant degree you probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing "S" letters--which would be less interesting. The combination of five letters, the rules, and the number of guesses seem to calibrate the difficulty pretty well for me. Given enough time, I could probably solve most words eventually with just my brain…

> The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and certain other verb forms to any significant degree you probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing "S" letters--which would be less interesting.

There's no reason it has to be noticeably disproportionate, the clues are curated and not just picked randomly from the list of words that are legal to guess.

I guess I'm also curious if the suggestion is that all these words are illegal to guess or just not used as clues?

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#13

I really like the idea of wordle-over-dns. I wish all wordle authors would use words with 5 unique letters and singular nouns or infinitive verbs, though.

I see where you're coming from on 5 unique letters but have a strong preference the other way. The possibility of double letters adds a lot of interest to the game for me. But I can see how someone would find it annoying too. I'm curious about the singular nouns or infinitive verbs suggestion though. What's the thinking there? Also to be clear, are you advocating for no adjectives/adverbs, or are you just restricting…

The reason for the restriction is that you make a near endless amount of words by allowing plural, past, future, genitive (at least in Danish, that doesn't take apostrophe in the genitive) et cetera. I'm unsure how I would restrict adjectives/adverbs, but the idea is that the words should exist as main entries in a dictionary.

Here's where I come from:

Decades ago I learned to play a word game which was more like MasterMind than Wordle, and it could be played with just pen and paper (later I have played it over sms, and over gratis bank transfers):

Each participant writes down a secret 5-letter word (unique letters, singular nouns, no verbs) and take turns to guess the oppponent's word. The only clue you get for each guess, is how many correct letters your guess has. You do not get to know which letters are correct, if any, nor if they are correctly placed. It's a bit more challenging than Wordle, something that justifies the restrictions, but even with Wordle I think it's reasonable to use just the “root dictionary words”, if I may call them so.

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from on 5 unique letters but have a strong preference the other way. The possibility of double letters adds a lot of interest to the game for me. But I can see how someone would find it annoying too. I'm curious about the singular nouns or infinitive verbs suggestion though. What's the thinking there? Also to be clear, are you advocating for no adjectives/adverbs, or are you just restricting…

The reason for the restriction is that you make a near endless amount of words by allowing plural, past, future, genitive (at least in Danish, that doesn't take apostrophe in the genitive) et cetera. I'm unsure how I would restrict adjectives/adverbs, but the idea is that the words should exist as main entries in a dictionary. Here's where I come from: Decades ago I learned to play a word game which was more like Mas…

The different forms of the word are really just a constant factor. Moreover, not all endings have the same number of letters, so it's easy to distinguish between e.g. eat vs eaten vs ate.

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and certain other verb forms to any significant degree you probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing "S" letters--which would be less interesting. The combination of five letters, the rules, and the number of guesses seem to calibrate the difficulty pretty well for me. Given enough time, I could probably solve most words eventually with just my brain…

> The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and certain other verb forms to any significant degree you probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing "S" letters--which would be less interesting. There's no reason it has to be noticeably disproportionate, the clues are curated and not just picked randomly from the list of words that are legal to guess. I guess I'm also curious if the suggestion i…

It appears as if there are plurals in the words you can use to guess. I just tried PILLS and it worked. I have not yet run across a plural as the answer but I haven't looked at the word list.

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and certain other verb forms to any significant degree you probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing "S" letters--which would be less interesting. There's no reason it has to be noticeably disproportionate, the clues are curated and not just picked randomly from the list of words that are legal to guess. I guess I'm also curious if the suggestion i…

It appears as if there are plurals in the words you can use to guess. I just tried PILLS and it worked. I have not yet run across a plural as the answer but I haven't looked at the word list.

1.6% of possible answers end with "s" but none of those are plural. 30.5% of allowed guesses end in "s" however.

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#19

What's a good resource to gain more-indepth knowledge on DNS?

I’m not sure there’s one good resource, DNS is a complicated system, mostly as a result of evolving along with the internet over many years.

However Julia Evans has done a bunch of interesting things lately: https://jvns.ca https://twitter.com/b0rk

Re: Show HN: Wordle over DNS

#20

It would be better if it just represented replies as ASCII chars to avoid perl postprocessing. Most terminals probably doesn't display colored emoji anyway.

Interestingly I just tried it on Windows. For me Windows Terminal managed emoji, but only the green square! (After running “chcp 65001”)

However the unescaping isn’t needed, nslookup on Windows just outputs the raw data. Makes me wonder if I could just use ANSI terminal escape sequences.

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