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Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

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Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#61

Post by logicallee »

danieltait wrote: post #15
IanCal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tap the letter to place them down. If what you put down is a real word it should tell you how many points you score. Each letter has a number on, that's the score for using it. DL and tl are double and triple letter tiles respectively. You get double or triple the points. I'm not sure if they added it but in the real game you'd get 50 bonus points if you use all your letters.

I haven't added the bonus 50 points but maybe I should?

Thanks for the fix (TL & DL changed to double letter and triple letter), now it's much clearer.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#62

Post by amenghra »

danieltait wrote: post #43
amenghra wrote: post #38

Nice game! nit: I found the sentence "you found the nth highest scoring word" a little confusing since there can be >n words with a higher score (e.g. there could be 6 words scoring 12 and you found the 2nd highest scoring word with a score of 11).

Thanks! Hmm yes what do you think could be a better way? Just the number of points?

You could just drop the sentence since the top scoring words are shown below.

Other nits:

- Gray the submit button until the word is valid, otherwise it's unclear why clicking on the submit button doesn't do anything.

- If you are trying to find a word and switch tabs, things get reset when you come back.

- If you place tiles forming a word, a space, random tiles: you can submit the first set of letters. IMHO, it shouldn't let you submit if you have spaces between tiles.

- Display the best word I have found so far, but let me keep trying other tiles.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#63

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bla3 wrote: post #42
jstanley wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this as well, and not just on HN. If you do a bit of knitting that is obviously an amateur's attempt, people will say "wow, so cool that you can knit". When you work hard and get better at knitting and you produce stuff that is so good that it's commercial-product quality, people will say "what's the point in spending all that time and effort when you can just buy one?". Only when you become so good at k…

It's also true when learning languages. If you speak a language a tiny bit, locals act politely impressed. If you speak it kind of good but aren't a native speaker, at least in some countries that lands much worse than speaking the language badly.

if you speak the language like crap and they've never seen you before they think aww, this tourist really tries. When you speak kind of good they know you live there damn it!

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#64

Post by blowski »

reaperducer wrote: post #56
867-5309 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly! two types of people on HN: those who have five or ten minutes to spare (on the bog) and those who comment "professionally" to bolster some sense of compulsion

those who comment "professionally" to bolster some sense of compulsion I wonder what would happen to the quality of discourse on HN if there wasn't a scorecard at the top of each screen. The "gamification" of everything is so 2010.

True, I wonder how much internet points improve quality of conversation. Given some people keep arguing even when they're being downvoted into oblivion, there must be something deeper, like a need for engagement.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#66

Post by cosmojg »

noduerme wrote: post #20

Like, this is neat. And fun. Small, simple and chill. So what I'm about to say is not specifically a knock against your game. What I've noticed lately on HN is this weird split where everything has to either be super basic - like, this game could have been literally written with BASIC in 1984 - or else it has to be an abstract conversation about the future of AI. With very little in the middle. What would be in the m…

You should check out https://lobster.rs! It's like HN if it were dedicated to the middle of that content distribution you describe. Nothing too simple, but nothing too abstract either.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#67

Post by Symbiote »

Tade0 wrote: post #33

I can't hope to beat an experienced native speaker at this game, but it might be useful for expanding my vocabulary. Case in point: my language doesn't really have a word for "almonry" - there's usually no dedicated space for collecting/dispensing alms. By far the best Scrabble player I ever encountered was a former corporate drone in his 50s, who hiked 40km+ daily in the Carpathians and was in charge of maintaining…

Without context, I doubt many native English speakers would know the meaning of "almonry".

From [1], they seem obsolete well before any colonization, so it's probably only British people with an interest in church history.

"Alms" is already fairly obscure, [2] puts it at word frequency 44625. Almonry is not in the top 333,333 words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonry

[2] http://norvig.com/ngrams/

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#68

Post by Symbiote »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #52

Nit: it indicated I had chosen the 3rd highest scoring word, and listed a Latin word as first. Don’t normal scrabble words preclude foreign words?

The top word for today's puzzle is an English word.

http://norvig.com/ngrams/ says it's the 28462-most-frequent English word, slightly more frequent than pronounce, lactating, aquamarine, sedimentation and slime.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#69

Post by sour-taste »

noduerme wrote: post #20

Like, this is neat. And fun. Small, simple and chill. So what I'm about to say is not specifically a knock against your game. What I've noticed lately on HN is this weird split where everything has to either be super basic - like, this game could have been literally written with BASIC in 1984 - or else it has to be an abstract conversation about the future of AI. With very little in the middle. What would be in the m…

Maybe I can describe how I work and why sharing anything more than protoypes is hard, and then people can comment if this rings true to them.

Like many people here I have a full time job writing software. Most of the time I get home and don't really want to sit at a computer for a bunch more hours working on a side project. But a few times a year I get super inspired or have an acute need and will spend my spare time working on a game, or a small project or something like that. Inevitably I lose interest after reaching the 'alpha' phase of the project (or sometimes even failing to get there). At that point I sometimes want to share the project with others, but I won't usually continue working on it.

I think this may partially explain your experience.

Re: Show HN: Can you beat my dad at Scrabble?

#70

Post by jfindley »

danieltait wrote: post #5
anentropic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice! My only gripe is: any time you click away from the tab, when you click back to it it resets the screen (shuffles the pile and clears any letters you had placed)

Hmm yes ok I just removed the refresh now. The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters. Will have a think of a better way to force the refresh of the letters on a new day.

This is still happening btw - if I quickly switch to another tab it resets the board completely, giving me a different puzzle in practice mode. This makes it sadly unusable for me.
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