Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity | Hacker News Reader

Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity

catchabird.com

395 pointseduardsik112 comments

This is great. Really.

I sat there for 5 minutes reading them and then I tried to type something, and realized I couldn't think of a single thing. Just a bad day. I love that you made this, though. It's inspiring.

Maybe the other responses brightened your day?

Well, me and my dogs wish you a wonderful end of week, sincerely

It seems then that something which made you happy today was finding the website and reading other people’s happy messages, no?

My sincere wishes that your day improves and that your weekend is as relaxing and (un)eventful as you need it to be.

Could get outside for a walk everyday, find some nature space, and enjoy a coffee/tea. Also could volunteer at a local pet rescue, as there as many friends waiting on team joy.

Also, don't gamble with your health, take a few minutes to talk with your doctor if you don't understand what is happening.

Have a glorious day =3

Same. I want to be positive but today is off to a pretty lousy start.

Thanks. It actually works like a closed loop. I needed feedback to finish it, you gave it to me, and now the "thing" gives something back.

Some days are just not good days.

Hope the end of the week is better for you

what about today ? is today the worst day of your life ?

yeah

that's messed up

Favorited.

My bird so far:

>Caught 25 times · fed 4 times · 23 cities

For feedback, I'd say make it more obvious to feed. The icon is not obvious and you'd likely feed a lot more than flag.

It would be bad if people make bots to spam non human birds even if they could be prevented from being straight up bad, even good seeming birds that aren't human would be a drag. I imagine text based would be hard due to the extremely short nature. And obviously we don't want to compromise anonymity.

I really like the general site UI.

The birds you feed kinda pile up in a long list. I feel like it makes them insignificant. Perhaps embrace ephemerality? Idk how to solve this.

open source?

reply to birds? Birds could have comments. No privacy, but anonymity.

i don't understand the manual send away button.

Clean AI/translator text content from website.

Do birds stop eventually? I assume so. Maybe a button to send one back out there from your fed list.

Maybe if you don't "send away" a bird it will repeat. I get many repeat messages after I opened the site again in the same browser. Maybe I should have sent them away.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, really appreciate it.

On “send away”: that’s the actual release action — if you don’t tap it, the bird stays in a pending state and can resurface, which sounds like exactly what’s happening to you (and to ShinyLeftPad below, reopening the site in the same browser brings back a bird that was never sent away). We agree the button isn’t obvious right now and that’s worth fixing.

On bots / non-human birds: it’s a real concern for us too, and we’re thinking about how to discourage that without compromising anonymity. No solution yet, but it’s on our radar.

The feed icon visibility, the long list of fed birds feeling insignificant, the idea of replies/comments on birds, and cleaning up the translated text — all noted, we’re not solving these in this thread but they’re captured for the next round of work.

Adding the bird ID to the fed list would be nice, or some kind of limited opportunity to retrieve info later. A few times, I've wanted to share or retranslate a bird that's still on the tree but I can't revisit it unless I also grabbed the share link when I first caught it.

it seems they always get sent away as soon as you unclick it.

By the way, all your comments are banned because of the AI detector, but I'll just vouch for them. I think you're just using a translator, but unfortunately it's getting detected.

Thank you for vouching. English is not my first language, I’m Hungarian and I get help with the wording. I’ll write more in my own words from now on.

Beautiful. Really feels 'alive'! Impressive how many species of bird you've got here.

When I built something similar – http://alsjeditleest.be (messages in a bottle for Dutch speakers. Never really took off.) – I spent a decent amount of time researching automatic content moderation. Looks like you could some here as well. Mistral has a free moderation endpoint with ZDR. Can definitely recommend it!

Two feature requests:

- I want to be able to click away the message window without making the bird leave

- Bird sounds. I put this on in the background: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenera...

Really beautiful, I was tearing up reading all of the positivity, from simple to complex. A lot of tech stuff, a lot of "dog / my dog", a lot of spouses, kids, food... all so wonderful.

We need more of these kind of gems.

Hi Eduard, I'm Levente from HU too. I love the whole concept, I had a similar idea to do it, when I found this site: https://pudding.cool/2026/02/happy-map/ just don't have the time to work on. It's a similar, just not dynamic as yours. Love the design and everything just somehow you should filter the spam with LLM or I don't know, but right now there are lot of birds with "asd" like sentences.

Hey Levente, thanks for the kind words and for the link, that’s a cool project, nice to see a kindred idea out there. Love that someone else was drawn to the same kind of visualization.

On spam: there’s actually been an automatic filter on input since launch, we’re just tuning it. The challenge is balance, we don’t want to over-filter and cut off genuine, shareable thoughts, just catch the obvious junk, so some “asd”-type noise has been slipping through while we dial that in.

Nagyon köszi a visszajelzést.

My cat was not happy about this at all. He sat and watched it for five minutes, tail wagging ominously. While I am happy that thoughts were set free by people, my cat wanted all thoughts to die a horrible death.

There's a surprising lack of web based cat toys. I've vibe coded a good handful but nothing hits 100%.

This is really neat. I love this sort of project. Reminds me of the early days of the Internet while adding some positivity to the world. Thanks for sharing.

