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Show HN: Live Dangerously – 1-for-1 anonymous photo sharing via SMS (danger.life)
44 points by idealboy on Sept 3, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments



Are you scrubbing Exif metadata on all these? I spot-checked a few and there didn't seem to be any embedded. A surprising number of people have no idea that their mobile phone may embed GPS coordinates in images they take with it.

I think most social media sites do this by default but I wish they were more selective about it. Okay to scrub GPS ___location if present but copyright/photographer/exposure details, etc, are all helpful and should be kept if at all possible.


Most cell phone carriers automatically scrub exif data from photos sent by sms.


Correct. I am not scrubbing anything, but the carriers do.


Aannddd..... I just got a dick pic as my first photo.


D'oh! Sorry about that and thanks for reporting it - that keeps it off the site. For what it's worth, you received the very first!


I somehow don't really believe this.


Don't apologize. He just said he got a dick pic, not that he found it unpleasant.

I've never gotten a dick pick... I feel left out! Ha.


Ha! Good point.


Surprising lack of penis pics, given my experience with chat roulette.


Maybe the categorization algorithm is used to de-penis the results?


You got it! The categorization algorithm can detect pornographic submissions. Users can also report images they receive. However, instead of simply blocking dick pics, I'll re-route them to other dick pic senders.


Are the other more benign categories also rerouted in the same way?

Being able to for example, send a picture of a book knowing I'd get one back would be pretty nifty. Food would be a popular topic for swapping pics judging by the main page.


Not yet, but great idea! I'll definitely add that to the feature list.


2nd me for that feature. This might actually be a key feature for me. I'm not that interested in random pics (beyond the "neat" factor at least), but being able to snap pictures of my code and seeing someone elses code? Or of my new car, and their new car? etcetc.

It's like posting to a subreddit, but super low friction (no title, no finding the appropriate subreddit, etc). Really nifty idea


The best way to handle that.

Well, unless you want to use geolocation and match them up by ___location. Think of all the romance you could spark of you knew what sort of genitalia people sending were hoping of receiving.


That's just mean. :P


Hah. Some poor grandmother who sends photos of her cacti collection might be getting a ton of dick pics.

joking aside, while i agree with your model, i'd be curious to see cases where users get trapped in these auto-identified sub-worlds of obscenity. I imagine as we get better at content recognition this model will become more prevalent, and thus innocent crossfire will be more commonplace (even if to the tiniest degree).

Interesting times we're heading into


What sort of algorithm are you using for image classification?


I'm using the Watson Visual Recognition API: http://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/visual-recognition....


Brilliant. My favorite (on the site) is the pic tagged 'party'.


Give it a while.


Maybe that's because I'm not a native speaker of English, but I don't get why it is named so. Could you please explain?


You're accepting a random photo from a random Internet stranger which means there is a good chance it is a dick pic, a shock site picture, gore, child porn, or contains misc other unsavory content.


Well, that's the worst way it could go and I'll do my best to filter it out. Although the system is anonymous to users, I have info on everyone (including the person you received a photo from), and I have no problem using that info if necessary.

I think the danger element more refers to just putting yourself out there and sending a photo to a stranger and not knowing when or what you will receive back. It could be beautiful artwork, nature, cute animals, or something more strange or challenging. That's the danger part.

Anything that crosses the line will be immediately removed and appropriate action taken.


Well I mean I guess because you never know what you're going to get


Kind of like a box of chocolates


So far, batting way better than chat roulette :p


I think I like it ...

Negativity follows!

Not sure what it's for? Seems like it's trying to get a corpus for training image recognition - but then I can't rate the tagging of images or highlight when they've failed (like one of the "car" images is an aeroplane interior).

I can't link to a tag page. The images loading are shifting about and re-ordering which I find quite discombobulating and distracting. Some images -- someone's takeaway of indiscernable type -- that are loading for the front-page are quite large, 800+kB to show me a thumbnail. I hope you're not paying by the byte!

When you say anonymous, what's the scope of that? I see your are using Twilio - does that mean you can tell Twilio to drop all logs of the sender details of the images? If I have a group of people send large images can I DDoS the site?


Thanks for your feedback!

It's only an experiment right now, so it's not built for anything specific at this point. There are some interesting ways to take it, but I wanted to see how it was used first. As you suggest, the ability to a further curate through the website would be great. One idea is some kind of stock photography site with users receiving a cut?

The frontend definitely needs polish and some architecture upgrades, as you pointed out. I wanted to see if anyone actually used it before putting more time in, but the feedback today has been encouraging.

As for anonymity, it's anonymous between users, but some basic Twilio data (phone number, city, state) is stored with your user account on my end.

As for attacks, Twilio provides some high level security, but beyond that I'm sure I could easily be hosed if someone were inclined. It's a hobby project, so the resources would fail pretty quickly under a sustained attack, and what fun is that?

Thanks for taking a look and the time to provide your thoughts.


Curious, I wonder what the odds were of seeing a picture from my hometown of ~30,000 (Valparaiso, IN) in the stream :) . http://valparaisoevents.com/summer-outdoor-movies-recap/

Interesting service, I initially thought of it as a pen pal for the modern day where I'm linked to another account 1to1 instead of just receiving images from a stream. The rating aspect is unclear if 1 or 5 is better, I'm assuming 5 is better? Kinda fun but I'd be worried about receiving too many low quality pictures and I'd ignore posting again.


The name gives an implication that the photos being sent would be risque in nature. But clearly none of the photos shown are. Is anyone else confused by this?


Thanks for your feedback. The name was inspired by a Goethe quote: "Live dangerously and you live right." It's less about being risque as it is about being willing to put yourself out there and try something new - even if you don't know what the result will be.


Interesting quote, considering that Beethoven chided Goethe for acting so deferentially to aristocrats.


Hmm, seems I can't rate anymore, keep getting the following (disclosure, I earlier tried to rate a photo 3.5, may only accept INTs?)

You already rated the last photo you received. Send another photo and wait for the response before submitting another rating.


Sounds like it already recorded a rating for your last photo? Try sending another photo, then waiting for your response photo before rating. Also, it's only looking for INTs so your 3.5 may have confused it. I'll make note - thanks for the heads up!


Think I replied in order but after the 3.5 I couldn't successfully rate or be rated for the next 2 images. Working now, and love the concept, great job!


Glad to hear it's working again. Sounds like maybe a bug with float ratings, I'll check it out. And thank you!


That first picture is definitely not vegetation or a flower.


Wth is that? A baby wrapped in plastic?



Not born without amniotic sac, but rather born with the amniotic sac intact.


This is called an en-caul birth and there is a lot of very old superstitions about people born en-caul, mostly that it was good luck.


Ah, yes, I read 'sans' rather than 'dans'. Thanks!


A baby "born under a caul". A rare occurrence, it was taken as a sign of extremely good luck in many cultures a long time ago.


Turns out one can recover background sounds from even still images: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/


Video, not single stills.


Watch the video. He demonstrates extracting background noise from an image.


Am I the only one who doesn't understand what this is?


the tag small has an interesting half naked, half wasp, drawing...




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