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  • Hacker News
  • Coincidentally came across this after reading a comment [1] under the recent post on _for-sale DNS records, visiting milk.com and scrolling through the owner's Mastodon

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224882

    by jmusall
  • I'm not impressed.

    the whole technique hinges on qr scanners reading only middle point of the squares

    The moment you encounter developer that thought "for redundancy let's sample the whole square" (which is a very natural thought) - it breaks

    I kinda expected working the limits of error correction, honestly. Not this blunt circumvention "because it works on my machine"

    by NooneAtAll3
  • The specification of qr codes says you should look only at the centres, iirc.
    by Jaxan
  • I think sampling "the whole square" might actually not be that good for decoding even standard QR codes as aliasing at the edges of each code module ("pixel" of the code) in a camera image would actually make the distincion between 1s and 0s more difficult.

    Your argument still partially applies though, as introducing new unrelated colors at the module edges could also lead to aliasing effects when the code is too small for example.

    by jmusall
  • I recognize the domain name from playing some of his daily puzzles, namely Ronin and Cell Tower.

    https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/

    by Zecc
  • This is really neat!

    A question I had about QR codes:

    Let’s say I want to produce a QR code that is as close as possible to an image (let’s say the Nike swoosh logo), if I just added that to the center and added the 3 orientation markers on the corners it wouldn’t be a proper QR code yet, my question is what is the minimal amount of edits I would need to do from that symbol to get a valid QR code?

    I’m thinking of something like people buying and hoarding domains in early 00’s (even now), if I could generate the minimal QR code (minimal is important here in the same way that .com is treated as superior to .ca or .net) of well-known symbols and buy the resulting domain it points to (if it even points to a domain) couldn’t I sell this to companies with the associated domain as a re-direct as well?

    by hellojomp
  • Using their logo in this way is probably a trademark violation, so they would be able to get your QR code “for free” (minus the costs involved with consulting their legal division).
    by Diti
  • You could maybe determine this using a SAT solver. You would have to encode the entire QR code specification. I was thinking of doing this to find a minimalist QR code that just had as few black cells as possible.
    by OscarCunningham
  • From another comment:

    https://research.swtch.com/qart

    Looks like this is definitely possible, the results aren't as clean as you might hope though. Maybe they could be improved by introducing some intentional errors (which were explicitly avoided here).

    by jmusall
  • This made me wonder if you could do it with color and apparently you can: https://1mentat.github.io/qr-code-shenanigans/
    by mentat
  • You can also run animations in QR codes: https://cgv.cs.nthu.edu.tw/Projects/Recreational_Graphics/Ha...

    So, technically, you can run Doom inside a QR code?

    by zahrevsky
  • I'm now waiting for someone to post the Bad Apple meme but all in QR codes
    by sphars
  • I always think of Russ Cox’s blog posts as canonical here: https://research.swtch.com/qart
    by zellyn
  • These are also very cool: https://antfu.me/posts/ai-qrcode

    Diffusion image generation constrained to also be a valid QR code

    by petters
  • By the same author: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115056697540191327
    by OscarCunningham
  • This reminds me of car safety features, how drivers have become more complacent to offset the benefits. QR codes were made to be robust in the face of errors, but over time this has been eaten into for aesthetic purposes. Businesses commonly put a logo in the center, eating up some error correction budget. This likely has a similar effect.
    by gblargg
  • I always find it funny when companies don't put any attempt to shorten the URL, filling it with plaintext url parameters, resulting in huge QR codes that can barely be scanned due to the density.
    by nomel
  • A few weeks ago I saw the first QR code I've personally witnessed that I'm pretty sure is completely unscannable. The company logo stretched well out of the center block. It was on the back of a semi in the Chicago area. I didn't get the greatest shot of it on my phone (as a passenger), because it was driving away as I tried, so it wasn't quite proof it couldn't scan, but I'm pretty sure it ate more than 100% of the error correction margin.

    Based on the trends, I expect it is only the first of several I will see.

    by jerf
  • Russ Cox’s QArt Codes[0] modifies how the URL is encoded to embed an image while keeping the QR code fully valid, without relying on error correction.

    [0] https://research.swtch.com/qart

    Related QArt discussions on HN: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213044 (2017-09-10, 61 points, 6 comments) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836935 (2012-04-13, 56 points, 9 comments) [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8549772 (2014-11-03, 56 points, 4 comments)

    by 0sp
  • You can use colour as well: https://janglingpointer.github.io/Image_To_QR/

    The guy that made that did a writeup on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1v52x96/

    by unkl_