Hacker News: spython

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:40:57 +0000

It's the other way around - I integrated some things I wrote in the comments here into the blog post. I'm still writing the post though - it's not easy to hypothesize about people's intention without sounding like an ass.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:30:48 +0000

Indeed, I think this is how it starts. However the filtering system does not indicate to the user if their drawing was filtered - otherwise it would turn into a "trick the system" game - a whole different genre. So the visitor always gets the satisfaction of seeing their penis galloping on the horizon. Still, many if not most penis artists then continue to add more and more lewd drawings. So it's not just a test but some other behaviour. Coming from Hacker News, they might feel like a hacker, a rebel breaking the system. And that's fine - after all there are not many ways in a society where you can feel this way and not hurt anyone.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:47:12 +0000

I understand all that, but how would you explain that 8,6% of drawings from people coming from HN were dicks, while visitors from Tumblr would draw dicks only in 1,6% of the cases? My guess is that people from Tumblr already explored a lot of the transgressions, so it does not interest them much - just like "potty talk phase" stops being interesting after your reach a certain age.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:25:54 +0000

I'm writing a second part of this post right now - about the differences in how separate online communities are drawing horses. There are clear differences in richness of detail, drawing mastery, but also in the amount of dicks drawn. My suspicion that people with more drawing experience draw less dicks simply because they already have drawn all the dicks previously. While people with an untrained drawing muscle perhaps fall back to these easy and familiar shapes. Drawing a horse is hard.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:14:11 +0000

So many dicks! Roughly 4 percent of all drawings are dicks. With over 600 000 drawings that means.. Twenty five thousand dicks. I thought about including them, but as with all the other transgressive drawings, the only person who enjoys looking at them is the one who drew them.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:25:20 +0000

Yes, on the original gradient.horse it was an early experiment in hidden moderation - and it did help hide quite a few of the less kind drawings. Now, as the moderation model trained on the larger corpus works quite well, it's just for fun.

New comment by spython in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

spython — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:15:17 +0000

Oooh, there are just so many horses - more than 600 000 - that it's a tiny chance to actually see your drawings! And there are around 50 000 drawings marked as non-horses - all kind of weirdness - that could be an exhibition on its own..

Thank you for drawing, a typical drawing is seen more than a hundred times, so your pegasus and space invader were seen and appreciated : )

What else do people draw on gradient.horse?

spython — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:28:56 +0000

Article URL: https://rybakov.com/blog/what_else_do_people_draw_on_gradient-copy.horse/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959008

Points: 170

# Comments: 46

New comment by spython in "Against Usefulness"

spython — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:35:37 +0000

This hits home - I wrote you an email!

New comment by spython in "Small Penis Rule"

spython — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:37:34 +0000

Would that be enforceable? Can people be excluded from the right to a legal dispute? It seems that otherwise any contract would include a clause that it can not be contested - which it sometimes does with mandatory mediation.

New comment by spython in "Leaving Mozilla"

spython — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:25:13 +0000

I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.

New comment by spython in "Leaving Mozilla"

spython — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:20:37 +0000

Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.

Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.

So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).

New comment by spython in "Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game"

spython — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:39:25 +0000

You can go from the starting position to the last u-turn, skipping nearly the whole course. But I doubt that's intentional.

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:10:13 +0000

Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:37:49 +0000

Yeah, I too had probably an idealized image of HN - but I guess what makes the HN great is the moderation :)

And it's not like there are no beautiful horses being drawn - I observed quite a few ingenious horses and non-horses coming in in the last hours. But I'm surprised at the level of.. carelessness.

One way of dealing with it would be training a penis-drawing-recognition ai and only show other penis drawings to people who draw dicks. Though it would go against the whole idea of, well, having a moment together.

Substack traffic is hard to quantify, at least for me as I am only looking at HTTP referrers, and I had the feeling the referrer field was mostly filtered out. It is comparable to facebook and mastodon traffic, both in volume and in the sense that it is a slow burn - the link gets share in a small community, and then gets shared a few days later in a different one. In contrast to tumblr, HN and bluesky, where a spike in traffic comes sudden, a cultural moment is shared by many thousands of people, and then the attention mostly disappears the next day.

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:16:36 +0000

Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:51:48 +0000

As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:

- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )

- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

- Most generous buymeacoffee supporters: tumblr

- Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

- Hardest slashdot effect: bluesky

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:15:32 +0000

The filter does not show directly whether it's filtered out or not - it's silent, otherwise the game would be "trick the AI filter" and that's a totally different genre.

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 19:34:18 +0000

Hey, it's my project, nice to see it here! I wanted to do something that I liked in the early times of the web - something small, optimistic and whimsical.

The AI-assisted drawing moderation is inspired by drawafish.com and works quite well at keeping the horse parade family friendly!

New comment by spython in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

spython — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:59:05 +0000

https://rybakov.com/ Though it's more about art and UX.