Show HN: Codewars

Reading through some of the comments here I feel like you just posted a video series of running over cats in your SUV to Reddit.<p>Personally, I love it, I think its great, has a slick feel and experience to it. The site wasn&#x27;t as responsive as you might hope but to be fair you are currently on the front page of HN so I am willing to let that slide.<p>Looks like a ton of hard work went into this and I think it comes across really well!

For the privacy-conscientious user, your site provides one of the worst experiences I&#x27;ve ever seen.<p>To get anything to work, I had to allow scripts from www.codewars.com, push.codewars.com, two CloudFlare domains, AND platform.twitter.com. While my usual process to get JS-heavy web apps to work is load scripts from the domain itself, plus any standard CDN domains (like CloudFlare), your site does not work without widgets.js from Twitter, which is pretty crazy.<p>You depend on three different CloudFlare subdomains - one of which serves a tracking script, <i>on top of</i> you trying to load tracking scripts from MixPanel, Google Analytics, Rollbar, Intercom, Twitter and Facebook. I only loaded what I had to, but I think it&#x27;s safe to assume that you would have pushed more domains on to me had I loaded everything.<p>Edit: the complaints in the two paragraphs below are invalid (can&#x27;t strikethrough on HN) - I mistook the authentication form as requesting my GitHub credentials, whereas the &quot;GitHub&quot; title is a link to GitHub&#x27;s oauth page, and they also provide the option for creating a CodeWars account without linking your GitHub. The visual distinction between these two authentication mechanisms is near-invisible on my laptop&#x27;s monitor. Anyway, according to guptaneil (below), they will still require you to create an account with them after linking your GitHub, so don&#x27;t bother.<p>-Normally I would just dismiss such a privacy-flippant site as yours, but what pushed me to make a comment is that you prompted me to type in my GitHub password on your site, on a form with an action against your server. This is absolutely horrendous. You should only input your GitHub password on pages at, and send it to, servers at <a href="https://*.github.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;*.github.com</a>. I can only feel sorry for all the users who have fallen for this. I feel worse for those users without NoScript, who have unknowingly typed their GitHub password into a tab with scripts from about 10 different companies running - do you trust all of them to not log your password? Even the analytics companies?-<p>-I&#x27;ve flagged this post, and for anyone who typed their GitHub credentials into this site, I&#x27;d recommend you reset your password.-

Was anyone else put off by the link github&#x2F;enlist to continue after only two brainteasers? I felt like I was just starting to get really engaged in using the site and enjoying it, to only have a &quot;paywall type obstacle&quot; in the way and take away my good vibe feeling. Maybe rephrasing enlist to something like login to track your progress would be better?

I just finished the Javascript and JQuery course at codecademy.com three weeks ago and since then I take challenges at coderbyte.com to continue learning.<p>So I was very interested in your site and signed up. Here are some of my first observations and comparisons:<p>- codecademy.com lists lots of males and females from young to old, from different countries with all kind of professions on their Success Stories pages. I felt very welcome their site. The name of your site and the constant use of the word Kata indicate to me that your audience are young males. As a woman in my thirties I don&#x27;t feel I fit on your site. It seems a bit to aggressive to me.<p>- The second Javascript problem description was not very good. The second problem basically says &quot;Something is wrong - correct it&quot;. I like clearer instructions like &quot;write a function to reverse a string&quot;.<p>- Compared to codecademy.com the site took longer to check my code.<p>- I have no problem giving my e-mail address to anybody that provides a service I want to try. I like to get the onboarding mails from codecademy.com and think they should send out more because they are motivating. So I think that it is good that you are asking for my e-mail address and I hope you make good use of it by sending me interesting stuff. If not, I just filter you with a click.<p>I&#x27;m going to spend some time on your site. If you want further feedback, just send me a message.

I can&#x27;t recommend Codewars highly enough as a way to sharpen your skills. It&#x27;s like a slightly more verbose, prettier Project Euler.<p>They currently support CoffeeScript, Javascript, and Ruby, but are working on supporting a ton more. Definitely worth investigating.

No! You may not have my email address after two woefully simple problems! I don&#x27;t need you sending me emails every day, &quot;You forgot to come to Codewars.com in the last 2 hours, why aren&#x27;t you spending your entire life on this site?!&quot;

Cool idea. The Ruby code takes a long time to evaluate - even though I passed the first two challenges without any issues, this would frustrate me if I were a beginner. Why not use a Ruby REPL? Looks like you&#x27;re evaluating the code server side.

Saw you guys demo at a meet-up at Carbon5 almost a year ago, cool to see your progress since then. I actually use the site regularly, nice work, especially with the way your hide the spoilers so you can&#x27;t just cheat if you get stuck.

I love it! I&#x27;m a self-taught programmer, mostly working alone on my own projects. This is a great way to expand my knowledge and have fun at the same time. I particularly like seeing the other solutions after I&#x27;ve come up with my own.<p>Thank you!

