I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.
I often find myself drowning in things like the Qld state library photo archives of the suburbs of Brisbane. They name street junctions which still exist, you pull up a modern photo in google maps, you look at the old one with Trams and wooden houses.. And another..
I’m not sure what’s happening in this thread, but so happy to see Myles mentioned on HN. Every time I post one of De Selby’s research papers, it gets downvoted to oblivion for some reason.
Dalkey is lovely, i used live there for a few years, but couldn't afford to buy a house there. Great to see Flann O'Brien in the comments - an under appreciated genius
My gateway drug was The Third Policeman, as read aloud by Patrick Magee on the wireless in 1986, a feat all the more remarkable for a man that was, quite appropriately, dead at the time.
A surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.
There’s something about resurrecting underloved media, isn’t there? I recently did a Catherine Louisa Pirkis collection[1] for Standard Ebooks; most of her stories had scans on archive.org / Hathi that I could use, but “Trooping with Crows”[2] was only available from the British Library as a physical copy. We paid for it to be scanned and I’ve uploaded those to archive.org now.[3] I’d be surprised if anyone had read it in the last decade, if not longer, yet it’s a perfectly good Victorian genre romance with a strong lead.
I opened this and thought hoooooooold on, I know that; I have a framed A2 print of it on the wall to my left.
One of my favourite parts of my trip to Japan (only been once so far), the tide was out at the time so I stood under that Torii gate and have a few photos of it of my own that I use as wallpapers.
This feels like I am violating something that is sacred.
The last time I felt the same was when I accidentally found a Japanese Youtube channel that had tons of clips of konbini storefronts, a few seconds long each, most of them with zero views.
Just professionally, I'm curious whether they derive has_not_been_viewed_much by some nightly cron process, by an insert trigger on a `user_image_viewed` table, or by some monstrous full table join that HN is currently obliterating.
There used to be a site called Forgotify that would only play songs from Spotify that had zero listens. So each song played, of course, removed that song from the set that could ever be played by Forgotify. Doesn't look like it's around any more, sadly.
Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.
https://vid404.com/ is for videos with zero views. It generates search queries for finding them.
For videos with low views there's https://petittube.com/ (loads a random video with low view count) and http://astronaut.io/ (which has an "automatic stream" of videos).
This is awesome. It's interesting to me how it messes with my incentives. At first I was just pulling the lever on the slot machine, then I went back and clicked on the pieces I really liked (to mark them as "viewed" for the Art Institute and show some love), but finally realized that I was systematically working to remove my favorites from the pool of images people would see.
In the end I just clicked on the "refresh" button a few more times.
They meant that a more ergonomic name would be "has_been_viewed_much", so you can filter by the inverse and still get the same result, but with a better name
I know what they meant, I was saying that imo the ergonomic name is has_not_been_viewed_much. it's directly expressing the property you are interested in, as opposed to expressing the negative property and comparing it to false.
How can we reconcile "viewed fewer than 200 times since 2010" with the absurd number of crawlers overloading the entire internet from every AI company out there?
Perhaps a quirk of the implementation - maybe the site doesn't server-side render links that lead to these items (though many bots run a full browser now), maybe they only track usage client-side or only in their mobile app.
Reminds me of the "mathematical proof that there is no least interesting number".
Because if there was a "least interesting number", that would make it interesting: it would have this unique property of being "the least interesting".
Here each candidate for "least interesting art" loses that property in much the same way, becoming interesting by being not_viewed_much.
I remember reading a post by soneone who really liked imusic, i think, and the filter options it used to have.
They had a playlist that was "all songs with four or five stars that i haven't listened to in 4 years or more" or something like that. This person apparently had a massive music collection, so there were always a few nostalgic hits to listen to.
My first art work was a drawing of a bunch of couches flying. I loved it. I came back here to comment about it without noticing I’d lose track of it. I tried searching in the collection but I couldn’t find it, so if anyone finds a sketch of a bunch of couches, I’d appreciate a link.
