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Hi, I'm the @andrewrn mentioned. For those interested, I did polish the initial app a lot: https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ (b

Hi, I'm the @andrewrn mentioned. For those interested, I did polish the initial app a lot: https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ (bad news though... I over-engineered it even further I think. It's my first real public project, so I learned my lesson to viciously descope the mvp). Some of the comments here (like scientific notation and sharing) are present in my project. I tried to re-share after polishing but the HN link sharing dynamics have been a bit opaque to me and kept the project buried when posted. It's clear to me that there is a lane here for a fun brain teaser/exercise. Just getting the answer right on 2 tried on OP's version by guessing ~5% of 330M population buying new car was a nice hit of dopamine. Combining a little math and world-knowledge is pleasing, it would seem. @danielfetz, any interest in collaborating?

danielfetz 1y ago
Hi Andrew, great seeing you here. I'd love to chat with you because I also plan to create some more games around Fermi estimation in the future. I would, if you don't mind, send you an email to the address you've listed in your profile.
- andrewrn 1y ago
  Please do! This is a fun area that I think has some potential. A HN moderator actually directed me to this post. I never would have seen it otherwise, so I'm grateful for that.
praash 1y ago
I really enjoyed spending a bit of my morning with these two implementations of the concept. I prefer your idea of treating the question as a proper puzzle with a 1-submission limit. The "calculator" UI took a whole 2 minutes to understand initially, but I really liked seeing the chain instead of having to mush all the factors in my head. It's really nice to see the correct answer broken down to get a feel about the real numbers! The current question's answer seems to contain big errors in magnitude in its factors: "How many kilograms of skin does a human shed in their lifetime?" Skin cells shed per day: 5e8 / day Mass of one skin cell: 3e-6 g Years in a lifetime: 80 yr Grams to kilograms conversion: 1 kg / 1000 g The final "correct" result is displayed as 44 kg, but these values result in 44,000 kg. It's also odd to show a conversion factor for kg/g, but not day/year. The first two factors correspond to shedding 1.5 kg/day, which is definitely unrealistic!
- andrewrn 1y ago
  Thanks for trying it and sorry about those errors. All fixed now. You're very much not alone on the UX friction-- that's what most people have said. My gut says that what is fun about Fermi estimation is chaining the factors, (which OP's clone doesn't have), but it's not a trivial thing to package into an intuitive UI. So I'll have to think about it a bit more. If you've got any more ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears!

danielfetz 1y ago

Hi Andrew, great seeing you here. I'd love to chat with you because I also plan to create some more games around Fermi estimation in the future. I would, if you don't mind, send you an email to the address you've listed in your profile.

andrewrn 1y ago
Please do! This is a fun area that I think has some potential. A HN moderator actually directed me to this post. I never would have seen it otherwise, so I'm grateful for that.

praash 1y ago

I really enjoyed spending a bit of my morning with these two implementations of the concept. I prefer your idea of treating the question as a proper puzzle with a 1-submission limit. The "calculator" UI took a whole 2 minutes to understand initially, but I really liked seeing the chain instead of having to mush all the factors in my head. It's really nice to see the correct answer broken down to get a feel about the real numbers! The current question's answer seems to contain big errors in magnitude in its factors: "How many kilograms of skin does a human shed in their lifetime?" Skin cells shed per day: 5e8 / day Mass of one skin cell: 3e-6 g Years in a lifetime: 80 yr Grams to kilograms conversion: 1 kg / 1000 g The final "correct" result is displayed as 44 kg, but these values result in 44,000 kg. It's also odd to show a conversion factor for kg/g, but not day/year. The first two factors correspond to shedding 1.5 kg/day, which is definitely unrealistic!

andrewrn 1y ago
Thanks for trying it and sorry about those errors. All fixed now. You're very much not alone on the UX friction-- that's what most people have said. My gut says that what is fun about Fermi estimation is chaining the factors, (which OP's clone doesn't have), but it's not a trivial thing to package into an intuitive UI. So I'll have to think about it a bit more. If you've got any more ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears!