alt Hacker NewsCatch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity
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Favorited.
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.
Beautiful. Really feels 'alive'! Impressive how many species of bird you've got here.
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...
My cat was not happy about this at all. He sat and watched it for five minutes, tail wagging ominously. While I am happy that thoughts were set free by people, my cat wanted all thoughts to die a horrible death.
Really beautiful, I was tearing up reading all of the positivity, from simple to complex. A lot of tech stuff, a lot of "dog / my dog", a lot of spouses, kids, food... all so wonderful.
Hi Eduard, I'm Levente from HU too. I love the whole concept, I had a similar idea to do it, when I found this site: https://pudding.cool/2026/02/happy-map/ just don't have the time to work on. It's a similar, just not dynamic as yours. Love the design and everything just somehow you should filter the spam with LLM or I don't know, but right now there are lot of birds with "asd" like sentences.
Terrific idea! Does it have the ability to translate into a default language (for each user)?
This is really neat. I love this sort of project. Reminds me of the early days of the Internet while adding some positivity to the world. Thanks for sharing.
Nice site! Could you add a species descriptor to the bird, so it can have some educational value too. Some of them I don't recognize.
Really cool. The first bird I hit was from someone in Pakistan:
> 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.
"got kicked out of a store for being racist"
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.)
Nice, but can I ask how you determine location?
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
If you could make this into an iPhone app, I’d use it daily.
Wonderful idea and execution. Thank you
Neat experiment! I wish I'd read that my comment was going to be public before immediately typing (whoops, but a minor whoops). Maybe update the UI to have that shown earlier?
But also clearly user error on my end to just type away and not read first, so that's on me.
I liked this a lot!
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.
Kind of ruined by all the spam ones that just say like “fs” “sd” etc
Wow! This is happy twitter.
This is what the internet is for, thank you.
Agreeing with the others, this is really cool! :)
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?
Lovely!
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.
Absolutely delightful!
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."
The Game Poems community might enjoy this. You can find their Discord on their website: https://www.gamepoems.com/about
I love it. It's one of those cool projects that exist in the internet altruistically to do good. Thank you for making this.
Charming idea, love it.
On mobile (chrome on android): Needs an X to close the dialog windows.
What an incredibly beautiful project. I can't stop smiling.
This is lovely. And also quite clever in the mechanic - as well as being beautiful it makes abuse by ‘the internet’ which is always so inevitable with any open message posting, not very rewarding since it just comes and goes.
This is good work. Made my day.
Love this! Was really nice to read all of them
This is so lovely! It's like a collective gratitude practice. There's something special in seeing what other people are grateful for.
> What made you happy today?
> I didn't sleep the entire night and it's 7 am but I am unemployed
Love it! More of this, less of things like X
Absolutely amazing idea. I love that the positivity is contagious. :)
Great stuff. I'm asking AI to add some cats.
This is genuinely wonderful.
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.
You'll know my bird when you catch it: "Realized that "reasoning was set to low" on DeepSeek Flash 4.1 - set it to high and life improved immediately."
Strange world we live in, but life just got seriously better. ;-)
"The guys digging in my yard are skilled enough that they do not destroy existing pipes and cables when they dug a ditch for the new power cable being installed in my house"
lmao had a laugh at this one, I know the feeling of depending on trades lol.
This is absolutely lovely.
Woah, this is a unique web experience... thank you for contributing :>
Would be cool to make the feeding button more obvious.
Gen-Xers discovering the world around.
This is such a cool idea. Well done
Great idea, bookmarked. Thanks for building this.
More of this on the net!
This is wonderful. Making this my homepage
Very wholesome :) I like it
this is fantastic, I love the idea
Thank you for building this, it's a beautiful reminder that the world is pretty awesome, and it's something I am gonna keep up on my third screen when I need a smile.
Don't tell Kelly Clarkson about this
This is great. Really.
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.