Hacker News Reader

Comment by JackWebbHeller | Hacker News Reader

People are bashing this for being 'pointless', but hey, so is the next great to-do list app you made in 48 hours. This is a fun little experiment.

I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a little more classy than a monster.

[1] http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an...

View on HN

I see this as like an internet art installation. It injects art into an unexpected place/space.

Finding patterns and/or meaning out of nothing is quite interesting.

Is art useless and not worth executing?

Is generating a 4 color palette based of a random seed all it takes to be art? Not to say it wasn't worth executing from a personal standpoint, it was probably fun to build if nothing else, but really what possible use can anyone else get out of this?

We put this together one afternoon because it was fun and quick to do. We were looking into generating colours for our site and logo that would somehow be different for every visitor. We thought about this but then realised it wouldn't be that practical. If it can inspire someone to do something similar but more useful then that's enough for me :-)

Is putting a toilet in a gallery all it takes to be art?

These days, 'art' is an almost meaningless term, since it has to include this:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/creed-work-no-233-p78388

You had me at "fu". Bookmarked!

And, on a more serious note, pretty depressing.

Being depressed by this is a bit like being depressed by pop because you think only classical music is music. He's not stopping anyone from doing better art. I wouldn't be into his art particularly but neither am I into the sort of paintings you see in national galleries either. Really it wouldn't surprise me if he turned around one day and said the whole thing was a big joke. He practically does just that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6syZr_me_Bg

The question is, how do you get the the point in your career where you can put stuff like this and people laud it?

If I went to a gallery and offered this up I'd obviously be laughed out of the place.

Indeed, I only found depressing the fact that this "work" made it to a prestigious museum.

Nowadays being alive is art.

Art is anything that someone somewhere could claim is not art.

Is anything that anyone claims as art.

The work’s irreverent message appears discreet due to its small size and almost apologetic lower-case lettering; the blank expanse of the rest of the page, however, gives the words disproportionate weight and presence. This simultaneously self-effacing and assertive quality is typical of Creed’s work.

I don't know where to begin. If I didn't know any better I'd think this was a parody.

I was in the same boat as you; reading this shed some light:

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y6fj/el...

Art is a means of expression, whether you can see meaning in it or whether it had any meaning at all or even if you think it wasn't particularly creative. Art serves no other purpose other than to be art. In that regard, yes, this can be considered art. I thought it was quite creative in a relatively unexplored medium, your IP, instead of oil paint.

And I vehemently disagree with cormullion's comment : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239734

Consider Malevich's work : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malevich.black-square.jpg

Yes, that's in a museum. And it wasn't made "these days" either.

I don't think that I can agree enough with this comment. Pointless are only comments point it out. How many people ask what they could do to learn programming? A lot, and I don't like all the "read books & watch videos", working on a little project like this is a great thing to learn many good things while doing something more fun than the common notepad or to-do-list

I was considering something related for my own software -- giving some level of differentiation to "Anonymous" users in a discussion, to reduce samefagging; users on the same subnet would get similar colours, etc. The main downside with that is that it's then plausible to look at somebody's colour and work out their IP address :P

Just hash the actual IP address. For example, take the IP and apply MD5; then take three bytes each to make, say, 3-colored "flags". That would totally work and yet be reasonably anonymous. This would also take care of the fact that colors come as three byte values and not four.

That would not work, as stated. The search space is way too small. Simply exhaustively building a table mapping hash to IP address is tractable.

This could be ameliorated by including a site-specific secret in the hashed value; I'm not comfortable calling that "secure" but it does address this particular flaw.

Yes, but given a single hash you are only able to reduce to 200 candidate IPs.

If a site specific secret is present you would not be able to do that - unless the site will act as an oracle for you and doesn't care about you making several billion requests.

Its not pointless at all - I can think of situation where this idea would be very useful:

When looking at client (request) logs full with IP addresses, the colorful visual cue would give you an idea which requests group to a single client.

I agree! Useless things can be some of the most fun things to do with your time. I do recreational motorcycle riding, and admittedly from a practical point of view it's pointless, it's my favorite activity!

I actually like my IP's color scheme. I might try to use it for something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com