Show HN: March Madness for Hackers

https://www.codersbracket.com/code_bracket

by nimz • 12 years ago

100 59 12 years ago

dy9• 12 years ago

Hey - David from Fullstack Academy. Our students this semester decided to build something awesome around learning to code and March Madness and codersbracket.com is the result.

It's March Madness brackets but instead of picking teams, people can write code that will automatically generate their bracket for them. Our students have raised some money and are donating it all to code-learning organizations (CodeNow, Code.org, GirlsWhoCode).

netcraft• 12 years ago

Coder's Bracket is the product of an internal open-source project at Fullstack Academy.

so, is there source available?

Regardless, very cool concept and execution.

dy9• 12 years ago

Hey netcraft - we built this really quickly so the source is a bit messy - we'll work on open-sourcing it sometime in the near future though.

atom-morgan• 12 years ago

This is really cool and it got even better when I found the documentation. I was hoping there would be a way to access rounds and seeds to try and put some more coding effort into a No.12 vs No.5 first round game.

debaserab2• 12 years ago

This is awesome! Is there a way to go full screen on the editor? I couldn't seem to find one.

dy9• 12 years ago

Hi debaserab2 - you can Expand Editor under Help right now, but we don't have full-screen editor. Great idea though!

dangeruss• 12 years ago

Very cool idea.

selectout2• 12 years ago

This is awesome. Where are the data sources coming from for this? For free throw percentage, etc. I'm assuming this wasn't manually gathered as the teams were just announced yesterday and it'd be a hassle to do it so quickly.

dy9• 12 years ago

We've scraped the data from various sources - when Selection Sunday was announced we basically edited up a big JSON object to get it ready.

GBond2• 12 years ago

Really cool. A killer feature would be the ability to test against past years tourney's actual results.

dy9• 12 years ago

We have the last few years of data but we don't have back-testing yet - great idea though!

trg22• 12 years ago

This is awesome! I went to UConn, so I'll obviously hard-code a UConn win there. But I heard on NPR today that, historically, a 12 seed has a 50% chance of upsetting a 5 seed in the first round. If I'm biasing towards the higher seeds everywhere else, that means my code looks like this:

function (game, team1, team2) {

  var winner_team = "Connecticut";
  
  if (team1.name == winner_team) {
    team1.winsGame();
  } else if (team2.name == winner_team) {
    team2.winsGame();
  } else if (team1.seed > team2.seed) {
    team2.winsGame();
  } else if (team2.seed == "12") {
    team2.winsGame();
  } else {
    team1.winsGame();
  }
            
}

dy9• 12 years ago

This is exactly the reason we built this - it's much harder to keep all these various rules in your head while you're making your bracket, but simple to execute in code. Thanks for the awesome example!

selectout2• 12 years ago

WOuldn't this not take into account 12 seeds winning? Since you do team1.seed > team2.seed before checking if team2.seed is 12.

Also, this would mean 12 seeds would go all the way anyway, you're not limiting it to the first round only.

shazeline• 12 years ago

Yeah, trg2 would need to put all the edge case rules towards the beginning. That, or just put the basic rules at the beginning and have separate conditionals at the end to handle the edge cases.

akerl_2• 12 years ago

Site seems dead for me. Anybody have a tl;dr or cached version?

dy9• 12 years ago

It's back - our servers got a bit overloaded due to the rush.

akerl_2• 12 years ago

Sweet! Thanks for the quick recovery

dy9• 12 years ago

And we're back - sorry overloaded our servers!

kimhowardj• 12 years ago

I'm liking the voice of that tutorial video.

yeison• 12 years ago

Any functionality to create a pool? That would be great.

dy9• 12 years ago

Hey - we have Bracket Pools in the nav bar - that should let you invite friends and have them put their brackets against yours.

yeldarb• 12 years ago

Could you add the last couple years' brackets and stats as an algorithm tester?

Would be cool to run your algorithm against previous years to see how it would have done so you can refine it before submitting.

I'm imagining coloring the final bracket green/red for correctly/incorrectly predicted games in the simulation.

nimz2• 12 years ago

Hey yeldarb, Nimit here from Fullstack. Good idea! We did have the 2013 data up last week before the 2014 bracket came out yesterday but will work on adding more years and the comparison to how the previous brackets turned out!

hanley• 12 years ago

Any idea if you'll have this functionality up before the bracket deadline ends? I'd love to be able to build out some functions and test them on previous years before the contest officially starts.

wehadfun• 12 years ago

That would be great.

nevster• 12 years ago

Off topic - did you ever play Wizardry?

rrradical• 12 years ago

This is a super neat idea. Thanks so much for making it!

Some small comments:

I found the tutorial video painfully slow, but maybe you're targeting beginning programmers. All I was looking for was-- what's the language, what's the api.

The determining function could easily be a pure function. I.e., it could designate the winner by returning true, or false, or an enum/constant.

