Settings

Theme

Show HN: Eyeball

eyeball.rory.codes

295 points by mrroryflint 24 days ago · 91 comments

Reader

MontyCarloHall 24 days ago

A modern take on Matthias Wandel's classic [0], which has you guess a variety of geometric attributes (e.g. angle bisection, centroid locating, shape regularization), not just simple partitioning of a line.

[0] https://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html

  • kerblang 24 days ago

    Oh that version actually made sense.

    Going back to our newer game, I realized that I am supposed to figure out where the number given should fall on the line.

    A case study in modern useability - looks a lot cooler, can't figure it out.

    • imzadi 24 days ago

      idk, it only took me one click to figure out what the goal was and how I was being judged (beat the average). I feel like that's part of the puzzle. Sort of similar to Baba is You. Figuring out the goal is part of the puzzle.

  • mrroryflintOP 24 days ago

    Oh wow - that is very cool. Thanks for sharing.

    • harrisi 24 days ago

      Just want to say thank you for sharing your project. Very fun, and I wouldn't know about Matthias Wandel's version if not for yours!

      Also, both of these tickled my brain in a great way. I think a potentially fun continuation would be to "eyeball" physics. For example, throw a ball and pause the physics before it hits something (ground, object, who knows?) and guess the location. Or show two objects about to collide with certain shapes and masses and guess what one of them will hit first and where.

  • stronglikedan 24 days ago

    This is great. If only the little square tool would disappear while I make adjustments though - it's just enough of a distraction to barely miss.

forlorn_mammoth 24 days ago

Love it!

It would be great to have a 'training' mode, where you get to repeat ones you miss. This would increase the learning speed.

Easy training- repeat the one you just borked Medium training- cycles through say 5 examples until you get all five within your target range (1%, 0.1%, whatever)

  • mrroryflintOP 24 days ago

    Cool idea - thanks! I'm building a mobile app as we speak so I'll add it for sure.

sandebert 24 days ago

Got a perfect result for the first try. (Off by zero.) Not trying again. :)

davidcollantes 24 days ago

I was 0.06% off on eyeball. Beat me: https://eyeball.rory.codes.

This is fun!

harrisi 24 days ago

It's interesting that there are, at the time I'm commenting, 11 new users commenting on this submission, some commenting multiple times. I wonder what the effect of "share my score" type pages have on account creation.

  • hazelnut 24 days ago

    yes, was thinking the same. but it's also weird that the amount of new users commenting is so much higher here. wonder if that is just not a coincidence.

    • harrisi 24 days ago

      It is odd. There's significantly more new users commenting here than every other submission on the front page, both in absolute numbers and proportionally.

      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

zer0tonin 24 days ago

This is fun but you need to put "click the line" higher on the page. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at.

densekernel 24 days ago

https://eyeball.rory.codes/ I was 0.20% off on eyeball. Beat me: https://eyeball.rory.codes

mavdol04 23 days ago

It's a bit of a cheat, but you can hit 0.00% every time. Just measure the bar length, then cross-multiply. :)

Example: bar is 1250px, max is 2100, number is 376 → (1250 × 376) / 2100 ≈ 223.8px from the start, that's the 0.00%.

throwawaydudhdn 24 days ago

Great idea! Have you considered storing triplets <range, correct number, selected number> for each try and making image plots of these (x/y coordinates are correct/selected numbers, color of each pixel represents frequency) for multiple users for each range? I think the image might reveal interesting properties of human eyeballing, like near-perfect accuracy around 50%, but with less obvious correlations.

layer8 24 days ago

The fact that the numbers are in a brighter color than the end marks, and that the numbers go inwards, makes it slightly more difficult than it would otherwise be, because the eye is biased by the more prominent space between the numbers being different from the line between the marks.

pedromlsreis 24 days ago

0.11% by luck, because I actually got lucky the target number was too close to zero, out of a big scale.

ashm1104 24 days ago

I love these kind ones! Really engaging also yes as someone commented, the training mode would be an awesome idea.

Also, I tried this on laptop as well as my phone, I liked it more on my phone (I know the whole point is about precision though)

SugarReflex 22 days ago

I thought this was a random guessing game and kept randomly clicking and felt very frustrated. Once I realized how it works with the two numbers, estimating felt a lot more rewarding.

furyofantares 24 days ago

I find it very easy if it's near 50%, 10%, or 5%.

