Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others

hallak | 824 points

The leaderboard is fascinating. Some people are clearly putting a lot of time into this, while the rest of us are trying to sneak phallic shapes past your CNN.

1. https://drawafish.com/rank.html?userId=1753510318634_cdeh6a4...

primitivesuave | 14 hours ago

The website is great!

> I built a basic CNN trained against penises

After seeing it in action, my second thought (first was just watching my fish) was that I was amazed at the good behavior of the users because I would have expected a lot of penises floating around. Now I understand. Nicely done!

andy99 | 16 hours ago

https://imgur.com/a/Vtoxc7p

35% for this masterpiece? Rigged

dpoloncsak | 15 hours ago

Somewhat interesting thing with my 9yo. She's a pretty good artist, she can draw various characters and objects pretty well.

With this she clearly just wanted to do the standard stick fish shape, but it turns out she only knows how to do it facing left. Facing left, looks typical, facing right, almost a figure 8. So after like 6 attempts being judged by the computer she's getting frustrated, and I'm like how about this, turn the phone upside down to have her draw facing left. But now she can't do it left either!

furyofantares | 14 hours ago

Suggestion: canvas.addEventListener('dragstart', (e) => { e.preventDefault(); } );

At least on Firefox/Mac, sometimes while dragging it "picks up" the image to drag it. This should prevent that.

amitp | 14 hours ago

> exercise in vibe-coding

The code shows it... Your escaping routine seems OK, but you really __should not__ be building HTML and JS(!) using raw string interpolation. Or letting the client decide whether the submission needs moderation.

rafram | 15 hours ago

I did this on a trip to Japan but can't remember for the life of me where. Some museum. My wife and I drew fishes and then they were uploaded and we went to a room and watched them swim across walls/ceilings. Really cool experience

volkk | 17 hours ago

I couldn’t get it to go above 50% and then I wrote “fish” on it and it went up 5 points

evan_ | 15 hours ago

My initial fish likelihood score was 7% and I couldn't get it past 12% without looking up what a fish looks like. I learned a lot about myself via this app, so thank you.

martinrue | 2 hours ago
Exuma | 16 hours ago

> I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas

Isn't this how some Lego MMO died? They spent too many resources on "moderation" and too few on the actual game.

If you post that more proeminently, maybe you'll get a bunch of kids on summer holidays finding ways to make penises pass your filter...

nottorp | 16 hours ago

I tried my damnedest to give my fish a ballsack. That's a real good fishiness detector.

boje | 16 hours ago

What a fun game! Especially on a Note 10+, and I have to say, seeing the dongnet keep up with each pen stroke on a 2019 device is really impressive! Possibly still a little generous, though, I think. Writing "FISH" on a rectangle shouldn't hit 50%, but this does explain why SSN-69 didn't have much of a chance :D

throwanem | 16 hours ago

This is the most wholesome thing I saw on the internet for a long time. Thanks for the effort!

productme | 16 hours ago

That is fun. And it's nice to know that everyone else on HN is about as artistic as I am.

quantummagic | 17 hours ago

This is fantastic, the leaderboard is really nice! It reminds me of Paper Planes.

https://paperplanes.world/

distalx | 2 hours ago

We visited the St Louis Aquarium a couple years ago and they have a similar set up. It's pretty awesome and great for kids. It's simply called "Fish Draw" https://www.stlaquariumfoundation.org/education/conservation...

Cerpicio | 14 hours ago

This is too much fun! If anyone missed it, you can also rank the fish here: https://drawafish.com/rank.html

justusthane | 17 hours ago

Fun!!!

Small changes if make: - Change the background colour of the drawing canvas to match the water background - Add fill tool? So folks can color this fish white? Bonus points if you automatically color the inside part of the fish white - Fix the discontinuity of how the fish swim by stretching the pixels of the fish that you draw

jezzamon | 16 hours ago

I drew a fish but I couldn't find it anywhere when it switched to the tank. Perhaps you could highlight the user's own fish, at least initially?

EDIT: Tried again and now I see there is a highlight, but it's pretty hard to see a in a busy tank, the color contrast is not very high

pimlottc | 16 hours ago

This doesn’t work for me on Firefox Focus on iOS, even with all the ad and tracker blocking disabled. Tapping on the make it swim button does nothing. I’m able to see the tank with the tank button though.