Actually, I think I would prefer this API:

function (team) { return team.off_reb * team.win_pct; }

And then play the teams by calculating the scores for each team and comparing them. But then of course, you can't have different scores depending on the opponent. I wouldn't use that information, but perhaps others would.

alxndr2• 12 years ago

re: your API comment: seems like putting extra functions into the outer context breaks the parser, but putting them inside the main anonymous function worked for me.

mmcclure• 12 years ago

This is awesome! I took the time to create a pretty in-depth function only to find out you apparently can't do that :(

nimz2• 12 years ago

Hey mmcclure - sorry about that. We don't have any check's against in-depth functions ;) so maybe there's a bug on our side. Can you send me your function at nimit@fullstackacademy.com and I'll get back to you about what may have gone wrong!

mbesto• 12 years ago

For the Data Scientists out there: http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/march-madness-predic...

rschmitty• 12 years ago

Using this for Buffet's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge (because no one is going to win that anyways!)

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

I went to enter my bracket on Yahoo, same as I've done for the last 15 years, and it's demanding to "verify" a mobile number for me, and forcing me to agree to accept marketing txts.

There's no way for me to "verify" a mobile number without agreeing to marketing txts. There's no way for me to create a bracket without "verifying" a mobile number.

Yeah, no.

And thus ends my 15 years of using the site for this, with an angry feeling on my side. Well done, Yahoo.

surye• 12 years ago

Use a throw-away GVoice account?

mikeho1999• 12 years ago

Awesome idea... one quick feature suggestion -- on the bracket, itself, it'd might be nice to highlight any upsets (e.g. in bold and/or red or something like that).

Typically, variance in brackets is based on the upsets picked... so by making those more visible, it would make it easier for a human to more quickly digest the content.

Just a thought. But regardless, awesome idea. Well done!

hoot80• 12 years ago

I had this idea for multiple years and never finished the project. I started it in Python, then 2 years later re-wrote it in Ruby. Since someone else finally implemented it, you should name it after my project: March Nerdness :)

wambotron2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if the 'turnovers'/'turnovers_per_game' is a POSITIVE or a NEGATIVE. Is it that they turn it over that many times? Or they take it away?

I'm assuming it's a negative and it really means that turnovers is how many times they actually turn the ball over.

alxndr2• 12 years ago

In basketball a "turnover" is when your team gave up the ball when you didn't have to, and thus is a negative.

wambotron2• 12 years ago

I think games against top 25 teams (and their win percentage of those games) would be a good thing to add as well.

bergie3000• 12 years ago

Very nice. I've run a marginally similar site for a few years that I had just decided to sunset (http://randombracket.com). Too much work for about four days of usage :)

I'm glad I have your site to use now.

apawloski• 12 years ago

This is so cool! What are you using for data?

ncavig4• 12 years ago

Would also be cool to be able to include more detailed data. There's some useful data points exposed at http://madness.io including Tempo-free stats and (not advertised) json endpoints, http://madness.io/teams/uaa.json

Full disclosure: I released this site a few weeks ago, mostly as a side project. I submitted to Show HN but it didn't get much traction. Might be of use though.

mdotc3• 12 years ago

Nice site. I agree, I'd love to be able to use some of your data points in my algorithm.

ncavig4• 12 years ago

There's a few exposed json endpoints for data, the matchup page, team page, and player page.

eg team: http://madness.io/teams/fak.json eg player: http://madness.io/players/1772.json eg matchup: http://madness.io/matchup/dae/vs/oad/1395332100.json

lukekarrys• 12 years ago

This is really great!

I'd be very interested in the data and the code behind the generator function. I'd love to integrate it with my bracket-generator module (which is very basic and only does lower seed, higher seed, and random currently).

https://github.com/tweetyourbracket/bracket-generator

agentultra• 12 years ago

Sorry if this sounds dumb... but what's a bracket?

cag_ii• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket_(tournament)

lukencode• 12 years ago

This is pretty awesome. Would be rad to have something similar for the world cup for us non us sports loving coders.

avelis• 12 years ago

Just as naive but fun to look at:

function(game, team1, team2){

  if (team1.rpi > team2.rpi) {
    team2.winsGame();
  } else {
    team1.winsGame();
  }

}

I want to custom build from a known index via ESPN but don't if the team objects hold all the stats necessary.

elwell• 12 years ago

Video audio keep play when pressing Next during video play. Windows/Chrome.

heynk• 12 years ago

Hey Guys!

I just saw this today and got pretty interested. I was interested in implementing a 'weighted' scoring function, but needed a way to save state somehow. I ended up finding a pretty fun solution using the console. It's really fun to play with the weights and see how the bracket changes!

https://github.com/hstove/Coderbracket-Weighted-Scorer

GBond2• 12 years ago

hold on.. there's a developer console somewhere in the webapp? I don't see it and would love to use it. Am I missing something?

kylebrown• 12 years ago

The browser console. (in chrome) View -> Developer -> Javascript Console. You can enter commands there, run functions, access variables (in the page's global scope), etc..

Show HN: March Madness for Hackers

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