Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/01/continuing-our-work-to-improve.html <comment><USER2> My biggest problem with YT recommendations is that they _dramatically_ overweight recent videos when generating the recommendations. I mean, I can spend a week doing nothing but watching (well, listening) to videos of classical music performances, and my recommendations will be full of classical music, exactly as you'd expect. Then I watch one random one-off thing, like "15 funny pitbull fails" and suddenly ALL of my recommendations are animal videos. Then I have to go manually edit my feed history and remove "15 funny pitbull fails" to get my recommendations back to normal.

<comment><USER3> All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers.

<comment><USER4> You think that's dumb, but I bet the marketing data behind that says otherwise.

You think "I already have a mixer, idiot!" but in reality the chance that you are interested in buying a mixer just went from 1% to 2%. (Because you want another one, because you want to gift one, because you returned yours, etc.)

<comment><USER5> This has been discussed on HN before.

The last time I saw an Amazon employee weigh in, he said the ads are in fact not effective but the ad team isn't measuring it well. In particular, he claimed that he showed them that _after adjusting for returns_ , the order- again rate for a particular expensive item was effectively zero, they asked him to repeat his study for another product, and he wandered off and found work to do for his own team.

<comment><USER4> My skepticism level remains high. This is billions of dollars, with easy access to tons of data.

I'm not sure if put more stock in the government successfully hiding a fake moon landing, or analysts in one of history's most successful companies not running the numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19".

But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.

<comment><USER7> As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while.

The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few.

Of course, hiding the video helps but I get tired of having to do it constantly. I think I'm resigned to my YT homepage being useless at this point.

<comment><USER8> It's possible your adblocker is preventing YouTube from tracking your watched video history. I know pi-hole does this by default unless you whitelist certain domains.

<comment><USER9> user agent hits Google random-string.googlevideo.com/videoplayback with referrer, ip, signature and several other parameters coding your individual user id, Google knows every single time who, why and when requested particular resource.

<comment><USER10> Just because they have the data doesn't necessarily mean that they use it. They might rely on some javascript XHR to tell them when a video is really watched. Just guessing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We currently don't allow our son to watch anything on youtube, simply because it's a cesspool of horrible videos for children. You're always almost one click away from some violent video where cartoon characters are getting their limbs chopped off, etc. And it's sickening that Google's done nothing about it.

Secondly, I can't watch any video without it taking over my recommendations. Alex Jones for example. I still haven't watched an Alex Jones video (I was curious about what rubbish he spews), without worrying that I'll get a bunch of delusional hyper-conservative drivel taking over my recommendations.

There should be a way to watch a video once and not have it take over your recommendations.

On the one hand, we find that we're making great strides in certain areas with ML. On the other hand, recommendation systems are still just so, so, so naive and bad.

<comment><USER12> What do you want them to do? I'm an adult who uses YouTube and I don't want sanitized kid-friendly recommendations just so that you can protect your son's eyes from cartoon violence. In fact, several of the creators I like have been pinched hard by changes to the All-Powerful Algorithm which seem to be deliberately de-emphasizing anything that could be remotely considered offensive, and it's not fair to them at all.

<comment><USER13> There should be a "parental controls" toggle.

<comment><USER14> YouTube Kids is a separate app. Does that not suffice?

<comment><USER15> No, YouTube Kids has the same problem. Content on it isn't really vetted in any way.

<comment><USER16> Have you used YouTube Kids recently? You can set it to "Approved Only Mode" which only allows kids to view human-vetted videos.

<comment><USER15> That's good to hear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's worth noting that this blog post appeared less than 24 hours after BuzzFeed News posted an article explicitly highlighting the conspiracy theories in the recommended section: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/down-y...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/down- youtubes-recommendation-rabbithole)

I helped contribute to that article, feel free to ask any questions!

<comment><USER17> Have you investigated their rabbit hole for children? YT for Kids simply needs to die. They are evil.

<comment><USER18> Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means.

I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?

<comment><USER19> If you're in the United States, 90% of the population can receive the 24/7 PBS Kids channel over the air for free.

If you're worried about the quality of content from YouTube, or the chances that someone gaming the system dumps questionable content into your stream, it's worth spending ten bucks on an antenna. It's also good for supplementing your child's YouTube viewing when YT starts showing the same stuff over and over.

<comment><USER18> Not in the US; unfortunately, I don't think Poland has a dedicated government channel for kids.

Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.

