Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity(catchabird.com) |
Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity(catchabird.com) |
On mobile (chrome on android): Needs an X to close the dialog windows.
> I didn't sleep the entire night and it's 7 am but I am unemployed
Strange world we live in, but life just got seriously better. ;-)
lmao had a laugh at this one, I know the feeling of depending on trades lol.
I was expecting a solo site where you have to think about something you're grateful for, and I was like, meh, I've seen that before, I'm just not interested.
But then seeing everyone else's birds really lit something up inside of me. Someone was happy because they saw the fog burn off in the morning sun. Someone was happy because their cat fell asleep in their guitar box while listening to them play. I genuinely felt happy for their happiness.
I will bookmark this site, and hope people (and I) keep adding to it.
There could be another place for these common posts on the site somewhere (might be interesting to surface how many people are happy about "coffee" vs "tea" for example), but on the bird view they just end up being a disappointing click.
I’m thinking about a switch for the reader, off by default, something like “longer birds only”.
What I can’t decide is how it should choose. Counting words is simple but dumb. A model could judge if a bird says something, but that’s a quiet judgment on people’s words. Or the birds people feed more could show up more often. Thoughts?
I think this ranking feature alone would solve the lazy throwaway posts problem entirely
There's a lot of gibberish replies but flagging it says "you flagged enough for today, thanks"
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It's a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn't finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don't know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I'd love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.
1- Are the birds actual birds species or just randomly generated? How?
2- Do you plan on doing some sort of classification on the messages later? It could be interesting.
>I'd love to hear what break
One bird got "stuck", midair, between the trees for a while. I clicked it two or three times and then it flew to a branch.
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It’s a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn’t finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don’t know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I’d love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.
I made this because I stopped seeing the small good things. You gave a lot of them back to me.
I’m working through the feedback now. The feed icon, the send away button, and the spam. Thank you all.
I sat there for 5 minutes reading them and then I tried to type something, and realized I couldn't think of a single thing. Just a bad day. I love that you made this, though. It's inspiring.
yeah
that's messed up
My sincere wishes that your day improves and that your weekend is as relaxing and (un)eventful as you need it to be.
Also, don't gamble with your health, take a few minutes to talk with your doctor if you don't understand what is happening.
Have a glorious day =3
My bird so far:
>Caught 25 times · fed 4 times · 23 cities
For feedback, I'd say make it more obvious to feed. The icon is not obvious and you'd likely feed a lot more than flag.
It would be bad if people make bots to spam non human birds even if they could be prevented from being straight up bad, even good seeming birds that aren't human would be a drag. I imagine text based would be hard due to the extremely short nature. And obviously we don't want to compromise anonymity.
I really like the general site UI.
The birds you feed kinda pile up in a long list. I feel like it makes them insignificant. Perhaps embrace ephemerality? Idk how to solve this.
open source?
reply to birds? Birds could have comments. No privacy, but anonymity.
i don't understand the manual send away button.
Clean AI/translator text content from website.
Do birds stop eventually? I assume so. Maybe a button to send one back out there from your fed list.
On “send away”: that’s the actual release action — if you don’t tap it, the bird stays in a pending state and can resurface, which sounds like exactly what’s happening to you (and to ShinyLeftPad below, reopening the site in the same browser brings back a bird that was never sent away). We agree the button isn’t obvious right now and that’s worth fixing.
On bots / non-human birds: it’s a real concern for us too, and we’re thinking about how to discourage that without compromising anonymity. No solution yet, but it’s on our radar.
The feed icon visibility, the long list of fed birds feeling insignificant, the idea of replies/comments on birds, and cleaning up the translated text — all noted, we’re not solving these in this thread but they’re captured for the next round of work.
By the way, all your comments are banned because of the AI detector, but I'll just vouch for them. I think you're just using a translator, but unfortunately it's getting detected.
When I built something similar – http://alsjeditleest.be (messages in a bottle for Dutch speakers. Never really took off.) – I spent a decent amount of time researching automatic content moderation. Looks like you could some here as well. Mistral has a free moderation endpoint with ZDR. Can definitely recommend it!
Two feature requests:
- I want to be able to click away the message window without making the bird leave
- Bird sounds. I put this on in the background: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenera...
On spam: there’s actually been an automatic filter on input since launch, we’re just tuning it. The challenge is balance, we don’t want to over-filter and cut off genuine, shareable thoughts, just catch the obvious junk, so some “asd”-type noise has been slipping through while we dial that in.
Nagyon köszi a visszajelzést.
> I went outside for the first time since suffering a panic attack last time I went out.
… from Pakistan. A good reminder that some folks have it harder than others.
It added mine as my old home town but I haven't been to that location for a while and it's 20 miles away from where I was when I posted.
Update: I am on mobile, used chrome and Firefox, normal and incognito mode. All show my old town location, Max mind says my IP is in a different town 70 miles away. Either some super odd coincidence and stale geoip lookup or some very advanced device fingerprinting tracking! Feels too odd to be a coincidence
It feels like a really odd coincidence given the size of the town in question. I suspect the db-ip service has cached the IP somehow against other data for me, perhaps the ipv6 if you use that?
Wonderful idea and execution. Thank you
There sure is a wide variety of things that make people happy...
(All the others were much more wholesome, and this is a very cool idea.)
I caught a bird from Macedonia who told me he was happy he'd never have to deal with another non-technical PM again. Simple delights everywhere.
But also clearly user error on my end to just type away and not read first, so that's on me.
I find it interesting that if you switch between languages on the site and the language has a local variant of the proverb, the text will have an additional paragraph explaining it.
E.g. this is the case in French, English or German, while other languages seem to fall back to the English "happy as a lark" one. (And all of them refer to the Hungarian proverb of course)
Did the translation model do that "on its own" or was that a conscious decision?
I want this as an app on my TV (TizenOS), where a different bird gets highlighted every 1-2 minues, and if I click OK on my remote I feed it.
No other features. Just that.
And i think i can tell the ones from HN (in a good way), they are often like "showed a client a really cool feature i made and they loved it."