triword

Yeah I figured it was a necessity for a puzzle like this.

A new logical constraint puzzle I built. Hope you enjoy!

Odd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...

Today's theme is very clever and I think HN will enjoy it a lot.

Thanks!

I'd love to learn how you grew your audience so fast! I built https://dailybaffle.com but haven't reached your numbers yet.

Built a daily puzzles site at https://dailybaffle.com.

Working on a new puzzle for it as well as the mobile app, which is coming for iOS and Android around the holidays.

Somehow I feel like this article was very unclear? The way it's written, the way it tells its story, I'm really not sure what happened. I wish there was just a link to the saas in question.

Like maybe it's that I just woke up, but all I really got out of this was that a vibe-coded app resulted in a company being downsized. But that's in the title. Any specifics beyond that? I really couldn't say despite having read the whole article.

The Daily Baffle, a site with all sorts of daily puzzles including one clued daily by NYT-published constructors.

Can check it out at https://dailybaffle.com

I'm still working on growing the audience. App coming soon!

Built The Daily Baffle at https://dailybaffle.com, a new daily puzzles outlet with a variety of original puzzles.

Still working on growing the audience.

A question I asked myself when I first created it. Some people will be annoyed by that, some won't. It's fine if you're the former! but the fact is, without an input field, there's no way to verify that your solution is accepted and mark the puzzle as completed.

Yeah, have to press enter. Would you mind editing your comment to remove the spoiler?

See my other comment on this subject! I think it would be a risky choice.

If I omitted any puzzle with alternate obscure solutions, the vast majority of puzzles would be invalid. There are a lot of obscure words.

If on the other hand I set it to accept the alternate obscure solutions, that actually could ruin the puzzle in my opinion.

Take today's with BRA for example - it's a nigh-certainty that the commenter suggesting BRA did not know the archaic alternate spelling of BRAWL. What's much more likely is that they saw "BRASS", then checked ZE and saw "ZEBRA", and then thought "I wonder if BRALL is a word?" and googled it to find that it was indeed a word in a very obscure sense.

Check this google n-gram for a reference of just how obscure that word is - it hasn't registered meaningfully anytime in several centuries. I added in the word "quine," another obscure word, just for comparison, and you can see it's orders of magnitude less common even than that. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brall%2Cbrawl%...

So what would start happening is people would find something that worked for 2 of 3 (which is easy), type it in cuz why not it might work, have it succeed because the 3rd option was written once by a Gregorian monk in a remote monastery in the Balkan Mountains, and be like "huh, well that's dumb." It's actually a lose-lose that would let people off easier because they'd feel like it was done just because they found something that matched 2 of 3 and happened to match the 3rd in a fairly ridiculous way.

Edit: I came up with a solution to this. I'll verify each puzzle against a full dictionary with obscure words included, and if a user puts in a valid obscure solution I'll display a message saying "Valid, but at least one of these words is too obscure. A better solution exists." It'll take a little time to add that functionality though.

I appreciate the well-thought-out comment. I'm reluctant to imitate Wordle's style of successive partial confirmation, which I feel is a tired pattern now. It feels like there's a trillion [*]dles, all of whom operate on that principle. It might have made a better game in a vacuum, but in the context of that deluge is it still better? I'm not so sure.

Very observant! I know that that is possible and left it in, at least for now.

Sorry about that though. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.

Sorry about that. If you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.

Maybe I should add a reveal option for when someone feels done with it.

There isn't, but maybe there should be. Sorry about that. For now, if you open the browser dev tools (F12 on Windows or opt-command-J on mac, in chrome anyway), go to the network tab, and refresh and look at the network request to the /puzzle endpoint on load, you'll see the solution.

In this case "prill" is the obscure word, sorry. I understand some people will be annoyed that the obscure words they happen to know don't work, but I think it's better for the 95% of players who would be disappointed to find that "prill" or "brall" was part of the solution, effectively giving them no chance.

Each puzzle has only one solution, so if you find one that doesn't work with 1 or more extremely uncommon words, it's safe to assume that's not the solution.

Confirmed the bug on my phone. Firefox Android only it looks like. Thank you!

I agree that puzzles with progression are the best kind. This puzzle just isn't that kind of puzzle. I didn't want to make another wordle clone, there's a thousand of those and everyone's tired of that style being copied over and over. It isn't for everyone, and that's okay! A lot of people like NYT Connections a lot hate it. Same with Spelling Bee and same with crosswords.

As for the letter lifeline, I am curious how you decided that the third letter's identity is obvious. There are plenty of words that end in ISS, IZE, and ILL, not to mention OSS, OZE, and OLL (e.g. SCROLL, EXTOLL). There is also USS, UZE, and ULL, (e.g. GAUZE, TRUSS, BULL, although they don't fit.)

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Today's is a quirky one that some people will solve at a glance and others will have to stare at for awhile. Personally I'm terrible at my own puzzle and would also have needed the lifelines.

Programmatically, no, but I've made about 1500 puzzles and been sharing them with friends for months and neither I nor anyone else have found a double solution yet.

It would happen if I picked generic clues like BR/SL/ER (not a real puzzle, don't try to solve it), but I make a point not to. As long as you pick clues that are a little more specific than that, it's actually extremely improbable, despite what you would intuitively think (I had the same thought in the beginning!). Remember that there are 4 restraints, not 3 - it has to match 3 different prefixes or suffixes, but it also has to only be 3 letters (4 letters on weekends).

Sometimes I'm suspicious and I do verify them, but it's really only a risk with the compound word versions like SELL/LAW/FOX. Those I have to be more careful with.

It doesn't use obscure words. As far as I can see BRALL is an archaic alternative spelling of BRAWL that's only listed on a site for obscure words. Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both have no result for that, so...that wouldn't really be very fun if that was the solution, would it?