<comment><USER9> We do, tv-trwam.pl

<comment><USER18> Hahaha, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> YouTube suggestions are worthless now. Used to be if you were watching "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 2" the recommended videos would be "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 3", Part 1, and some other videos by the same user. Now it's a host of other unrelated bullshit.

<comment><USER21> A few weeks back I got a weird fan biopic of Himmler created by some account with the SS logo in their picture recommended to me after watching a video on some obscure DNS features. I reported it but it's still there.

Google is beyond broken. Chasing those engagement numbers on a forever treadmill, just hoping they inch up a little more at any cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole. Too many and all of a sudden its bloody flat earth videos and other insane conspiracies. Made it very difficult to try and watch a balanced set of videos.

<comment><USER23> This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories".

Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right- leaning content by conflating the two.

I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right- wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst.

The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella.

Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now.

[0] [http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf](http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf)

<comment><USER24> Conspiracy theories are, for the most part, a right-wing thing.

Unless you can give me examples of conspiracy theories and their peddlers on level of Alex Jones for the far left.

<comment><USER25> The anti-vaxers are from all over the political spectrum I am sad to say.

<comment><USER24> From my personal experience they've always tended to be further right, since often the anti-vaccine fear comes as a result of government mistrust as well as not trusting scientists. Very similar to the people against climate change in my opinion.

Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk science, rather than a belief in a hidden government or group wanting to personally change you.

<comment><USER26> My experience couldn't have been further from yours. Most of the anti-vaxxers I encountered both irl and online were of the kind that is all about natural remedies and distrusting of GMOs and such (as opposed to those distrusting of government and believing in conspiracies; that kind i mostly encountered online only).

Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.

P.S. As I was trying to find an article about an outbreak in Seattle that I remembered from a few years ago, I realized there is another one happening right this moment [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/an-anti- vaccinatio...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/an-anti-vaccination- hotspot-near-portland-declares-an-emergency-over-measles-outbreak/?amp=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If they could simply make the "Not interested" feature work that would be great.

<comment><USER28> Seems to work fine for me. You just have to click "not interested" on every video of the topic that you don't like and after 5 times or so it stops recommending that topic.

Let's say you watched a video called "Top 10 most amazing things you never knew until today" and now the youtube algo recommends you a bunch of clickbait. Just hit "not interested" on every single clickbait video you see and eventually it stops showing you those videos unless you watch more of them.

<comment><USER29> Or delete the video from your watch history. Your watch history is built based on your history

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Long overdue. Maybe in a few months I can watch a Joe Rogan podcast video without tainting my YouTube recommendations for the next year with Ben Shapiro-style clickbait.

<comment><USER31> However, who determines what is a conspaircy? The government might be deciding that Iraq has WMDs and any evidence to the contrary is a conspiracy. While some measures are needed to be taken, who decides what is? No one is truly impartial. The censorship (while required due to how much crap is in YouTube) might devolve to 1984 without comple transparency, which we all know google isn't providing.

<comment><USER32> Who determines when daytime is? is 7AM daytime? is 7AM in Alaska in the middle of winter daytime?

There is a discussion to be had about some topics at the edge...but 2PM everyone agrees is part of daytime; the flat earth 'conspiracy' should never be recommended to anybody.

And sadly, in the current climate, this also has to be said: This does not mean Google is picking sides. If you on your own reflections decide that for some strange reason the earth is flat, that is your right, and no one is infringing on it by not giving you a platform.

<comment><USER31> Truth, but however, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Say what you want about YouTube recommended political videos, but I have found some absolutely _great_ music because it showed up in my recommended.

A small Canadian band showed up in my recommended and that first song captivated me. Then I listened to their other singles and two albums, and now I'm going to their show next month.

Also, I just found an artist from Belarus that makes fantastic synthpop. The weird thing is that all his videos use cyrillic characters, so I don't know how google even matched it. I am thankful though.

<comment><USER34> I also recommend going to [https://www.youtube.com/feed/music](https://www.youtube.com/feed/music) . It's a landing page that used to be behind a "Music" button on the youtube homepage, but has since been removed. But luckily the page still exists. It gives you a bunch of different playlists, including "Recommended" and "Latest Videos". I like the Latest Videos because it allows me to see what's "current" at a glance, even if I choose not to view any of them, I can see what' going on in the mainstream.

<comment><USER31> Also, I discovered awesome electro music and house music along with the Seven nation Army Remix by Glitch Mob. That's song is now in my main playlist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why do they recommend the same five videos of a series (like Barefoot Contessa) over-and-over when I've watched them already?