AnonHP | 14 hours ago

There used to be something like this at the Boston Museum of Science, where you created a fish (don’t remember if you drew it freehand and/or selected from different fish parts) and released it into the tank with other fish and predators.

meagher | 11 hours ago

This is my favorite thing today! I only saw one penis fish (with the penis nestled inside the face, as a facial feature of sorts). That's pretty good for a drawing app on the internet, well done! I've given up on running public apps that accept user contributions.

pamelafox | 7 hours ago

OP has a clear bias against angelfish.

hinkley | 17 hours ago

Shocking no one has mentioned Jian Yang's hotdog app :) [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWwCK95X6go&ab_channel=Felix

Love the simplicity of this.

parsabg | 13 hours ago

I keep getting this error on both Safari and Firefox:

Uncaught (in promise) Error: Fish model not loaded verifyFishDoodle https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:514 <anonymous> https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:170 EventListener.handleEvent* https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:168

Edit: Never mind, I had to wait till the model loaded. Took some time though. Fun project nevertheless!

sometimes_all | 15 hours ago

Nice, I got my upside down penis fish past the filter! Although, once it was swimming it did look very much like a fancy guppy. I don't think anyone would recognize it, but I still feel smug about "beating" the machine.

salamanderman | 15 hours ago

This is brilliant. Checkout my [Anatomically Correct Fish Tank](https://drawafish.com/fishtank-view.html?id=gYCWJ24lhxSvR4lG...)

miellaby | 8 hours ago

I realized that my drawn with a mouse fish looks a lot like the fish quilt block I made. Neither were very good. But I enjoyed making them both :-)

Now to share with my grandkids.

susiecambria | 7 hours ago

Locally we have the National Museum of Play. One of the exhibits right near the entrance is a virtual aquarium where you can color in a picture of a fish. Then you take it to a scanner and press a button and your fish starts swimming in a huge screen that serves as a virtual aquarium.

michaelmior | 10 hours ago

Does not work for me on desktop Firefox. When I press the "make it swim!" button, there's an error in console: "Uncaught (in promise) Error: Fish model not loaded"

veidelis | 15 hours ago

There’s a museum in Tokyo that has this but for physically drawn fish and is then projected on a large wall. Cool to see a digital version

rl_for_energy | 6 hours ago

I'm glad we've stopped drawing dead fish (beautiful talk by Bret Victor, 12 years ago): https://vimeo.com/64895205

Also inspired by that: https://drawdeadfish.com/

Naracion | 12 hours ago

As Bret would say, please stop drawing dead fish.

whoamii | 4 days ago

What a fun, whimsical idea. I love this.

Also: When you release something like this to the public, I'm amazed at how quickly humans race to the bottom. That bit can be awful to watch.

danesparza | 15 hours ago

Some of you are wayy too bored at work - some of these are too realistic

evansjp | 4 days ago

Show me a tank of the leaderboard fish!

lwansbrough | 11 hours ago
[deleted]
| 7 hours ago

I recently went to an aquarium in Exmouth, Western Australia, which had a giant wall mounted display with a tablet which allowed kids (of all ages!) to draw a fish and "release" it into the tank.

ash_091 | 9 hours ago

> Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.

So this means it's doing CORS? Why not just have GCP serve everything?

umvi | 14 hours ago

Cool but ......

This is my feeling of vibe coding this kind of stuff so far. It's never really good, it's just kind of acceptable because it was vibe codeded.

The way the fish are stretched where they gets sliced into bands is not something I think most humans would generally choose to do. With a few characters of code change you could at least stretch each column so it scales to the next column.

I know vibe coding will continue to get better. There's a bunch of people at my work that have a vibe-coding chat where they show off their latest creation. Most of them they'd done in Gemini Canvas. The prompts are usually 1 or 2 paragraphs like "Make a 3d tower defense game with joypad input where you move a character using the joypad and can place towers by pressing the button. ....." And it spits out a working game but it's only interesting because it was vibe coded, not because the game is actually in any-way-shape-or-form interesting, good, pretty.

Also, I appreciate that this game had a fish recognizer but I also found it super scary. I tried to make to make a sunfish and it was like "not a fish". I don't want bad AI judging what is and isn't acceptable.

socalgal2 | 13 hours ago

Would love to hear more info on how you actually vibe coded this as the fishbowl seems incredibly cool

hajrice | 14 hours ago

This is so cool!

I did just about spit out of coffee reading the words vibe coded fish tinder though. But a smart thing to implement.

Jemmeh | 17 hours ago

I carefully drew a lion fish. Turns out only 37% odds of being a fish. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionfish)

Fun idea, fun site!

danielvf | 14 hours ago

I love these kind of websites. After finishing my drawing, I spent way more time than I expected looking through other people drawings.

tuesdaynight | 10 hours ago

I love that the common styles of fish are a function of what tools people were given.

For example, if a fill tool was available I bet we would see far far fewer hollow fish.

