frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

https://unscreenshottable.vercel.app/?text=Hello
81•zikero•3h ago

Comments

bix6•2h ago
Ha cool! How’s it work?
Lalabadie•2h ago
The only way to see the text is in the movement. The pattern across any single frame is entirely random noise.
cryptoz•2h ago
Had a lot of fun trying to break this. Turns out you can screenshot real easily by zooming out. Maybe there are other ways but I stopped trying :)
sans_souse•2h ago
Not sure what you mean - I can screenshot it freely that's not the point the point is if you look then at the screenshot you cant discern the text because its a single frame now
dwg•2h ago
Zooming out before taking screenshot and the text is no longer obfuscated. I tried and confirmed it works. In fact, the text is perhaps even more readable than the original.
anigbrowl•2h ago
It depends how fast or slow your GPU is. I tried it and saw the effect you described, but within a second or two it started moving and was obscured again. Obviously you could automate the problem away.
dylan604•1h ago
Mine freezes the animation on zoom change. Not sure you could automate against that
esafak•2h ago
He's right. This is zoomed out: https://imgur.com/a/G7CKZ94

This is on MacOS 15.6, Chromium (BrowserOS), captured with the OS' native screenshot utility. Since I was asked about the zoom factor, I now tried simply capturing it at 100% and it was still perfectly readable...

I guess the trick doesn't work on this browser.

dylan604•1h ago
I zoomed out to 90% and could make out something was there but wasn't easy to read. Zooming out further went back to just being noise. I also tried zooming in but with no success. What zoom level did you use and I guess we have to ask the standard what browser/version/OS/etc?? My FFv142 on macOS never took a screen grab like you did
vunderba•1h ago
yeah - I actually was initially confused since I wasn't having any issues screenshotting it but had forgotten that I have the default site zoom set to ~65%.
altcognito•2h ago
Fun side effect: staring at the letters for a bit makes the rest of the image move.
Izkata•2h ago
Firefox on Android seems to just be a static image, I can't see any text.
stevage•48m ago
Wfm
kemayo•2h ago
This makes me feel motion-sick, which is kind of impressive because I'm normally not easily susceptible to that.
dylan604•1h ago
My eyes went straight into seeing 3D image mode. It's the easiest one I've seen yet! /s
RedShift1•35m ago
Heh my eyes felt like they started bleeding
dylan604•1h ago
Has anyone tried a long exposure to see if the motion smears into something discernible? Obviously harder to expose a bright screen without some ND since the shutter speed is the phone's main exposure control
dasil003•45m ago
How do you take a “long exposure” screenshot? Isn’t every screenshot a perfect digital copy of a single frame or a full on video?
dylan604•43m ago
Clearly, I meant using a camera, and I'm guessing you knew that too
dice•14m ago
Not the parent but that was not at all clear to me. I immediately thought of taking multiple successive instantaneous screenshots and then stacking them. I'm not sure I would have thought of using a camera within a few minutes to an hour, it's not a tool I would ever reach for normally.
sprobertson•39m ago
Here's the screen recording version of a long exposure (thanks for the nerd snipe) - https://gist.github.com/spro/7599415b0e47de65311557b3454771a...
lodovic•12m ago
If you zoom out to 25 % the text is clearly visible and screenshottable.
alliancedamages•1h ago
You can also break it by recording the screen, of course.
xnx•1h ago
This game disappears if you pause it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3RAI8uyVw
vunderba•1h ago
This is great - seems to be the same effect of hiding a shape using an animated noise pattern on a background of static noise.

They even provide the source code for the effect:

https://github.com/brantagames/noise-shader

markasoftware•1h ago
same thing, but a game: https://brantagames.itch.io/motus
zikero•1h ago
Another idea I had with this concept is to make an LLM-proof captcha. Maybe humans can detect the characters in the 'motion' itself, which could be unique to us?

- The captcha would be generated like this on a headless browser, and recorded as a video, which is then served to the user.

- We can make the background also move in random directions, to prevent just detecting which pixels are changing and drawing an outline.

- I tried also having the text itself move (bounce like the DVD logo). Somehow makes it even more readable.

I definitely know nothing about how LLMs interpret video, or optics, so please let me know if this is dumb.

squigz•1h ago
As if captchas aren't painful enough for visually impaired users...
UltraSane•1h ago
Seems trivial to diff multiple screenshots to identify what parts move. Or just use a compression algorithm to do the same.
kps•1h ago
The text reappears when I screenshot it twice.
Syntonicles•1h ago
I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3RAI8uyVw

The effect is disrupted by introducing rendering artifacts, by watching the video in 144p or in this case by zooming out.

I'd love to know the name of this effect, so I can read more about the fMRI studies that make use of it.