Somehow this made this experience even more wonderful.
The irony is, that by drawing attention to these, especially on HN, they are likely to have the view numbers artificially increased, to a point where they no longer has_not_been_viewed_much
How many of these images are there? I cycled through a few and ended up hitting at least one duplicate [1] that I do actually enjoy (but I can't find the name of it now that I refreshed the page, I know it had the verrazzano narrows bridge in the title)
Is there a chance a site like this could ruin their metric by inflating all the views for these lowest viewed items? Or do these not count?
it keeps saying "failed to load" for me. through the magic of the developer console, i can see that the api calls are working but the actual image requests are not. it seems that this is a case of an overzealous cloudflare turnstile setup since if i open the image links in a new tab and pass a challenge i can view them.
That cheesy Renaissance marble table not only hasn't been viewed much, but all the views were from a White House IP address 2017-2021 and 2025 to present.
Gauguin, Manet, Rembrandt and Whistler sketches, Weston nudes, Harry Callahan photos, amazing things indeed.
People generally seem quite uninterested in preparatory sketches/studies/maquettes by famous artists, which is absolute madness, to my mind. Unfinished and transitory work is much more interesting to me. Photographers' contact sheets especially.
But why? Seems like there's way more art than people need, just as there's way more music than people need. As a consequence, most artists aren't earning much (just as it's always been). Why would author welcomes us to artificially inflate click counts? For example, e-commerce stores don't like artificial reviews.
https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/7a8a1d7e-c773-d11b-24f6-08c8f63...
I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.
This site is vaguely addictive in a dopamine feeding sense. What will the next image be? ...One more click won't hurt... :-)
200 clicks later...
I often find myself drowning in things like the Qld state library photo archives of the suburbs of Brisbane. They name street junctions which still exist, you pull up a modern photo in google maps, you look at the old one with Trams and wooden houses.. And another..
A line much abused in Myles na gCopaleen's (aka Brian O'Nolan's, aka Flann O'Brien's) An Béal Bocht (trans: The Poor Mouth)(1947)
It translates as "Our likes will not be there again." and is originally from An toileánach (1929) - https://archive.org/details/toileanach0000ocro about remote island life.
I’m not sure what’s happening in this thread, but so happy to see Myles mentioned on HN. Every time I post one of De Selby’s research papers, it gets downvoted to oblivion for some reason.
There's two kinds of dark suckers. you've met the second kind. It's always saddened me I've been to Dublin 3 times and never made it to Dalkey.
I want to pay a courtesy caul..
Dalkey is lovely, i used live there for a few years, but couldn't afford to buy a house there. Great to see Flann O'Brien in the comments - an under appreciated genius
My gateway drug was The Third Policeman, as read aloud by Patrick Magee on the wireless in 1986, a feat all the more remarkable for a man that was, quite appropriately, dead at the time.
Struggling to find the carpenter’s story, do you remember the title by any chance? Thanks!
A surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.
There’s something about resurrecting underloved media, isn’t there? I recently did a Catherine Louisa Pirkis collection[1] for Standard Ebooks; most of her stories had scans on archive.org / Hathi that I could use, but “Trooping with Crows”[2] was only available from the British Library as a physical copy. We paid for it to be scanned and I’ve uploaded those to archive.org now.[3] I’d be surprised if anyone had read it in the last decade, if not longer, yet it’s a perfectly good Victorian genre romance with a strong lead.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
[3] https://archive.org/details/12641-cc-26-001
I like the first one I got: Honorable Mr. Cat - https://www.artic.edu/artworks/79175/honorable-mr-cat
I thought this was lovely, and was surprised by the date: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/196937/summer-moon-at-miyajim...
so beautiful
The colors look so different here:
https://nipponprints.com/images/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-...
(non-deeplink: https://nipponprints.com/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-at-miya... )
Different print impression (probably not by the same woodblock?), but both are beatiful!