I don't want to say "not interested" because I don't know what that means... I want a feature where it's like "more like this, but not this one in particular."

It's surprising they've been under Google's control for a very long time and yet their main recommendation algorithm still leaves a lot to be desired.

<comment><USER36> If I remember correctly, the "not interested" UI has an option for "I've already seen the video"

<comment><USER35> That just makes it seem like their algorithm is powered by bad code or bad management, or both. They know what I've watched. They should know if a video is likely to be watched repeatedly (ie. classifying songs/music videos differently from other content).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame I _love_ watching crackpot conspiracy videos on YouTube, _especially_ flat earth & moon landing denier stuff. Beyond just the curiosity to dissect their weird contrived explanations, there's tons of interesting scientific & historical context to be learned from the counterpoint experiments and such. I hope it will still be generally available & in the sidebar if you're already watching such content.

Also, generally speaking, you really should block youtube cookies. The recommender doesn't seem to track your history then, and the entire experience is FAR better, simply recommending associations from that single video, instead of always trying to railroad you back into where you've historically spent more time.

</comment><comment><USER37> YouTube recommendations are so terrible I consider any suggestion of a channel I don't already watch as a warning. "We see you watched an informative video on topic X, would you also like to watch DudeWhoHatesEverything rant incessantly about X, or BaityMcClickface's Top 10 Ys about X? Don't worry if you don't, we'll keep bringing them up every time you watch anything even tangentially related to X."

</comment><comment><USER38> For some insane reason, no matter what video I watch, I almost always get recommendations for Penn & Teller. Doesn't matter that I don't care about that even a little bit, and haven't watched one of their bits for years. Doesn't matter that I was just watching a technical tutorial. Doesn't matter that I was just listening to a music video. Doesn't matter if I just played a Thomas and Friends video for my kid. I mean, wtf? I want a "why am I seeing this recommendation" button at this point, because my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I want to see how this magic trick is done. Oh, hey, wait a minute...

<comment><USER39> I too watched a couple of "Fool Us" videos and now YouTube believes I am training full-time to be a professional magician.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My expectations are very low, and I generally only browse my sub feed, but I have noticed that some recommendations are getting better.

Specifically, I notice more of:

* Subjects I haven't watched in a while, but went through a period of watching. This is especially useful if it's a recent update or revival of a particular topic.

* Content from channels that are actually similar to what I often watch, and not just clickbait stuff. Occasionally there's actual valuable discovery in the recs.

* Videos that I very much would normally watch from sub'd channels, but missed for whatever reason. The recs are actually helping remind me to watch things I want to watch.

It's still the minority of recommendations, but I have to agree that the system _is_ actually improving.

</comment><comment><USER41> They should introduce some features that allow better search or a hierarchical directory for ppl who like to pick and choose. Perhaps allow a more descriptive presentation of the creators themselves. Not everything needs to be a flat feed.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hm - I was hoping to read a little bit about the algorithms behind YouTube's recommendation engine but instead got a few paragraphs informing me that YouTube was going to implement (even more) arbitrary censorship and claim it was in the spirit of "protecting" us.

</comment><comment><USER43> ...I hate that feeling when I browse youtube and want to watch a trashy video, but then have to stop myself because of the negative effects on the recommendation engine. (yes, if I'm in browser youtube I have the option to open an anonymous tab)

</comment><comment><USER44> My YouTube suggestions list is filled with videos I _just_ watched in the last few weeks or months. Along with the some new videos, but remarkably many already watched ones. They are not labeled as such.

I suspect I blocked some cookie or changed some setting they didn't want me to change, and this behavior is deliberately calculated to be punitive. It's not very user friendly.

Or, the YouTube developers are just not very smart. Either way, it doesn't look good for them. This would be so easy to fix. If they don't know how, they are welcome to reach out to me and I can give them some ideas.

Yes it did occur to me that some users might like this. But they way they have it set up is very confusing and suboptimal for my needs as a user. I will admit though it may be serving some business need that they have, like saving their bandwidth by re-serving me old videos from my cache.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have always had the idea that there should be a law requiring any recommended item anywhere on the internet to be accompanied with a reason of why the item has been recommended. Youtube already does this with certain videos but I would much like it to be expanded completely.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't want YouTube to reccomend anything for me. I don't want Facebook to show me the news stories they think I should see. I don't want Google to show me the ads they think are more relevant to me. None of this improves my life in any way whatsoever, and in fact is leading to the dumbing down of society. We have completely handed over individual taste, interest, and curiosity to algorithms that do nothing but optimize for engagement. I'm done. I want the old internet back. A place where you were presented with a variety of information, indexed by it's content, from which _I_ am able to pick and choose, and then discuss with other human beings.

