8 ms·
Pointer Pointer (2012)
- frabert 6y agoThis is weirdly hilarious to me, I like it!
- m12k 6y agoThis feels like something from the early days of the web - and I mean that in a good way.
- makach 6y agothis is something from early days of the web.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoIn the grand scheme of things yes - but not relative to our subjective experience :)
- recursive 6y agoThe title claims 2012.
- raister 6y agoHow this gets to the front page and other relevant things get diluted amazes me every time in HN!
- guessmyname 6y agoI guess people upvoted this submission because they think the website has some sort of machine learning algorithm, which is the daily bread on Hacker News.
- harel 6y agoIt just shows that a "Lot of Prep" can be "machine learning" to the observer.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoIf it were "lot of prep" - e.g. a manually-tagged and fixed database of about 100,000 images of people pointing (assuming 100 columns and 100 rows in the browser-viewport) then that's still small enough for an instantaneous response from the web-server, so the relative long busy-time suggests that _something_ computationally expensive is running in the background - such as a "this-pointing-finger-does-not-exist"-engine.
- dafoex 6y agoIt could just be fake busy. Timing is everything in comedy, so give a first time user a little suspense to think advanced computer magic is happening before the punchline arrives.
- cprecioso 6y agoExactly. Looking at the JS code (even minified), you can see that it's calling a setTimeout for effect - possibly also waiting for image load-, but all the data is there already.
- ziihrs 6y agoIf it runs instantaneously, it would probably be a pretty cool effect to have the pointing fingers trace your cursor as it moves.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIf I had a piece of ML that could do that, I'd just run it once on the server and grab a coffee as it generates a set of 100k labeled images for me. IIRC, the "this X does not exist" sites also don't run ML on request, but serve cached images. At least that was my impression from getting the same image more than once when I spammed F5 fast enough.
- bayindirh 6y agoToday's friday. The site is cool and hilarious. Problem also looks like a good application for ML. Bonus points for candid photos, no ads, low resolution images and nostalgic scenes. I like this structure of HN. Kinda like old Slashdot. Something funny and lighthearted amongst all the heavy articles.
- qayxc 6y ago> Problem also looks like a good application for ML. Wouldn't that be complete overkill, though? Zooming and panning are so much simpler and less compute intensive.
- theshrike79 6y agoI think the idea was to find images that point to a certain location from a collection of photos. Not having a bunch of photos of people pointing and just zooming/panning to that bit.
- qayxc 6y agoML methods would require labelled data to be trained. Labelling itself already solves the issue (i.e. a bunch of photos with people pointing in certain directions). So basically you'd solve the problem you want to solve in order to automate a task that you already performed.
- nightcracker 6y ago> ML methods would require labelled data to be trained. Not necessarily. One could train a model on synthesized data using e.g. blender, some programmable 3D people models with hand controls and some generic background images to paste them on.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoI've heard of this being used. It's surprising to hear you mention it. Have you done that? It's a neat idea, and I hope it becomes more popular.
- pedrogpimenta 6y agoLighten up. Have some fun. Life is more than just "important" things. Or better yet: "Important" and "relevant" things should not be limited to serious, constructive, work/society relevant things. Fun is very very important for the mind and soul. Have more fun.
- ncfausti 6y agoFrom the title, I was thinking it might be an interactive demo of pointers in C, very surprised :)
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI thought it'll be some rant about and/or explanation of pointers to pointers in C/C++. But I like this page more!
- m12k 6y agoMe too, at first I thought it was a follow-up to that post the other day about Linus Torvalds' 'more elegant' linked list implementation using pointers to pointers.
- _Microft 6y agoI had expected that too and before I knew it I spent time looking for Drake's approving finger from the meme or Uncle Sam's "I want you" gesture. I couldn't find either.
- cube00 6y agoVery relieved when it wasn't...it's been a long week.
- dafoex 6y agoI love a light hearted thing every now and then, and this tickles me very much! Reminds me of a "user locator" website I once saw. It claimed to use advanced algorithms to locate the person using the website, so when you clicked go it spent a while printing various "reticulating splines" type technobabble before finally showing a picture of a big finger pointing at the user with big H1 text saying "You are right there".
- Twixes 6y agoI need this! Does it still exist?
- sumtechguy 6y agoI like these one off fun sites. Sort of like how 'zombo.com' was making fun of the .com stuff . Unfortunately that one will be done as flash goes away.
- wakamoleguy 6y agoLuckily, flash isn't needed any more: https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/ We should have always known, as anything is possible at ZomboCom.
- rochak 6y agoThis sounds ingenious and cool.
- dylan604 6y agoThis is what the internet was supposed to be. Well, not totally that's all it was supposed to be. But random websites that people put together just because. I'm sure they learned something by doing it, so it wasn't a total waste for them. And now we all get a bit of levity in our day.
- lowbloodsugar 6y agoThat was the original GPS application on the palm pilot. Just put a big X on the screen, with "You are here" underneath it.
