The thing that most impresses me is that this is the first ball-and-paddle game that I've played with keyboard control that doesn't feel like it gets in your way.
I kept losing instantly, took me a bit to remember I have a setting that forces new windows to be new tabs. Needless to say it is very hard to play that way.
It would be better done with canvas and javascript.
As of right now, it is a poorly done game with an ever expanding popup windows. It is hard to figure out what and where the paddle is. I automatically won 3 points merely being confused.
It is hard to see why the inhabitant of hacker news voted up the story.
It demonstrates a neat effect. I'm sure many people like me soon were right-clicking to inspect the code.
edit:
And I'm sure this was done with just our kind of people in mind:
/*
Dear Source-Code-Reader
First of all, thank you for caring. Not that many
people view source. One of the beautiful things
about JavaScript is that it's necessarily Open-Source.
I like that a lot. I hope you find this source code
somewhat useful, and not too dirty. Remeber to
pay it forward.
Well, the source simply being viewable for JavaScript is not the same as all JS being released under an open source license! I guess this is kind of like an open source license, though.
I hope you're joking, but if not... I think this is actually a fantastic example of what it means to hack. It's a very unexpected, humorous example of doing something with technology, that the designers of the technology (I'm pretty sure!) never would have anticipated.
I'm sure I'm not the first to cheat by enlarging my paddle browser. But strange they didn't make the borders of the popup non-resizable.