<comment><USER47> The users of YouTube, Facebook, and Google generally like a feed of things recommended to them. I feel like if this were an article about too many people pissing in a pool, your comment is saying no one should want to swim. That's one way to not get urine on you, but plenty of people clearly want to swim and it doesn't help much to blame them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Let me block channels from appearing in my recommendations. Obviously I don't like that channels content, so I don't want to see it.

<comment><USER49> Should be "block this channel and very similar ones" IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> For a short time, you could actually hide a video in your subscriptions by just clicking one button (an "X" overlayed in top-right). Best feature ever. Now it takes two clicks and mouse movement to hide.

</comment><comment><USER51> It would be great if Youtube actually stopped recommending irrelevant videos that I do not care about (the recommended for you videos) and instead only showed videos in the sidebar that are relevant to what I am watching at that very moment. If I am watching a conspiracy video then I would prefer it if I got another conspiracy video as a suggestion rather than a random cooking video - and it actually goes the other way too! Every time that I go to watch a gaming or a programming video at least one of the suggestions is some lame political or conspiracy-related video.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think the problem is they're using machine learning on something where it's hard to know when to reward the AI. Do you reward it for max minutes the users watch, max clicks, etc? None of them imo really measure whether the _users are satisfied with the recommendations_ which even if that means less watch time for them, it's good for youtube as a brand.

I just ignore them completely now except for when browsing music. They often don't even help when watching serial things (e.g. part 1, 2, 3), I'll often make the effort to look up a playlist instead. I have also always ignored the front page, so can't say anything about it.

I do wish youtube would let you pick areas of interest and whether you wanted to be recommended based on those areas. If a video fits in an excluded area, you would just get random recs, otherwise you would get recs from around that area. Preferably a mix of recent + old + really old videos that still have good ratings / watch time.

Also they would have less to sort through, etc, if they allowed creators to "archive" a video (because its outdated and maybe some other newer one replaced it). This happens to me all the time. And as a user it would be nice if for example, when some video's audio was bad and then a newer fixed one uploaded, if I was prompted to go to the new one. Similar thing with serial content. It would be nice if creators could establish one video follows another or is related.

</comment><comment><USER53> Manual selection doesn't bode well.

I like to watch spiritual and metaphysical talks, Papaji, Eckhart Tolle, Conscious TV, Rupert Spira and the like.

I don't want someone to tell me what's "true" or what's "real" by refering me to the so called "facts".

Sounds like a slippery slope to me...

There sure is a lot of drivel on YouTube.. much of it like content farms playing search engines, is driven by the ad revenue. I find this empty / mindless content far more distracting than "false claims".

<comment><USER54> _I don 't want someone to tell me what's "true" or what's "real" by refering me to the so called "facts". Sounds like a slippery slope to me..._

It sounds at a first reading as though you'd feel everything since the Enlightenment has been a slippery slope. To be fair to YouTube though, if you want an environment devoid of "what's 'true' or 'what's real' by referring [you] to the so-called 'facts,'" then YouTube seems like it should be your paradise. I watch mostly technical, science, and history videos, but apparently YouTube interprets that as a preference for ranting conspiracists and people who make Joe Rogan look like a gentleman and a scholar. I can only imagine the trash it throws up if you actually seek it out!

If you want to create a bubble of people saying things totally divorced from anything like reality, what more could you ask for than YouTube?

<comment><USER53> Garbage content in my opinion is mindless, soulless content created by content farms. Which in a way is what YouTube encourages through their advertising business. Same issue with low quality results in search engines due to all the content farms.

Any content that makes me question things is good in my opinion.

I had a period when I was into UFOs and whatnot.. and it led to an interesting realization about what I actually know. So in my view everything has its place. For example a video about flat earth may very well engage the viewer to wonder WHY the earth wouldn't be flat?

You can't force people to ask questions. Some people will get into the deep end and lose themselves. So be it. You can never force someone else to wake up out of their dreams. It's each individual's choice. At best it is only through the heart, and not rationality, that you can help someone see more clearly. Everyone believes n one thing or another, in order to feel safe.

And yes you are right. YouTube is absolutely perfect right now in some funny ways. Through the limitation of their own business model, they allow everyone to express themselves. And this is better for everybody.