Presumably I'd do just as well visually near 90 and 95 as near 10 and 5, the difference is in the first stage, estimating the percentage.

iJohnDoe 23 days ago

This seems like a nice therapeutic application. Something a person or practitioner could say, “Sit down and play this for 5 minutes to calm your mind.”

ninju 24 days ago

Note the "share" link doesn't share a specific challenge for others to try, which would be much cooler, instead it just shares to main page

obomeretic 23 days ago

I was 0.67% off on eyeball. Beat me: https://eyeball.rory.codes

joey9prints 24 days ago

Cool idea, love how simple it is. Minimal and clean.

gverrilla 24 days ago

Suggestion: make timed tracks - like a sequence of 10 turns, within max 60/30/15s or something.

Mabusto 24 days ago

I love these simple games that take 2 seconds to understand the rules.

Off by 6 on my iPad by mis-clicking. Very satisfying!

FinanceFreddy 24 days ago

Oh, this is actually fun! How about if you change the target every few seconds to add a bit of pressure.

schuhwerk 24 days ago

Nice! Would be nice to see your progress over time (if you got better, also as a function of speed...)

fortran77 24 days ago

I got a perfect "off by 4" on the first try! I feel like I've accomplished something!

RAZKOM 24 days ago

I thought I was going to be really good at this but turns out I'm surprisingly bad. Cool idea.

ketul_shah 24 days ago

this is fun and helping me get grounded :). adding a timer would be a good idea, I think.

zokier 24 days ago

10 round avg 4.5%.

A time limit would make sense imho. For extra challenge, add diagonal or curved lines.

tartoran 24 days ago

Fun. Got a streak of 4 and one of them was perfect (nearly .10% of target).

p2hari 24 days ago

My best on first attempt was 0.00% (Pure coincidence) . But was fun!

sentacraft 22 days ago

This is fun! and I really love the clean and modern UX.

Kwouz 22 days ago

Its cool man, i was playing for 1 hour, havent won yet

0xchamin 22 days ago

cool game. I tried. would be nice to include a helper description around what to do. took me a while to understand the challenge better.

0x000xca0xfe 24 days ago

10 perfect hits in a row!

...

handleClick({clientX: els.bar.getBoundingClientRect().left + els.bar.getBoundingClientRect().width / state.n * state.target })

ramon156 24 days ago

800

0 out of 1,600

I still missed. Even when there was centered text.

Maybe the human is the weakest link

wolttam 24 days ago

The low contrast of this website hurts my eyeball

baisampayans 24 days ago

This is wild. Got hooked into it pretty fast

untitled-now 24 days ago

I am amazed how such a simple app gets that much attention , whereas probably it is vibe coded in an hour using Claude or any other AI tool .

  • mrroryflintOP 23 days ago

    I think first prompt to deploy was < 25 minutes - purely to amuse myself.

    I have so many other projects that have taken days and in my eyes are way "better" but get zero attention.

lbeyer 24 days ago

Simple premise, oddly hard to put down.

shashankqv 24 days ago

This is very cool and fun. Thank you.

ehsangazarr 24 days ago

Really fun! I am pretty much blind

Lucas12546 22 days ago

I got 0.03%. I try my best.

Chaseraph 24 days ago

Well I suck.

efilife 22 days ago

very weird comments from very fresh accounts under this post

fspoettel 24 days ago

Would love a time trial mode

dennis3124 24 days ago

Love how simple it is.

Daniel-Pan 21 days ago

I was 0.43% away

jjenks1106 23 days ago

really cool! enjoy the simple premise but very satisfying

antoine-codefly 24 days ago

Definitely need an iOS version! An angle version on a circle would be nice too.

thedetailsguy 24 days ago

Super cool stuff!

oastp 24 days ago

love it, pulls you in after a first try)

Hugsbox 24 days ago

I didn't think I'd be any good at this. What I didn't expect is how wildly inaccurate I'd be on every single goddamn attempt lmao it's like I completely lack whatever part of your brain is required to do this

trickybusiness 24 days ago

this is fun!

cdelsolar 24 days ago

i got a 0.00% after 3 tries!

datagrasp-grcs 24 days ago

Very cool

nextma 24 days ago

my best is 0.08%

tt_dev 24 days ago

this was fun

elliotJames548 24 days ago

i made 0.87%

ehsangazarr 24 days ago

pretty fun!

aspectop 24 days ago

my avg was around 2% not able to do more than that lol

Keyboard Shortcuts

j
Next item
k
Previous item
o / Enter
Open selected item
?
Show this help
Esc
Close modal / clear selection