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Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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Personally I don't think there's any machine learning needed for this (but who knows what they used). If I were to build a replica, my approach would be to grab a decent amount of suitable photos, manually mark the pointed areas in them, and have some sort of scaling/cropping/offset handle near misses.

I upvoted the submission because I think it's a cool trick either way.

It just shows that a "Lot of Prep" can be "machine learning" to the observer.

If 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.

It 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.

Exactly. 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.

If it runs instantaneously, it would probably be a pretty cool effect to have the pointing fingers trace your cursor as it moves.

If 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.

In the ye olden demoscene days, we called that "precalc".

Just calculate all the effects up front and then draw them "in real time" :)

All work and no fun makes hacker a dull person.

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