What I've found so far:

Random Dot Kinematogram

Perceptual Organization from Motion (video of Flounder camouflage)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VO10eDIyiE

shannifin•1h ago
Others have mentioned Branta Games, but I first saw the effect here: https://youtu.be/TdTMeNXCnTs
alanfalcon•23m ago
Not technically a screenshot, I guess, but trivially easy to do with software I had lying around all the same. https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExYXloZ3Z0NT...
vivegi•7m ago
Cool. I used the Windows snipping tool and just screen-recorded it.

Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

https://unscreenshottable.vercel.app/?text=Hello
84•zikero•3h ago•34 comments

Show HN: Made NZ's member of parliament financial disclosure data searchable

https://open-register-of-pecuniary-interests.joshmcarthur.com/
2•sudojosh•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pgmcp, an MCP server to query any Postgres database in natural language

https://github.com/subnetmarco/pgmcp
10•fosk•9h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Chibi Izumi, staged dependency injection for Python

https://github.com/7mind/izumi-chibi-py
2•pshirshov•7h ago•2 comments

Show HN: A store that generates products from anything you type in search

https://anycrap.shop/
1160•kafked•4d ago•326 comments

Show HN: A PSX/DOS style 3D game written in Rust with a custom software renderer

https://totenarctanz.itch.io/a-scavenging-trip
53•mvx64•1d ago•34 comments

Show HN: MeldSecurity – Run Popular Security Tools in the Browser (Free)

https://meldsecurity.com
2•wowohwow•9h ago•0 comments

Show HN: STT –> LLM –> TTS pipeline in C

https://github.com/RhinoDevel/mt_llm/tree/main/stt_llm_tts-pipeline-example
9•RhinoDevel•22h ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Cyberpunk Tuner

https://un.bounded.cc
4•hirako2000•10h ago•2 comments

Show HN: I built a platform for long-form media recs (books, articles, etc.)

https://rhomeapp.com/Guest
18•rohannih•1d ago•3 comments

Show HN: OrderlyID – typed, time-sortable, 160-bit IDs with checksums

https://github.com/kpiljoong/orderlyid
3•piljoong•11h ago•0 comments

Show HN: LLMyourself.com – Type a name. Get a report.

https://www.llmyourself.com/
2•AlexNicita•11h ago•4 comments

Show HN: Vatify – Simple API for EU VAT validation and rate calculation

https://www.vatifytax.app/
2•passenger09•12h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Web-based 2D geometry calculator

https://ccorcos.github.io/geocalc/
2•ccorcos•12h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I reverse engineered macOS to allow custom Lock Screen wallpapers

https://cindori.com/backdrop
79•cindori•2d ago•56 comments

Show HN: Pyproc – Call Python from Go Without CGO or Microservices

https://github.com/YuminosukeSato/pyproc
39•acc_10000•2d ago•9 comments

Show HN: Daffodil – Open-Source Ecommerce Framework to connect to any platform

https://github.com/graycoreio/daffodil
64•damienwebdev•2d ago•8 comments

Show HN: Small Transfers – charge from 0.000001 USD per request for your SaaS

https://smalltransfers.com/
194•strnisa•1w ago•75 comments

Show HN: Omarchy on CachyOS

https://github.com/mroboff/omarchy-on-cachyos
63•theYipster•3d ago•62 comments

Show HN: Dagger.js – A buildless, runtime-only JavaScript micro-framework

https://daggerjs.org
77•TonyPeakman•3d ago•77 comments

Show HN: AI-powered web service combining FastAPI, Pydantic-AI, and MCP servers

https://github.com/Aherontas/Pycon_Greece_2025_Presentation_Agents
43•Aherontas•3d ago•24 comments

Show HN: Semlib – Semantic Data Processing

https://github.com/anishathalye/semlib
59•anishathalye•2d ago•12 comments

Show HN: I wrote a from-scratch OS to serve my blog

https://github.com/thass0/tatix
9•thasso•1d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vicinae – A native, Raycast-compatible launcher for Linux

https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae
179•aurellius•1w ago•35 comments

Show HN: MCP Server Installation Instructions Generator

https://hyprmcp.com/mcp-install-instructions-generator/
22•pmig•2d ago•6 comments

Show HN: AI Code Detector – detect AI-generated code with 95% accuracy

https://code-detector.ai/
72•henryl•1d ago•63 comments

Show HN: I made a generative online drum machine with ClojureScript

https://dopeloop.ai/beat-maker/
199•chr15m•5d ago•50 comments

Show HN: Coding AI Agent API for Developers

https://workser.ai
3•Khemmapich•22h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal

https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything
1084•mmulet•1w ago•144 comments

Show HN: Ghostpipe – Connect files in your codebase to user interfaces

https://github.com/inputlogic/ghostpipe
5•adriaanmulder•1d ago•1 comments