This is a very fun way to learn and get better. It&#x27;s still in a very active development stage, so things go up-and-down regularly (which sucks when you want to get your fix), but it&#x27;s mostly been awesome while I&#x27;ve used it the last few months or so.<p>If you do try it out, one of the best parts is adding your own &quot;kata&quot; — basically the games or tests. You will learn a lot by writing them (the community is very active in helping users improve description text and test cases). And there&#x27;s nothing like seeing someone come in and absolutely blast your best effort out of the water with something even more amazing.

The site looks great! I only have one comment: it&#x27;d be nice to get an idea of which solution is the most efficient, and it&#x27;d be REALLY nice to be able to sort solutions by speed.

The dashboard UI is pretty confusing, I switched to Chrome because I thought it was broken in Firefox, and in Chrome the &quot;preview&quot; (now I know it is a preview) has shadow on the bottom. It wasn&#x27;t at all clear to me that clicking &#x27;Train&#x27; would start the exercise with that preview. Otherwise, massive kudos, I hope you upgrade to CodeMirror 4 with multiple cursors and improve the CoffeeScript highlighting (I really feel Ace is more ready for what you&#x27;re doing). All the best!

This feels like the Codecademy for programming gangsters.

The name is pretty similar to CodeCombat (<a href="http://www.codecombat.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codecombat.com</a>) and I&#x27;m not clear on how this site is better than Codeacademy (<a href="http://www.codecademy.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codecademy.com&#x2F;</a>). There are already a bunch of programming koans&#x2F;katas available on the internet.

can&#x27;t wait for Clojure support

I was pretty taken by this site, I did the teasers, signed up, selected my skills and interests but then when I wanted to continue I started getting 500 errors. I had to leave quick so I didn&#x27;t try to find a way around but I would have had some fun if it wasn&#x27;t because of that. Haven&#x27;t managed to actually use the site.

Great idea -- interested to hear more about how you&#x27;re handing all the syntaxes, a combination of JVM and other things?

Couple of bits of feedback<p>- Server was unreachable when I tried to submit an answer, and the submit button was then permanently disabled - Not sure if my sign-in with Github was successful, it just shows login still - Now getting &#x27;The code does not execute properly. Try to figure out why.&#x27; and there is no code in the box to enter

This is really cool-- but I get so many &quot;Submission timed out&quot; errors that I can&#x27;t even do a problem...

Just wondering about how you are doing or going to do your sandboxing for languages like c, c++, etc. If you are running arbitrary code from the user on the server, it could be risky I would imagine, so I am wondering what steps you take to make sure the user won&#x27;t do anything nasty?

I would love to sign up, but when I click to create an account, I get redirected to the home page.

I ran into some bugs when testing, such as: <a href="http://imgur.com/B0VVnmn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;B0VVnmn</a><p>The test will pass but I can&#x27;t submit it, because the test doesn&#x27;t pass. Meh.

FYI none of the buttons seem to be working on the homepage in Firefox OS X. On Safari the formatting on the homepage is all off. Pretty cool nonetheless, I plan on trying this out more later today!

I like the concept, but I don&#x27;t see how I can currently compete with other coders on these problems. If I could pair up with a friend and do these challenges I would enjoy it more.

I voted for Haskell to be included and plan on joining when it&#x27;s added :)<p>Edit: Though, it&#x27;s not beyond the realm of possibility I&#x27;ll give in and sign-up once there is python support.

This is awesome! You should seriously add PHP. Our community is probably the largest and has many inexperienced programmers who would really benefit from Codewars.

Is there a way to go back to Katas that I&#x27;ve started working on, but haven&#x27;t completed? (Or is that something I shouldn&#x27;t be doing?)

I didn&#x27;t expect much but ended up pretty impressed by the site. It&#x27;s beautifully designed and the flow is very natural. Lots of kudos!

Is the scoring only based on time-taken and LOC? The top script that I looked at was more like code-golf. Is that the aim?

Very cool, one of those sites you can very easily spend a 1&#x2F;2 hour on without realizing it...

Awesome. Can&#x27;t wait till more languages become available.

MOAR (some) PYTHON.

I&#x27;m having fun with this. Thanks for sharing.

Big plus for making tab work in editor

R isn&#x27;t in the roadmap?

GitHub Sign In is a plus

Outstanding user experience throughout the account setup, I will continue playing with this as it&#x27;s quite enjoyable so far. Thanks for sharing.<p>#edit it&#x27;s kind of sad (and telling) to see the complexity and cleverness in the higher ranked solutions.<p>#edit2 rampant regex solutions, nested returns, oh my.

github sign in doesn&#x27;t actually seem to sign me in.

once I link to my github, why do I need to select a username, password and email to enlist?