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Show HN: I'm building the “chess.com” of speed cubing
- charcircuit 4y agoWhat makes this different from similar sites that already exist like cubingtime?
- kayson 4y agoWhy do I have to sign up to do anything? I'd love to re-learn some algorithms, but forcing me to sign up to access anything at all just makes me want to not sign up. chess.com lets you do a bunch of stuff without signing up.
- password54321 4y agoOn chess.com everything is locked except for the ability to play a guest game. Even by signing up you hit a paywall at every turn.
- kashnote 4y agoI actually have plans of making some parts of the app accessible without having to log in. Since I started the app by saving data to the DB instead of the user’s device, this is more of a technical limitation than a choice that I’ve made. I just need to put aside the time to implement it.
- walke 4y agoVery cool!!
- rschachte 4y agoThis is awesome. Just watched some Youtube videos of people using the app, looks great.
- mcphage 4y agoIs it only for the 3x3x3 cube?
- visarga 4y agoTo add to that, is there a good tutorial for 4x4 and 5x5?
- justbaker 4y agoBasic gist is solve the middle 2/3 edges to look as if they were a 3x3 edge, then solve like a 3x3, accounting for parity issues. Beginner method at least
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoMight be good to point to tutorials you have tried and why you didn’t find them to be good. Otherwise it turns into - let me google that for you - here https://jperm.net/4x4 https://jperm.net/4x4
- cwmma 4y agoJperm is generally pretty good but didn't explain all the algorithms, when I learned a 4x4x4 a couple months ago I used that plus this http://www.rubiksplace.com/cubes/4x4/ http://www.rubiksplace.com/cubes/4x4/
- kashnote 4y agoIt can be used for any cube or event. The WCA ones are built-in but you can even add custom event types if you want.
- username923409 4y agoIt would have been nicer if you were building the "lichess.org" of speed cubing
- jacob_rezi 4y agoA bit dismissive of the work and pretty impressive level of execution the guy has put in to get to this point.
- username923409 4y agoI personally have quite a strong distaste for websites such as chess.com. I'll just leave it at that.
- exdsq 4y agoWhy? I much prefer chess.com to lichess. For one the UI and game modes are vastly superior!
- shric 4y agoEach to their own. I find lichess.org's UI and UX vastly superior. And I'm not the GP, but I agree. To expand my thoughts: - The free version is vastly inferior to lichess.org, and it nags you to upgrade at every opportunity. - They are anti-competitive to the point of censoring the mention of lichess on their forums (for e.g. feature requests) [1] - I guess it's subjective how paid chess.com compares to lichess.org but I much prefer lichess. - Minor UX/UI annoyances (you can't give your opponent time or allow takeback requests in a rated game, etc.) - The price of diamond membership is quite steep for a chess website, but I guess compared to lichess.org anything is quite steep. Thinking about it further, I guess chess.com seems extra bad because of the existence of lichess.org which is just amazing (100% open source including the apps, zero ads, open API, can download the database of all games, etc.) Full disclosure, I'm a diamond chess.com member (signed up in January for a year) because I'm quite a chess enthusiast and really wanted to see if it was worth it. It's not, in my opinion. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/qudyuq/why_streams_who_play_on_chesscom_are_not_allowed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/qudyuq/why_streams_w...
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoDid you design the landing page yourself? It looks cool :D. I'm also curious if you used a tool like Webflow for it.
- kashnote 4y agoThanks! Yup it’s all made with React and Sass. Didn’t use anything for designing it. Just mainly eyeballing
- kmfrk 4y agoThis looks great! I think it's going to blow up in a massive way if you can get livestreamers on Twitch and YouTube to check it out, so be sure to try to reach out to those.
- kashnote 4y agoI think cubing definitely has potential to become mainstream like chess has. Maybe I should try reaching out to chess streamers to share my app with their audience.
- kmfrk 4y agoLudwig Ahgren would probably be a really good fit, I think he’d love the opportunity. :)
- spartanatreyu 4y agoAnd he's good friends with much of Offline TV, a chunk of their extended circle are accomplished cubers (Edison and Leslie being the standouts)
- jonahbenton 4y agoSuper cool. My 11yo son has become a speed cuber. Will point him this way.
- eligro91 4y agoreally nice. I'm trying to be speed cuber. currently around 40-50 secs for solving. Did you defined ranking program? what is the default rank? is it going to be similar to chess (e.g 1000 for starters, 1800 for experiences, 2300 for masters etc) ? how are you going to measure it? would it be changed only when you do 1x1 games? or also self training impacts it? also, how can you protect against trolls? everyone can fake it, you know.
- robofanatic 4y agoCheckout https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/ https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/
- kashnote 4y agoI have implemented an ELO system, but it's just running in the background right now with no UI component. I'm collecting data for now to see how I'll need to tweak the various params that go into ELO calculation. I'm going to try to make it as close to chess as possible. As for cheaters/trolls, I have a manual reporting system right now, but I'll do my best to start flagging accounts automatically. Pretty hard thing to solve given the nature of the issue.
