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Show HN: Emoji to Scale

713 points| javierbyte | 4 years ago |javier.xyz | reply

124 comments

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[+] AceJohnny2|4 years ago|reply
What is the yellow smiley face that's twice as large as Japan but smaller than the earth and oh god I can see it in the sky it's look--
[+] AceJohnny2|4 years ago|reply
oh nm that's the moon
[+] valleyer|4 years ago|reply
Neat concept.

As someone not very up-to-date in Web UI techniques, I was curious as to how the array was being advanced on scroll. Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is basically polling. The code constantly calls window.requestAnimationFrame(), checking window.pageYOffset. This means that the page is constantly doing work, even at idle.

Surely the more correct way is to install an onscroll handler or something, right?

[+] vincentriemer|4 years ago|reply
The correct way would be a mix of those two strategies: an onscroll handler that schedules an update through requestAnimationFrame (ensuring that it only gets scheduled once until the next frame update actually executes).
[+] have_faith|4 years ago|reply
Request animation frame exists specifically to avoid ‘traditional’ polling. You’re thinking more of setInterval() which is the old way of doing it. The requestAnimationFrame docs are a good read, there are lots of performance benefits.
[+] cunthorpe|4 years ago|reply
Goat: 45cm

Duck: 50cm

Might as well say “shuffled emojis with random data attached”

[+] dhritzkiv|4 years ago|reply
I managed to force this data to sort-of work by using a pygmy goat at 40-50cm tall, and a mallard deck at 50-65cm long (even larger than the site suggests). So, sure.

But if you use a more typical domestic goat, like an Irish Goat, you get a height of 80-90cm. The length is even longer.

[+] rob74|4 years ago|reply
Also, the "running man" being bigger than a cow and about the same size as a horse...

But what really bugs me is that it simply uses some font it finds on your system, so on my slightly outdated Linux version it only shows about 70% of the emojis. I mean, if there was ever a perfect use case for webfonts, it would be this page...

[+] King-Aaron|4 years ago|reply
Arm: 30cm. I think my arm is bigger than that. And fire: 40cm. This seems somewhat arbitrary lol
[+] cjohansson|4 years ago|reply
Well it says "to scale" not "to realistic scale" so it could be a made-up scale
[+] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
Yeah my mouth isn't 15cm/6in wide, definitely around half that
[+] dwohnitmok|4 years ago|reply
I was half-expecting there to be a gigantic jump to the sun emoji and then the galaxy emoji, but that might have presented rather interesting engineering challenges at that point.
[+] catern|4 years ago|reply
I love the idea, but the algorithm for scaling seems a bit off. For example, it shows the human as much larger than the car.
[+] tracedddd|4 years ago|reply
I think it’s by height in which case it makes sense… maybe.
[+] irrational|4 years ago|reply
Maybe it’s one of those tiny Smart Cars.
[+] whiskyant|4 years ago|reply
4-leaf clover larger than a credit card?
[+] whylo|4 years ago|reply
Measured from the base of the stalk, maybe? Rather than the diameter of the leaves
[+] travisgriggs|4 years ago|reply
Why is the mermaid so huge? The flamingo dancer and running male are smaller. The mermaid is apparently an Amazonian Mermaid, able to hurl the bison next to her to the ground with a flick of her tail.
[+] folli|4 years ago|reply
Two meter mermaid incl. the tail seems reasonable to me, however I have never met one in person.
[+] rosetremiere|4 years ago|reply
Is japan the only country that has its own map as a unicode symbol? If so, is there a story behind it? I would bet on compatibility with some regional encoding that had it to begin with.
[+] wodenokoto|4 years ago|reply
Emoji was basically created to add graphics to Japanese mobile websites in the late nineties when people paid by the byte.

Back then the supplier of the websites also made the phones, and you could only access specific mobile webs depending on your carrier.

The original emoji were mostly create to facilitate online shopping for train tickets for vacation and ringtones. So a lot of these represent travel, food and landmarks.

Edit: this is for Japanese handsets and carriers. That was pretty unclear before the edit

[+] tinus_hn|4 years ago|reply
The original set of emoji was created by one Japanese person in a weekend for a Japanese mobile operator. So these images, like the blood types, the astrology signs and the cats and later the rice ball and the pile of poo are images Japanese people would want to use in their communication.

The Wikipedia page of the creator has some links to the origin story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigetaka_Kurita

[+] Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago|reply
The other day I was running a web version of Townscapes on my smartphone, and it worked beautifully and smooth. But this one is so laggy and slow that I barely could scroll to Laptop (24cm), and then just stopped.

How come a real-time 3D rendering is faster then just displaying a few 2D pictures side by side on a screen? Tech these days is weird.

[+] wartijn_|4 years ago|reply
Funny idea, but lot of these seem off.

- A chicken egg is taller than 5cm.

- I would say a tulip is bigger than a phone.

- The okay hand sign says it's 21 cm.My hands are larger than average, but definitely smaller than 21cm.

- A duck isn't bigger than a goat.

- An elephant is smaller than a house.

[+] adzm|4 years ago|reply
I think some measurements are widths and some are heights.
[+] hbn|4 years ago|reply
I'm curious how he determined that fire is 40cm
[+] nkozyra|4 years ago|reply
The one that most confused me was lips bigger than the heart
[+] franga2000|4 years ago|reply
Cool idea, but since one one dimension (height?) was considered, you get some weird things like a cactus (12m) being way bigger than a house (7m).
[+] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
Even more confusingly, it's not consistent about the measured dimension. The car is 1.8m (wide), the firetruck is 2.3m (wide), the tractor is 5m (long), the bus is 12m (long), the statue of liberty is 46m (high), the astrodome is 66m (high).

It would have made more sense to stay with either height or the largest dimension (but that would have been weird for mountains, which often are far wider than high).

[+] duiker101|4 years ago|reply
Not to mention the bigger than the Hippopotamus :D

Very cool project tho!

[+] trissylegs|4 years ago|reply
Ok on my emoji set the Gorilla (Silverback) is just it's head. So it seems to imply a Gorilla has a head the size of a Llama.
[+] Thorrez|4 years ago|reply
The mosquito looks too small compared to the ant. I guess both can vary in size, but mosquitos I've seen have been larger than ants I've seen. Here's a video with a mosquito and an ant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW_RUnjLv6c

[+] traes|4 years ago|reply
Likely just a regional thing. Ants where I live tend to be slightly larger than our mosquitos, and they certainly have far more volume.
[+] 1270018080|4 years ago|reply
It's really laggy by the time you get to Tokyo Tower. My computer is hot.
[+] schmorptron|4 years ago|reply
Huh? I was about to comment the exact opposite, I was super impressed by how smooth it was! And that's running on a 3 year old low-end ryzen 3 laptop processor, on firefox in fedora.
[+] x3ro|4 years ago|reply
That's what I found too, in Firefox. I then switched to Safari and it was buttery smooth everywhere (MBP 16", not M1). Haven't tried in Chrome yet. I wonder why the performance varies so wildly...
[+] Gigachad|4 years ago|reply
This page was running at about 3fps on my M1 macbook.
[+] mdoms|4 years ago|reply
Great idea! Why vertical scrolling though?