HN Explorer

48 comments

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lifeformed
I'm not sure what I'm looking at here... all I see is a giant zoomable grid of chromatic noise. Is it supposed to be showing peoples pictures or something?
swat535
same here i was expecting to see actual profile images..
martin_
You do, if you zoom in.
Killswitch
Use your scroll wheel to zoom in (like Google Maps) or click in an area and it'll zoom in.
elwell
I thought that at first, but then the faces started loading finally. You do have to be zoomed in for that to occur.
geekrax
A facebook profile picture of smallest dimension (50px X 50px) will have minimum size of 3 kb.. So, if this site will show real profile pics all together, it'll have to load almost 3.5 TB of data for 1.2 billion pictures.. A connection with 100Kb/s downloading speed will take around 430 days, and a connection with 1MB/s will take around 42 days..

I don't think anyone would be interested to spend more than 2 minutes on this page.

dsl
I had to unblock Facebook Connect in Ghostery and AdBlock before it worked.
djloche
The real question is - does this have the image from the profile I requested that they delete over 1.5 years ago?
phwd
If you have the id or username, then you can check for yourself with a simple HTTP GET to https://graph.facebook.com/[Number/username]. Seeing that this app uses the Graph API to request accounts, I highly doubt it will be able to see any residual/soft delete data Facebook might hold for you.
timedoctor
The app doesn't work. When you scroll up and down through the images it stops showing you new faces. The faces are not all there, it's a trick, just has a few hundred facebook profiles in there, does not have all 1.2 billion.
31reasons
Its not "Visualizing". Its called fetching random images.
photorized
That was my reaction, too. I was expecting something more than a random pixel map.
joshlegs
also, it's slow as shit when you drill down to a subselection of 'faces'
Skywing
Working for me. Shows pictures, names and profile number. If you scroll to the top left you can browse all of the first users of Facebook. Pretty neat.
Tichy
Can't load the page. But I wonder, is it possible to grab all Facebook profile pictures (or at least the public ones), or were they given special access for research purposes?
Sprint
Your browser is doing the downloading. The URLs are available from the API (I changed random characters):

  $ curl -I https://graph.facebook.com/100000624321700/picture
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
(...)

  Location: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/573867_100000621711234_930571234_q.jpg
Then it is just a matter of incrementing the number. This might be a fun research project.
elwell
well don't forget that they are also using the api to get the full_name of users
Tichy
No rate limits?
Andrenid
After zooming in to 2 different areas and dragging it around for a bit, I now don't get images and I just get a popup asking me to log in to Facebook whenever I try zoom in anywhere.
toomuchtodo
Definitely rate limits. They should probably be proxying the requests and caching the images.
SurfScore
So apparently the app works because you can access someone's facebook page with the URL www.facebook.com/"#". With the number being the numbered profile they are.

Its curious, however, that Zuck is actually number 4 (www.facebook.com/4), numbers 1-3 are missing. I wonder why?

shacharz
I see Zuck as #1, Moskowitz as #3 and so on...
frik
Click on the picture, it links to "facebook.com/4" (=zuckerberg), etc. There are several gaps in between the first 50 ID numbers. Probably some early test/fake accounts as well as people who deleted/deactivated their account. Eduardo Saverin (co-founder) has id 41 and Joe Green has 42.
javadi82
Source, Dustin Moskovitz: 1-3 were accounts used to test registration. Evidently it only took Mark 3 tries to clear the bugs. Link: http://qr.ae/NMpX6 (Does not require login)
nkg
I clicked 3 zones before finding myself in front of a dick pic.
nkg
Oh, an ass.
sytelus
So FB allows to GET 1.2B profile images without getting blocked? If so, is using that data legal? If so, how can I get my hands on it :).
md224
It's pretty simple:

graph.facebook.com/[integer]/picture?type=large

skwirl
Your browser is doing the GETting. Bring up the network tab in your browser's dev console and zoom in. I was a little worried about getting blocked myself just from playing around on that page.
D9u
This a good example of why I don't use Facebook, although I do like the premise here.
shortstuffsushi
Interestingly, the first 14 "members," or at least images, are male. I'm not immediately familiar with the early development team of Facebook, but it appears that they didn't start sharing with their female friends immediately.
hnha
or maybe they did but their friends were not interested.
Aqueous
Yeah...

No, you're right, you're totally significant.

[dead] rorrr2
What's the point of this? Visualizations usually have a goal to display some data or relationships/connections in a useful way.
Siecje
I found my profile account number and it works for the graph link but I am not that number on the site
whackedspinach
The number on this site refers to the profile picture. Some people have multiple profile pictures over time, and some have deleted their account, etc. Example: Zuck is 1 on this page but his FBID is 4.
Siecje
So #1 is Mark's picture from back then and he and everyone else would be in the page multiple times.
elwell
Interesting to see a lot of Harvard grads on row #1 indeed.
abalashov
I was quite surprised by the [edit: relatively] prodigious amount of penises.
unclebucknasty
Most of those were people who just look like penises.
corobo
Idle curiosity for the mathfolk, by clicking somewhere at random what's the chances of getting your own picture to load?