Show HN: The Rap Test

141 points by nessup 11 years ago | 76 comments

BlackJack 11 years ago |

You should include some basic instructions on the home page because it took me a while to figure out what this exactly did. I went to the Eminem page and thought I had to shade in the Relapse album cover and didn't realize I had to click haha.

Really fun website though. I'm having a blast and discovering cool songs.

beardfu 11 years ago | |

> I had to shade in the Relapse album cover and didn't realize I had to click haha.

I did exactly the same!

ddoolin 11 years ago | |

Ditto on the didn't know what to do bit.

recursive 11 years ago | |

I missed the first question getting my headphones untangled.

sneak 11 years ago |

Any list of rappers that does not include Biggie is a bad list. He's the best that ever lived.

bhaumik 11 years ago | |

I don't think he was picking the "best rappers". Biggie/Tupac/Nas/Rakim > Drake/Kendrick/Meek. This is a pretty indicative of the popular modern rappers, excluding Lil Wayne.

bx_ 11 years ago | | |

Really wish this included Wayne

kevin818 11 years ago | |

Please define best, because best could mean different things to different people :)

kevin818 11 years ago | | |

What's with the downvotes? As a big fan of Biggie I'd like to know what it means to say he's the best rapper. Lyric-wise? Entertainment-wise? Intellectual-wise?

justathrow2k 11 years ago | | |

adjective: best

    1. of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.

best for the most part won't mean different things to different people, but which rapper whom people think is the best is certainly a subjective thing.

joshrotenberg 11 years ago |

Dang, dude. I started from the bottom and pretty much stayed there.

codeulike 11 years ago |

Was hoping this was like "The Turing Test", but as a Rap Battle.

clint 11 years ago |

Doesn't seem to do anything except show text on the screen ("Drake Test") What is it supposed to do?

sehr 11 years ago | |

It plays snippets of certain artists' tracks, and you have to guess which song they are.

cocoflunchy 11 years ago |

You should be really careful with licensing when you're dealing with music. If you become big enough for the record companies to notice, they will come at you hard and fast with their lawyers.

acallaghan 11 years ago |

It's honourable not having affiliate links, but I'd add them in if this were my project.

Most people don't care or even know what one is and it'd allow you a bit of beer money from the project and cover the costs of the servers. Most people on the site would be happy enough to not pay and have no adverts, affiliate links are a very unobtrusive way of making money from a project like this.

I have a project with affiliate links, and the passive infrequent income I receive from it softly persuades me to do more work on it.

It's up to you though obviously!

citricsquid 11 years ago | |

The lack of affiliate links has nothing to do with honour, he's doing it to try and avoid having to take down the music used: http://theraptest.com/copyright.html

draker 11 years ago | | |

My thought was that he may be able to use the iTunes 30 second previews but after looking into it further I think this would qualify as "the main focus [..] of a web experience".

> 5. Song previews can only be used to promote the track. They cannot be used for entertainment independent of that purpose, or as the main focus of an App or web experience.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/blog/song-p...

lucasnemeth 11 years ago |

Very nice UI. Hope you add some old school stuff in there! I went ok on the Kendrick Lamarr test, but would rock with A Tribe Called Quest.

anishkothari 11 years ago |

Respect, amazing UI! It would be great to know how you made this. Now you just need to add some old-school rap :-)

geuis 11 years ago |

The mobile interface is really well done. I appreciate especially that through accident or intent landscape works well. Everything is quick and quite logically setup.

The only downside is that I personally know nothing about rap, so the best I could guess were Real slim shady and another Eminem one by accident.

ljd 11 years ago |

It's not loading and console is spitting this out:

FIREBASE WARNING: Specified Firebase has reached its Peak Connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider upgrading. (https://raptestprod.firebaseio.com)

EDIT: Fixed

650REDHAIR 11 years ago | |

Hooray hard limits!

Was that hard limit that you had to change or did it scale for you automatically?

nessup 11 years ago | | |

Just fixed it :)

habosa 11 years ago |

Excellent job. I don't have a single complaint. It's very fun, the GIFs are great, and best of all it's extremely fast. Considering that it is audio and image heavy I don't know how you made it so fast. I'm gonna be playing this all day.

broolstoryco 11 years ago |

For me this page freezes Firefox (FF 30 Win 7) and bloats its memory usage by about 300mb. What it is doing on the top of the frontpage is beyond me.

650REDHAIR 11 years ago | |

I'm using a 4 year old MBP with 50 tabs open and it runs just fine on Chrome.

It's a neat idea and I'm looking forward to this taking off.

valarauca1 11 years ago | |

FF30 Win7 here (Core i3 4GB of ram). No issue what so ever, 15 other tabs open.

mandlar 11 years ago |

Oh. There's more than two rappers to choose from. Didn't notice that the first time I went to the page.

frankdenbow 11 years ago |

Pretty cool. Reminds me of SongPop which was a hit for a while (basically put this into a competitive game with many categories). Nice work!