- mellosouls 4y agoI've always loved this clip of Lucas Etter posting a speed cubing record time, in what appears to be a gathering of Stranger Things kids in real life... https://youtube.com/watch?v=vh0W8E4cNkQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=vh0W8E4cNkQ
- minhoryang 4y agogreat design!
- twright 4y agoThere is nothing missing from this timer, it's very impressive! You might be calculating larger averages slightly incorrectly? Convention is discarding best and worst `ceil(0.05 * len(n))` times. I've seen a lot of timers come and go what will be different about the longevity of cubedesk?
- kashnote 4y agoI'll double check the large average calculation logic. Good question. I recently came out with a Pro version for CubeDesk which is mainly there for people who want to support development. You also get some minor stuff like additional themes and 1v1 options. I'm hoping that enough people buy Pro so that I can cover the server costs. As long as the server costs are covered (or at least not too high), there's no reason for me to ever take down the app. If nothing else, it's a good learning opportunity for me.
- z5h 4y agoMaybe I'm the wrong target audience. I spent some time last summer figuring out 2x2 and 3x3 from scratch, without referring to any existing literature, methods, etc. That worked but solving a 3x3 is in the 2-3 minute range. FAR from speed cubing. OK. Now I'm interested in getting into speed cubing. The Trainer shows like 12 systems with no descriptions/trade-offs/recommendations ... how they are related ... best order to learn them if learning several... etc. Those points would be SUPER handy. Anyway... The rest looks good and I'll definitely play with it.
- kashnote 4y agoYou're right, it's not really beginner friendly. I want to improve upon that in the coming months. But for now, there are tons of cubing-related resources online nowadays. For 99% of cubers, you want to focus on OLL and PLL algorithms.
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIt's mostly memorising. I memorised a few basic algorithms a few years ago and practiced getting faster. Then you basically add algorithms to take shortcuts and improve your hand speed. I never got good times (maybe around 1m?) but it gradually lost appeal after a while. Nowadays I probably would get stuck trying to fix the last 4 corners. I'd like to get back into it one day and learn some very generic algorithms to just be able to transition between states, without the explicit goal of solving the cube fast.
- whycombinetor 4y agoSo this has no interaction with the cube itself? It's just a stopwatch app that you press the spacebar to stop, and everyone trusts that you didn't cheat? It doesn't have a programmable hardware LED cube that the app dynamically loads problems onto for each round and logs your moves? Short of that, with a normal cube, it doesn't make you hold up the sides of the cube to the camera before the round to let it determine the problem? Nor make you hold up the cube to the camera after completion to ensure that you solved?
- DizzyDoo 4y agoYour camera-based solution would be trivial to cheat at though; simply have two cubes where one is in the solved state. So, incredibly time consuming to implement while also not really helping much aside from security theater.
- kashnote 4y agoRight, it's a hard problem to solve. A camera-based approach would be invasive, impractical, and really easily duped. But now we have bluetooth cubes. Bluetooth cubes still have a ways to go before they're physically good enough and also affordable enough to replace regular cubes, but they will solve this issue. CubeDesk already supports a few types of BT cubes. When you use a BT cube on CubeDesk, you get a breakdown of every stage, turns per second, areas you paused, etc. The unfortunate thing about BT cubes is that all the companies making them have their own proprietary software that they want their customers to use, so they encode the data coming from the cube to make it really hard for anyone to make sense of it. Some of us in the cubing dev world have reversed engineered these techniques, but it's just unfortunate how they try to keep it a secret.
- klaudioz 4y agoIt looks like it's secret. I couldn't find in GitHub anything related with reversed engineered bluetooth cubes.
- Syzygies 4y agoMy first reaction glancing at the site was "Bluetooth Rubik's Cube". I could confirm in seconds that such cubes exist, but minutes spent spelunking the site gave no evidence that CubeDesk had even considered this issue. Then I opened the answer key (HN comments) and found this thread. Shouldn't you make it easier to find documentation before signing up?
- wslh 4y agoI know that the HN is not fan of crypto but I would like to add a decentralization point of speed cubing: "How To Model A Rubik’s Cube in Algorand’s TEAL" [1] this was written by Guido who is one of the top speedcubers in Latam and was invited to join the discussion here. Algorand was also selected for official chess ratings [2]. [1] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/uncategorized/how-to-model-a-rubiks-cube-in-algorands-teal/ https://blog.coinfabrik.com/uncategorized/how-to-model-a-rub... [2] https://www.algorand.com/resources/ecosystem-announcements/algorand-selected-for-official-chess-ratings https://www.algorand.com/resources/ecosystem-announcements/a...
- asutekku 4y agoThis has absolutely nothing to do with speedcubing apart from describing an algorithm and data structure to save speed cubing in blockchain.
- selfawareMammal 4y agoBetter build the lichess.org of speed cubing
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIf you don't like money
- garbagetime 4y agoIf you don't like money more than freedom and honour
- whoibrar 4y agoat this point it's more than just money. lichess is my go example for what you can do with community driven open source software.