Definitely. The print information says it's printed at least 50 years later than the original.
wow, that really is lovely. my favourite one so far.
I opened this and thought hoooooooold on, I know that; I have a framed A2 print of it on the wall to my left.
One of my favourite parts of my trip to Japan (only been once so far), the tide was out at the time so I stood under that Torii gate and have a few photos of it of my own that I use as wallpapers.
In a "that's so recent" or a "that's so old" kind of way?
1930s is the tail end of Shin Hanga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin-hanga
This feels like I am violating something that is sacred.
The last time I felt the same was when I accidentally found a Japanese Youtube channel that had tons of clips of konbini storefronts, a few seconds long each, most of them with zero views.
As a konbini enthusiast whenever I leave my continent… Link for the konbini storefront channel?
Just professionally, I'm curious whether they derive has_not_been_viewed_much by some nightly cron process, by an insert trigger on a `user_image_viewed` table, or by some monstrous full table join that HN is currently obliterating.
There used to be a site called Forgotify that would only play songs from Spotify that had zero listens. So each song played, of course, removed that song from the set that could ever be played by Forgotify. Doesn't look like it's around any more, sadly.
Seems likely that Spotify is stuffed full of "songs" with zero listens now.
Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.
There's a couple of those for YouTube.
https://vid404.com/ is for videos with zero views. It generates search queries for finding them.
For videos with low views there's https://petittube.com/ (loads a random video with low view count) and http://astronaut.io/ (which has an "automatic stream" of videos).
KVN AUST on YT hunts zero-view videos, sometimes entertaining.
This is awesome. It's interesting to me how it messes with my incentives. At first I was just pulling the lever on the slot machine, then I went back and clicked on the pieces I really liked (to mark them as "viewed" for the Art Institute and show some love), but finally realized that I was systematically working to remove my favorites from the pool of images people would see.
In the end I just clicked on the "refresh" button a few more times.
This was my favourite of the ones I saw:
https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/813984c9-f0a6-c340-5e89-f1c00af...
Really moving piece. Great idea on the part of the API devs!
I just wish the variable was called "has_been_viewed_much".
why, though? the current version is the interesting property
They meant that a more ergonomic name would be "has_been_viewed_much", so you can filter by the inverse and still get the same result, but with a better name
I know what they meant, I was saying that imo the ergonomic name is has_not_been_viewed_much. it's directly expressing the property you are interested in, as opposed to expressing the negative property and comparing it to false.
Wouldn’t a view count with range filtering provide the best flexibility?
How can we reconcile "viewed fewer than 200 times since 2010" with the absurd number of crawlers overloading the entire internet from every AI company out there?
Perhaps a quirk of the implementation - maybe the site doesn't server-side render links that lead to these items (though many bots run a full browser now), maybe they only track usage client-side or only in their mobile app.
Reminds me of the "mathematical proof that there is no least interesting number". Because if there was a "least interesting number", that would make it interesting: it would have this unique property of being "the least interesting".
Here each candidate for "least interesting art" loses that property in much the same way, becoming interesting by being not_viewed_much.
I remember reading a post by soneone who really liked imusic, i think, and the filter options it used to have.
They had a playlist that was "all songs with four or five stars that i haven't listened to in 4 years or more" or something like that. This person apparently had a massive music collection, so there were always a few nostalgic hits to listen to.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/31232/large-leaf-verdure-with...
I live there! Crazy...
My first art work was a drawing of a bunch of couches flying. I loved it. I came back here to comment about it without noticing I’d lose track of it. I tried searching in the collection but I couldn’t find it, so if anyone finds a sketch of a bunch of couches, I’d appreciate a link.
Somehow this made this experience even more wonderful.
this one? https://www.artic.edu/artworks/192466/floating-chairs-flying...
If you clicked through and viewed the artwork details page then it will be in the "recently viewed" collection at the bottom of the page.