I tried doing a startup based on short music clips (sourced from iTunes). Its too bad that its still a minefield legally until there are statutory rates for short clips of content.

carlob 11 years ago |

When I was a teen[1] there was this bar where they would give a free pint to everyone who could guess who was performing a given song. They gave out about one pint per hour. I wish I could find another place that did that. This website made me reminisce…

[1] Legal drinking age is not really enforced in Italy.

jdprgm 11 years ago |

I am entirely too good at passing these.

diego 11 years ago |

I tried to navigate away from the page in the middle of the song in Chrome and got a warning popup about leaving the page that was completely uncloseable by clicking on either option. I had to kill Chrome processes one by one until I randomly hit that tab :(

Rylinks 11 years ago | |

Shift+Escape in Chrome gives you the browser's task list. You can kill tabs without guessing there.

diego 11 years ago | | |

I could not get out of the pop up in any way, it locked my browser entirely.

thornofmight 11 years ago |

Very nice! It'd be cool if this could be turned into a type of flashcard, quiz site where users could upload some sort of config file with questions, answers, images, video and then test their knowledge of the subject.

rohunati 11 years ago |

After getting to level 6, I was like screw this, I just want to listen to some Ye.

good work though!

stefbowerman 11 years ago |

Really fun to play. My only comment is that when the song starts playing, the answers to choose from get animated in, and the timer is down at least 10% by the time the last option is clickable.

danielsamuels 11 years ago |

If you don't know the answer, you're better off choosing any option at the end of the timer to lose minimal points vs losing the full 150 for not answering.

mankyd 11 years ago |

Small bug: pressing the back button does not stop the music.

dewey 11 years ago |

If you are wondering why the music isn't playing, disable/pause ad-block and it'll work. At least that did the trick for me.

swineflu 11 years ago |

Very funny and well done. Reminds me of http://binb.nodejitsu.com

swang 11 years ago |

1. Can't stop music after round. 2. Got two selections of "Run This Town" for the hovtest

Really cool format though.

dangerb 11 years ago | |

I also encountered #2 and the first "Run This Town" selected wasn't accepted as correct. The next song was still "Run This Town", but this time with only one option presented and accepted as correct.

geori 11 years ago |

I had a good time with it. Got #8 on Kanye. Whoever is higher up on the list is clicking incredibly fast.

tcwatrous 11 years ago | |

There's more than one level, and the rank seems to be an aggregate of scores from each level.

gk1 11 years ago | | |

I reached #1 for Eminem, but getting on the leaderboard required logging in with Twitter...

iDemonix 11 years ago |

I just lost 15 minutes of my life becoming a God of Eminem.

Really nice UI, was really smooth, no complaints, nice work.

beamatronic 11 years ago |

Great design, very entertaining, and you put a big smile on my face. Thank you for sharing!

sbilstein 11 years ago |

Oh jeez this is so distracting and fun, I need to do some work today. Great job!

niix 11 years ago |

Cool concept, turned me on to some songs I've never heard before.

tcwatrous 11 years ago |

It would be nice to see the individual test leaderboards.

joshstrange 11 years ago | |

Yeah, it tells me I'm #2 on the Eminem board but I can't seem to find a link to it

ultimatedelman 11 years ago |

This is really fun. Well done :)

mathgeek 11 years ago |

Really needs a NSFW warning.

callum85 11 years ago | |

What is NSFW about it?

smellf 11 years ago | | |

I clicked once and got a blurred naked person that was revealed when moused over.

sneak 11 years ago | |

Get a better job that treats you like an adult.

PhasmaFelis 11 years ago | | |

It's nice that your mommy and daddy are willing to support you, but some people have bills to pay and don't have the luxury of turning down work.

dcalacci 11 years ago |

This is awesome. Great job.

possibilistic 11 years ago |

Nick texted me and told me to check HN. This is fantastic--totally kick ass, Dany! Congrats!

rak 11 years ago |

This was fun. Great app.

hxw 11 years ago |

This is pretty cool! :)

imwhimsical 11 years ago |

Good job, Danny :)

yoshko 11 years ago |

This?! http://www.businessinsider.com/21-year-old-college-dropout-r...

n0body 11 years ago |

stupid. i only know who kanye & eminem is, never heard of the others and i've been listening to hip-hop all my life. although, it's not this pop hip-hop that's currently in fashion.

get some real artists on there, then we'll talk

XiZhao 11 years ago | |

Uhh. Drake? Kendrick Lamar? Wtf are you talking about? You obviously do not listen to any rap.

n0body 11 years ago | | |

or i'm not 12?

Jach 11 years ago | |

Your comment would be more constructive if it requested some "real artists" by name... For what it's worth, my own requests would be (in no particular order) Immortal Technique, Eyedea, Tech N9ne, Tupac, Nas, Biggie, Xzibit, and Hopsin.

LaikaF 11 years ago | | |

Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, MF Doom, Deltron 3030 Aesop Rock and maybe Captain Murphy(might not be enough content). Gotta fill in those hipster rappers.

n0body 11 years ago | | |

fair enough. in no order, immortal technique, the coup, pete rock & c.l. smooth, de la soul, xzibit, the goats, jedi mind tricks, artifacts, redman, big daddy kane, black moon, btnh, canibus, dead prez, eazy-e, krs-one, leaders of the new school, nas, rakim, royce, kano, sway, skinnyman, az, the firm, wu-tang and so on

idunning 11 years ago | |

I think you should invest some time into checking out "good kid, m.A.A.d city" then, really fantastic album.

n0body 11 years ago | | |

tried, it's terrible. try this instead, the coup - genocide and juice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f18N1VwPPv8&list=PLcxmmGC6Lv...