HN Explorer

18 comments

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mrkyone
Smart hack! Where did you get those places from?
rememberlenny
One issue, the site highjacks the back button.

Otherwise, beautifully amazing.

dkordik
I was actually going to request some way to go back to a previous image. I didn't realize I could just use the back button. Glad you pointed that out! @OP: worth adding a back button in the site UI?
BenjaminN
I will. And there's also a sidebar/menu when you click on the logo, but that's not obvious at all.
morsch
I like it. How about adapting the background color gradient to the major colors of the picture? E.g. using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905547
BenjaminN
Ahah, I had that idea too, but there's a security problem with images from Instagram. Long story short: they don't allow cross-origin resource sharing, so that doesn't work.
legohead
please don't take over my back button
BenjaminN
Man, I'm so sorry for your back button, I hope he's okay :3
tchadwick
I really like this. I've already found some interesting places!
duiker101
Love the idea!

I tried and the first result was a place in London, cool but I basically live 40 min away. The second was Auschwitz. I was kinda not too motivated.

But still very nice!

BenjaminN
Randomness is not nice with you today, I'm sorry. My advice: don't play any lottery game.
bgnm2000
This is awesome - only wish it were faster, and that I could save my favorites.
BenjaminN
Might be slow because of the HN effect. Saving a place is a great idea, but that means creating accounts, and that complicates everything. You might just "like" the place on facebook.
Ryanmf
How are you curating these images? Which is to say, how are you ensuring that I see a really great photo of the Azure Window[0] (which happened to be posted two weeks ago) rather than whichever random one Ig turns up first?

I had a semi-similar idea (but focused on graffiti) but all the restrictions in their API terms were sort of a turn off.

[0] http://instagram.com/p/itwBoKwBnp/

BenjaminN
I told more about this on Cool Hunting [0] but basically I'm manually selecting the best one. So I have a list of ~150 shots, I'm sorting by likes (which most of the time is not relevant at all) and removing all the #selfies using a face recognition algorithm.

[0] http://www.coolhunting.com/travel/smwhre-app.php