The irony is, that by drawing attention to these, especially on HN, they are likely to have the view numbers artificially increased, to a point where they no longer has_not_been_viewed_much
A new field is required…
There is no irony. Drawing attention to these works is likely the reason this bool was introduced in the first place.
They could monetize it by having a Pay-Per-Unview button that lets you pay to unview things you liked and want others to see.
Is it really an artificial increase? Presumably the humans of HN are naturally viewing these artworks.
How many of these images are there? I cycled through a few and ended up hitting at least one duplicate [1] that I do actually enjoy (but I can't find the name of it now that I refreshed the page, I know it had the verrazzano narrows bridge in the title)
Is there a chance a site like this could ruin their metric by inflating all the views for these lowest viewed items? Or do these not count?
[1] https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/67395c18-c83c-865f-b0db-4736574...
The site calls the API directly (www.artic.edu), so yeah, probably it will ruin^W change the metric. It's probably the creator's idea?
Some, ahem, video sites, have "Popular videos". Of course the videos that end up there get more views and get even more popular...
There's no real way to know that they really are that popular or just what the streamer wants viewers to think they are
If the views are all real views it's hardly "inflating" anything.
If they're using a static threshold of 200 views and there aren't many of these left it could pull them all out of that category.
It could obviously be fixed but I was more curious than anything
Kudos to whoever put this in the response, honestly what a fun idea.
Opposite of a 429 right!
it keeps saying "failed to load" for me. through the magic of the developer console, i can see that the api calls are working but the actual image requests are not. it seems that this is a case of an overzealous cloudflare turnstile setup since if i open the image links in a new tab and pass a challenge i can view them.
if i turn off my vpn, it works, but the vpn is cloudflare's own WARP. strange
I enjoyed this one. Their other work was quite somber and then this title threw me for a loop https://www.artic.edu/artworks/151439/uranus-8
...I can't work out what this is.
Awesome user interface here: navigate away from the page and come back, and you will never see the thing you were looking at before.
Is this person trying to get hired at Google?
The ai training data flag
my most-viewed project has 47 stars and 3 of them are my own alt accounts. the one with 0 stars is genuinely better.
That cheesy Renaissance marble table not only hasn't been viewed much, but all the views were from a White House IP address 2017-2021 and 2025 to present.
I got a bunch of great ones and then I got this: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/91654/blackware-spouted-vesse...
I think I have an interest in Peruvian blackware now!! I mean... Look at this guy: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6911/stirrup-spout-vessel-in-...
Does viewing them via this blog add to the view count?
UI gore
Cool project, it's actually a shame if it gets popular enough then it won't return anything
A shame but maybe also the point? If the under appreciated art is being viewed, that sounds great.
It's more that they then go to the "low view" threshold then are no longer viewed and because the date is hard coded then it will never show any more.
I agree it's the point of the project but it's a bit of a shame someone could go to the site and see no art.
I wish I could click the picture to pop out scale to full 1x
there’s probably some decent arguments on how to implement this.
Wow, some of these are super cool
Gauguin, Manet, Rembrandt and Whistler sketches, Weston nudes, Harry Callahan photos, amazing things indeed.
People generally seem quite uninterested in preparatory sketches/studies/maquettes by famous artists, which is absolute madness, to my mind. Unfinished and transitory work is much more interesting to me. Photographers' contact sheets especially.
Reminded me of least viewed pages on wikipedia collections or neglected articles...
See:
In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
https://colinmorris.github.io/blog/unpopular-wiki-articles
(Some discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524943, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955600)
did it get hug of death?
The first one I got was a palm tree growing out of an orange woman's anus... so, I can see why some of this isn't very popular.
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But why? Seems like there's way more art than people need, just as there's way more music than people need. As a consequence, most artists aren't earning much (just as it's always been). Why would author welcomes us to artificially inflate click counts? For example, e-commerce stores don't like artificial reviews.
Congratulations Citizen, you have complied with the mainthink.