I think they're going to stick to moderation politics and whatnot anyway, so who cares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It would be much cheaper to use user feedback instead of "human evaluators" who represent a tiny segment of audience. Just try adding some sort of rating system for reccomendation like 10 is Perfect Reccomendation and 0 is Completely Irrelevant and adjust the algorithm accordingly. I think the current one use something like network analysis that feeds its own reccomendations back to itself.

</comment><comment><USER56> In the last year the videos recommending on the right margin have always been the same videos regardless of what video I was on. Which are the same videos at the top of my home page recommended videos. What ever happened to video specific recommendations? That was what allowed me to discover new things related to what I was watching and not just some total aggregate of everything I've ever watched.

</comment><comment><USER57> > To that end, we'll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and > content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting > a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or > making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.

Instead, why not just include videos that thoroughly debunks these ideas in the recommendation section of these videos ?

<comment><USER58> I am only 24 years old and hearing 9/11 being referred to as a historic event makes me feel old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> YouTube keeps showing me videos I have already seen, while not sending notifications for videos on channels I'm subscribed to (yes, with the bell!). In order to find videos from people I am subscribed to, I have to go to their Twitter/Discord/Minds so that I don't miss out on at least one video per day, it's nuts.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would love to see youtube add more videos to the recommended section. Right now I believe the limit is 18. When you load the homepage it shows you 12 tiles and you can click "show more" to display 6 more for a total of 18.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, this is the most annoying thing for me too. They have an endless stream of recommendations if you go to www.youtube.com/feed/recommended , so why not put it in the main page?

I can only assume that it's an intentional marketing thing to get people to watch other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wish YouTube kept better tabs on what I've watched and not re-recommend them. I especially wish they wouldn't automatically add to the automatic play list videos I've already seen.

</comment><comment><USER62> > We now pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics—on any given day, > more than 200 million videos are recommended on the homepage alone.

What does the first part (wider set of topics) have to do with the second part (number of videos recommended)?

Anyway, YouTube recommendations are generally quite poor I find, though sometimes a few gems come along. I also made the mistake of watching YouTube on my Android TV box. Holy cow, an ad _every single minute_. And the same 4 ads, rotating.

<comment><USER63> Just guessing, but it could be that they are claiming that 200 million unique videos are recommended on a given day, with the number of unique videos being a proxy for how diverse they are. Perhaps before some of their recent changes, the number of unique videos was smaller. (Who can say for sure, though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> honestly, i'd like to be the judge of if a theory is crackpot or not. i'm not a kid, i don't need youtube to save me from "bad information".

hopefully the change is mild. i've discovered a ton of great stuff through youtube recommendations (especially music! youtube blows everything else away for music discovery).

<comment><USER47> >honestly, i'd like to be the judge of if a theory is crackpot or not. i'm not a kid, i don't need youtube to save me from "bad information".

If your local library or city center decided to prohibit a local white supremacy group from putting up flyers on their billboards recommending Holocaust conspiracy theory materials, would you criticize them the same way? I'm curious about why people seem to have very different standards for public spaces and websites moderating themselves.

<comment><USER64> not a perfect analogy, because (1) billboard space is limited (2) this is restricting thingd that otherwise specifically would be recommended for me.

anyway, i, personally, would still give them (and every1) the space on the billboard. let every1 talk, even the crazy and the hateful.

more generally, i dont think any institution should be privilged over the individual to decide which ideas they get to hear.

just one possible philosophical position, one choice on a spectrum of tradeoffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Recommendation systems are often too specific, full of recency bias. I use YouTube for classical music while I'm working, so I play several hours of video every day. My feed is full of similar videos that are all the same! YouTube can step it up by offering a wider variety of potential interesting videos.

</comment><comment><USER66> I wish they would provide to turn off recommendations on the home page when you're logged in. Far too many click-baity channels show up and it becomes cumbersome to wade through all of it to find the channels that I follow.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is why I never look at the recommendations on YouTube. I just go straight to my Subscription feed; there is usually something worth watching there and if not, I find my entertainment elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'd be happy if they just stopped trying to recommend videos to me personally and just tried to keep the video suggestion remotely relevant to what I'm watching.

</comment><comment><USER69> Too late, I installed the "Distraction Free Youtube" extension. No more sidebar: No more clickbait.