Terrific idea! Does it have the ability to translate into a default language (for each user)?

Yes, you can. In the footer there is an option to translate the site into 47 language, and every message has a globe icon that translates it into your browser’s language, or into the language you translated the page to.

Really cool. The first bird I hit was from someone in Pakistan:

> I went outside for the first time since suffering a panic attack last time I went out.

… from Pakistan. A good reminder that some folks have it harder than others.

Nice, but can I ask how you determine location?

It added mine as my old home town but I haven't been to that location for a while and it's 20 miles away from where I was when I posted.

Update: I am on mobile, used chrome and Firefox, normal and incognito mode. All show my old town location, Max mind says my IP is in a different town 70 miles away. Either some super odd coincidence and stale geoip lookup or some very advanced device fingerprinting tracking! Feels too odd to be a coincidence

Location comes from an IP lookup, no fingerprinting. Check the link in the footer. Self-explanatory. If not, just drop me a line.

Very odd! Appreciate you've been up front with lots of privacy on the site.

It feels like a really odd coincidence given the size of the town in question. I suspect the db-ip service has cached the IP somehow against other data for me, perhaps the ipv6 if you use that?

> What made you happy today?

> I didn't sleep the entire night and it's 7 am but I am unemployed

Nice site! Could you add a species descriptor to the bird, so it can have some educational value too. Some of them I don't recognize.

Nice. ok.

Kind of ruined by all the spam ones that just say like “fs” “sd” etc

I flagged a few and then it started telling me that I flagged too many birds for the day. A real shame that the vast majority of the birds I got to see was fake ones.

I'll check it right away.

By the way, this is a great use for jev or a classifier model (but jev is really fast and very cheap) - you could ask for it to be rated as to whether its spam / low effort / exploit or not, and filter many of these out immediately. If you do, I suggest a shadow ban / grey list rather than letting the user know you’ve greylisted them.

On the flag limit — I’ll look into why that kicked in, that’s good to know.

Wow! This is happy twitter.

Such a good name variant.

If you could make this into an iPhone app, I’d use it daily.

Wonderful idea and execution. Thank you

Same for android, I really loved the concept.

Thank you for building this, it's a beautiful reminder that the world is pretty awesome, and it's something I am gonna keep up on my third screen when I need a smile.

Agreeing with the others, this is really cool! :)

I find it interesting that if you switch between languages on the site and the language has a local variant of the proverb, the text will have an additional paragraph explaining it.

E.g. this is the case in French, English or German, while other languages seem to fall back to the English "happy as a lark" one. (And all of them refer to the Hungarian proverb of course)

Did the translation model do that "on its own" or was that a conscious decision?

Glad you noticed that! It was a conscious decision, not the translation model improvising. For ech language, we only use a local happiness related bird proverb if it’s genuinely attested in that language, and when one exists, we add the extra paragraph explaining it. Where no such proverb exists, it falls back to a translation of the English “happy as a lark.” So French, English, and German have their own, while others fall back by design, not by model error. And yes, all of them nod back to the Hungarian proverb that started this whole thing.

"got kicked out of a store for being racist"

There sure is a wide variety of things that make people happy...

(All the others were much more wholesome, and this is a very cool idea.)

wonder if it was a joke riffing on https://www.tumblr.com/moderntoss/130260865487/via-brit-got-...

Absolutely delightful!

And i think i can tell the ones from HN (in a good way), they are often like "showed a client a really cool feature i made and they loved it."

For me it's the ones like "something; cat /etc/passwd"

Feature request - filter out common, low-effort posts (e.g. "coffee"). It should be easy to spot these from the data, and thus easy to automate the filtering.

There could be another place for these common posts on the site somewhere (might be interesting to surface how many people are happy about "coffee" vs "tea" for example), but on the bird view they just end up being a disappointing click.

I agree. The longer ones are the best part, and jumping over one word birds takes something away.

I’m thinking about a switch for the reader, off by default, something like “longer birds only”.

What I can’t decide is how it should choose. Counting words is simple but dumb. A model could judge if a bird says something, but that’s a quiet judgment on people’s words. Or the birds people feed more could show up more often. Thoughts?

The choice of birds to show should definitely correspond to how much they'd been fed (i.e. liked). I imagined you'd already implemented this, but maybe not?

I think this ranking feature alone would solve the lazy throwaway posts problem entirely

I liked this a lot!

I caught a bird from Macedonia who told me he was happy he'd never have to deal with another non-technical PM again. Simple delights everywhere.

Lovely!

I want this as an app on my TV (TizenOS), where a different bird gets highlighted every 1-2 minues, and if I click OK on my remote I feed it.

No other features. Just that.

This gave me an idea.

Feature request: Peek the text on hover.

That’s not catching

Nah, you gotta commit. That's part of the fun. And you'll never know what the birds you scare away would have said.

Thanks for putting into words exactly the tension we’re wrestling with — you nailed it.

Neat experiment! I wish I'd read that my comment was going to be public before immediately typing (whoops, but a minor whoops). Maybe update the UI to have that shown earlier?

