Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds • Hacker News Board

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#31

Post by sib » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #27

sib wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their eBird app! A masterpiece of design for a user base that they deeply understand. Something of a learning curve, but extremely efficient and useful for advanced / expert users.

Does it make sense that Merlin and eBird are separate apps? This confuses me.

Yeah - for sure I found it a bit strange... I guess the use cases (and maybe target users) are different:

Merlin - Use lots of data, storage, and analysis to help me identify what bird this is eBird - I can personally identify lots and lots of birds: keep track of all the ones that I and other have seen with maximum speed and efficiency

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#32

Post by kretaceous » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

One of the coolest things I've seen. I'd recommend the "Behind the scenes" video in the page.

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#33

Post by jimkleiber » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

The_Blade wrote: post #29

traceroute66 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta Those were the days ! A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.

now i have the lyrics to the theme song from the TV show in my head given the right group and timing that rockapella would totally play at karaoke

lol, I actually sang it (or tried to) to open my college commencement speech :-) Brutal for one sober person, probably more fun for a group of non-sober people :-D