- abcdef22 6y agokomentar
- pedrogpimenta 6y agocomment
- codeulike 6y agoThis is apparently by Studio Moniker in Amsterdam https://studiomoniker.com/projects https://studiomoniker.com/projects
- abusedmedia 6y agoSure? Where's the reference?
- whywhywhywhy 6y agoIt was created by Jonathan Puckey, Luna Maurer, Roel Wouters. Roel is part of Moniker. Another similar pointer idea from Moniker https://studiomoniker.com/projects/do-not-touch https://studiomoniker.com/projects/do-not-touch
- captn3m0 6y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4095237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4095237 (2012, has a video on how it works) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583179 (2014)
- dang 6y agoAlso a bit of "how does this work" from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13460124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13460124
- GrumpyNl 6y agoThis one is similar but for me a bit nicer, the eye in the left upper corner follows your pointer. https://www.ftm.nl/ https://www.ftm.nl/
- graderjs 6y agoThis is so werid, and strange.
- FriedrichN 6y agoThis was totally worth turning on scripts for. I wonder if the images were tagged by hand or automatically.
- Aachen 6y ago$50 on by hand being quicker than with ML
- lixtra 6y agoTry to tilt your phone from horizontal to vertical and back. :)
- Aachen 6y agoIt responds to landscape/portrait reorientation, nice!
- jstanley 6y agoVery fun! It would be cool if this was a bit faster, so you'd be able to move the mouse around and see it flashing up different pictures of people pointing at it in real time.
- Conlectus 6y agoHere's a picture of all the different regions:https://imgur.com/a/oYDA5Ja https://imgur.com/a/oYDA5Ja For those curious if how it works, Paul Irish did a breakdown of it quite a while ago: https://youtu.be/Z2ZXW2HBLPM https://youtu.be/Z2ZXW2HBLPM TL:DW - Vornoi Diagrams[1] and manual tagging, no machine learning needed. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram
- yarinr 6y agoThanks for sharing! Never heard about Vornoi Diagrams before..
- Philip-J-Fry 6y agoI just looked at the latest code and it doesn't seem like that's the case any more. It's just a simple grid and instead images are picked and scaled to point more accurately from what I can tell. Also it's React now...
- squeaky-clean 6y agoIf I'm reading it correctly, it loads up an array of points [0], and after you move your cursor it loops through all points and finds the one with the nearest distance [1]. It seems like every image has the URL structure /images/[index of point].jpg. The interesting bit is it keeps a list of the 4 point/images you've most recently seen, and will ignore those when searching for the new nearest point/image. Then scales that image to point at your cursor more accurately. This is why it feels pixel-perfect or so, because you won't get a repeat image until you refresh, or try the same location 5 times. To test that out, ctrl+tab away and back to the tab without moving your cursor. You'll always get a different image. Then refresh the page, and ctrl+tab away and back again without moving your cursor. You'll see the same images in order. Also neat that what was once a jQuery app now uses React and Typescript. [0] https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json [1] From /static/js/Point.ts const bruteClosest = (position: Point, positions: Point[]) => { let index = undefined; let closest = Number.MAX_VALUE; for (let i = 0; i < positions.length; i++) { const pos = positions[i]; const distance = distancePoints(pos, position); if (distance < closest && !lastPicked.includes(i)) { closest = distance; index = i; }; } lastPicked.unshift(index!); lastPicked.length = Math.min(lastPicked.length, 4); return index; };
- kdtop 6y agoToday I learned that the internet is AWESOME.
- circadian 6y agoHehe, good Friday fun, nice one! :-)
- ConradKilroy 6y agoIn terms of Algorithmic Bias, due to predominatly identifying light skin tones, I rate this as 2.5 out of 5 stars. Has alot of work to do. Thanks for sharing and allowing the community to openly critique it.
- aardvarkr 6y agoWhat algorithmic bias is there? It’s literally just a grid that maps your pointer location to a picture, no AI involved. Sounds like you’re calling the author a racist.
- ConradKilroy 6y agoAnd...?
- agys 6y agoI remember Jonathan Puckey* explaining this project at Resonate festival: the delay before showing the image is artificial and meant to create suspence. This is what I’d call 'user experience'. * Now at https://puckey.studio https://puckey.studio, but I think he was still working at/for https://studiomoniker.com https://studiomoniker.com at the time.
- ricardo81 6y agoBrilliant, worked without fail for me, peer reviewed by my daughter.
- SebastianFrelle 6y agoThe site loads an adsbygoogle.js script from https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle..... I can't see any ads on the site. Is this load due to the site being hosted on a Google platform like GCP or Firebase?
- nabakin 6y agoAds load for me on mobile. There's a banner at the bottom of the screen.
- always_left 6y agoOh I remember this from back when I was in highschool, nice to see it again :)
- leafmeal 6y agoI love all of the photos. Lots of casual pics of happy people. Everything has a very 90s/00s vibe which I'm finding nostalgic. Does anyone know where this database comes from? I feel like they were all scraped off old MySpace pages.
- oa335 6y agoMy guess is photobucket archives, that site was really popular among college age kids around that time.
- blindm 6y agoSubmits to https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
- vejrvkgf 6y agoGfcbdcvhfxvh