But also clearly user error on my end to just type away and not read first, so that's on me.

This is lovely. And also quite clever in the mechanic - as well as being beautiful it makes abuse by ‘the internet’ which is always so inevitable with any open message posting, not very rewarding since it just comes and goes.

I love it. One feature request: at present it feels like your own thoughts disappear into the void. Your birds should be shown on the tree, with a highlight, and some obvious way of seeing people's reactions to them

The Game Poems community might enjoy this. You can find their Discord on their website: https://www.gamepoems.com/about

What an incredibly beautiful project. I can't stop smiling.

I really like it. It would be nice to have a filter though that filters out politics. "Free Palestine" on multiple birds ruin the experience.

Palestinian culture being systematically removed from the world through mass murder is indeed a bummer, but ignoring it is a much worse bummer in the end.

Not everything is about politics. Stop running nice things with it.

I won't believe this of you when it's your turn to suffer. I'll stand up even when other people tell me to shut up about you.

This is so lovely! It's like a collective gratitude practice. There's something special in seeing what other people are grateful for.

This made me smile and made my wife reply with "kissie eyes", which I'm assured, is better than "hugging face".

I love it. It's one of those cool projects that exist in the internet altruistically to do good. Thank you for making this.

Love it! More of this, less of things like X

This is really nice, some of the messages have really warmed my heart and are really nice slice of humanity.

Charming idea, love it.

On mobile (chrome on android): Needs an X to close the dialog windows.

Woah, this is a unique web experience... thank you for contributing :>

Absolutely amazing idea. I love that the positivity is contagious. :)

This is absolutely lovely.

You'll know my bird when you catch it: "Realized that "reasoning was set to low" on DeepSeek Flash 4.1 - set it to high and life improved immediately."

Strange world we live in, but life just got seriously better. ;-)

This is 100% one of my favourite websites of all time.

Would be cool to make the feeding button more obvious.

Great stuff. I'm asking AI to add some cats.

Great idea, bookmarked. Thanks for building this.

Love this! Was really nice to read all of them

This is what the internet is for, thank you.

"The guys digging in my yard are skilled enough that they do not destroy existing pipes and cables when they dug a ditch for the new power cable being installed in my house"

lmao had a laugh at this one, I know the feeling of depending on trades lol.

This is wonderful. Making this my homepage

Gen-Xers discovering the world around.

This is such a cool idea. Well done

This is genuinely wonderful.

I was expecting a solo site where you have to think about something you're grateful for, and I was like, meh, I've seen that before, I'm just not interested.

But then seeing everyone else's birds really lit something up inside of me. Someone was happy because they saw the fog burn off in the morning sun. Someone was happy because their cat fell asleep in their guitar box while listening to them play. I genuinely felt happy for their happiness.

I will bookmark this site, and hope people (and I) keep adding to it.

This is good work. Made my day.

Very cute, +1 for team fun. =3

Very wholesome :) I like it

More of this on the net!

This is lovely, thanks

loved this. we need more sites like this these days

this is fantastic, I love the idea

Don't tell Kelly Clarkson about this

How soon until LLMs start using this as another place to communicate...

There's a lot of gibberish replies but flagging it says "you flagged enough for today, thanks"

Why a people spamming weird stuff into a site like this. This is why we can't have nice things.

Actually I have a pre filter. I'll take a look at the filter right away – thanks for the feedback.

Hi HN, Eduard from Budapest.

Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.

It's a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)

I almost didn't finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don't know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.

Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.

I'd love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.

Hi there, Hetzner here. I saw you mentioned us, so I tried it out. That's a really cool idea, and I'll pass it onto some people who I think will appreciate it. :D Glad we could be a part of this. --Katie

You are soo cool guys! And fast response btw :)

This is a great idea and deserves more attention. One thing I'd mention is maybe a guide on the symbols. I wasn't sure what they did and got a crumb & feeding by accident.

I have the same feeling about the icon for breadcrumbs. But I don't have a better idea yet. On mobile, it might be a good idea to add some clues on the first visit.

Love the site.

>I'd love to hear what break

One bird got "stuck", midair, between the trees for a while. I clicked it two or three times and then it flew to a branch.

The tree is growing to meet the request. How many birds need a branch? I designed this feature intentionally, but I'm rethinking it.

This is wonderful.

1- Are the birds actual birds species or just randomly generated? How?

2- Do you plan on doing some sort of classification on the messages later? It could be interesting.

Hi HN, Eduard from Budapest.

It’s a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)

I almost didn’t finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don’t know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.

I’d love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.

Hi Eduard, Liam from Ireland here. Making my first comment on HN to say that not only has your site made me smile, it's given me renewed optimism that technology can be used for good, and to bring people closer together. Thank you for sharing.

I didn’t expect any of this. I’ve been reading every comment and a lot of the birds, and some of them got me. The person who went outside for the first time after a panic attack. The ones about dogs and kids and coffee. Even the people who sat there and couldn’t think of anything today, and still said thank you.

I made this because I stopped seeing the small good things. You gave a lot of them back to me.

I’m working through the feedback now. The feed icon, the send away button, and the spam. Thank you all.

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