Waterluvian | 11 hours ago

This is the same thing I did when going to teamLab Borderless in Japan, very cool.

satvikpendem | 16 hours ago

Very cool! NN seems too focused on precision over recall (not allowing enough false positives) but trying to get stuff past it is also part of the fun.

littlekey | 12 hours ago

I’m so bad at drawing it only had a 46% confidence level that it was a fish

mehphp | 17 hours ago

Tell me why my fish just died!? Just went through a little loss and now feel sad

Timsky | 9 hours ago

Very fun. My only suggestion would be a small highlight when you submit your fish so you can easily see which fish is yours - at least for a few seconds.

dgrin91 | 15 hours ago

Well the first thing I did was submit a good ole CNB (use your imagination) and it put it under review.... so nice job hah!

exabrial | 13 hours ago

In firefox I'm able to vote for the same fish over and over.

arealaccount | 8 hours ago

This is so fun. I wonder if there is a similar page for other animals,

drzzhan | 4 days ago

Please approve my anglerfish. Thank you.

blindstitch | 13 hours ago

I know you tried to hack it the same way as I did.

mfalcon | 16 hours ago

you can upvote your own fish as much as you want

parpfish | 16 hours ago

I'm hard stuck on fish probability 59% fml

Lewton | 16 hours ago

If vibe coding means more silly fish-drawing apps in the world then I’m 100% for it.

debrisapron | 13 hours ago

i love frivolous stuff like this. it's art that reminds me of the internet's early days, well done.

mosburger | 16 hours ago

My eel didn't qualify as a fish :(

rtpc | 16 hours ago

No obscene fishes observed. Well done! :)

haolez | 17 hours ago

its got nazi fish (one with a swastika on it) in the tank already, hooray for the internet

techterrier | 15 hours ago

How do I eat the other fish?

rezmason | 13 hours ago

"Built with hate"...? Too bad. Love the rest of the project.

stockhorn | 14 hours ago

is it normal to expose API key and App ID on Github? I don't use firebase but figured I should ask

nothinghere789 | 10 hours ago

This is the only type of thing people should actually vibe code. I love it

flufluflufluffy | 15 hours ago

Very nice work. You could improve the tank rendering performance though...

mads_quist | 16 hours ago

Great capcha!

bravesoul2 | 5 hours ago

that's so random and fun! I love it!

doriancodes | 6 hours ago

Haha this is good times - solid site

HaZeust | 11 hours ago

Asking ChatGPT Agent to try doing this is hilarious

ArcaneMoose | 14 hours ago

Cool, just made nemo!

tamimio | 8 hours ago

Getting that fishmax is really hard, any tips?

tantalor | 16 hours ago

This is who I want to be when I grow up

skeptrune | 15 hours ago

It did not like my fish :(

UncleOxidant | 12 hours ago

Kudos to the person who managed to sneak a tiny fish, in a fish tank, on a table, with a plant in a plant pot, past the detector.

exasperaited | 13 hours ago

Can you add search by fish name?

bix6 | 14 hours ago

Start drawing live fish

sorrythanks | 12 hours ago

I get neal.fun vibes from this

masterpos | 16 hours ago

This is ingenious

indigodaddy | 11 hours ago

Missed opportunity to call it

Fish or no fish

dyarosla | 16 hours ago

No worky (Android/FF)

the__alchemist | 16 hours ago

Great project!

introvert1622 | 12 hours ago

10/10 love it!

bix6 | 16 hours ago

No mobile support?

Feathercrown | 16 hours ago

I drew a 100% fish but it was classed only 58% a fish.

https://drawafish.com/rank.html?userId=1754072603630_i0f8iw6...

rendall | 12 hours ago

Reminds me of Team Lab Borderless in Tokyo, Japan

constantinum | 12 hours ago

I saw my fish die :(

camillomiller | 15 hours ago

This is what the internet should be all about.

Now, make a man and we will make him adventure in the forest?

andrewstuart | 17 hours ago

I waited for my fish. But it never came. Made me sad.

cancerboi | 16 hours ago

sorry, i accidentally broke it by giving 500 in the url-param

DerPozilist | 16 hours ago

The top ranked fish, with a score of 236,208, advocates for a second Jewish holocaust.

https://imgur.com/a/qwRQJcL

abtinf | 14 hours ago

omg best shit that happened in 2025 yet, well done

fHr | 6 hours ago

RS HN crossover didn't expect to see this lol

curiouser3 | 13 hours ago

Now I want to see the adult version of this project: same thing with no CNN.

Inundate me with penises and swastikas!

shutupnerd0000 | 11 hours ago
[deleted]
| 4 days ago

[dead]

kevin11111 | 13 hours ago