Youtube got so much more pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER70> Until they'll get PewDiePie's videos back on Trending I'll consider completely dishonest and unethical. They follow the same path Facebook paved before: closing people in bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER71> Using uBlock Origin to hide the youtube recommendations sidebar was a fantastic UX improvement. Now I don't have withstand youtube's persistent recommendations to watch Jordan Peterson.

</comment><comment><USER72> Nowhere to go but up, really.

</comment><comment><USER73> I knew it!

</comment><comment><USER74> I banned thousands of channels in Russian language, but Youtube never stop attempts to convince me to watch an another video about Putin or mighty Russia.

How to ban all videos per country of origin or/and per language?

edit:

Moreover, how to bless my native language in Youtube and Google?

</comment><comment><USER75> Just please, for the love of god stop trying to show me Jordan Peterson videos!

</comment><comment><USER76> Improving recommendations? All I'm seeing is a complete deterioration of youtube's recommends since the glory days of the early 2010s.

How about stop spamming me CNN, SNL, Late Night Show ( kimmel, john oliver, etc )? I've yet to accidentally click on these links/channels in all my years using youtube and yet, I still see them every day? Why?

I've pretty much given up on recommendations and just directly go to the channels I want to watch. There was a time ( early 2010s ) when youtube recommends was great and it was actually fun going down the youtube recommends rabbit hole. Now it's just corporate shilling. Just like google search and its incredible decline.

You guys aren't going to improve anything because you don't have competition.

</comment><comment><USER77> User control is completely lacking in youtube. It's a tradeoff between marginal quality content and tolerating the UI and search.

Their creativity in thinking up new annoyances (e.g. undesired playing of videos if you merely hover the selection to a video) is infinite.

</comment><comment><USER78> In this thread, in social media, and in recent articles that critique YouTube's recommendations, it seems like the anecdotal examples all try to support a claim that YouTube's recommendation algorithm radicalizes viewers towards the far right side of the US political spectrum. This to me seems like a naive, self-serving perspective channeled by those who are on the US political left. Somehow, the same algorithm might help channel viewers to content from say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but no complaints are made in that instance, since that content aligns with the views of those who are complaining.

These algorithms are based on what people watch based on prior history. As outsiders, we can't know exactly how it works, but it seems like it would be some mix of the video you are currently watching and other videos in your watch/search history, which then feed into a model that considers all users' behaviors and produces probabilistic relationships between videos. This is a fairly standard way for how recommendations work, and it is reasonable. As others have pointed out, there are also many anecdotes of YouTube recommendations working great - for example with discovery of music. But we should keep in mind that the same recommendations engine supports those same positive anecdotes.

For a lot of users, the recommendations some are labeling as incorrect, radicalizing, etcetera are actually the recommendations they want and enjoy. Why should other users or YouTube intervene if that's what user behavior supports? Clearly, the reason is that these other users want to constrain access to views they don't share - which is just another way of saying they support censorship when it applies to others. There is a dangerous concept creep in Google's blog post:

> We'll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we > can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn't quite cross > the line of—violating our Community Guidelines.

This is really the first step in expanding their guidelines, and if they cave to either internal political activism or the complaints coming from the outside (a group with very uniform views aligning with the political left), it is a risk for public discourse. This is in part because there are very few alternatives to Google in general, and that applies to YouTube as well. As others have pointed out, BitChute was blackballed by payment processors. Any constraint on free exchange of information on YouTube is dangerous because so much of online discourse is under Google's control, on their platforms.

I can't help but think that the BuzzFeed article and others are basically cherry-picked hitjobs to create a false narrative that something more nefarious is going on beyond YouTube simply respecting user behaviors. The impetus to say something is wrong here seems to be based entirely on personal political biases. For example, some people here are bemoaning the fact that watching Joe Rogan's podcasts (which are less political) lead you to watch Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro. If that's the behavior other users who watch a Joe Rogan video are exhibiting, I don't see anything wrong with that recommendation. And if you dislike it, consider that this might be the exposure to different views that people often pay lip service to.

Some of the other annoyances outlined by commenters are less related to specific content and more like general usability concerns. A summary:

\- It is no longer possible to see recommendations based on just the current video. I agree this is poor design. It seems at some point YouTube switched the recommendations feed from being centered on whatever content you are currently seeking (which the currently playing video would be an input for), to just showing recommendations based on everything you've ever done. I think there is a place for the current set of recommendations but it should not be the sole set. Having a "Based on this video" section of recommendations and a "More for you" section of recommendations would solve this problem.

\- User feedback saying you don't want to watch something is not immediately respected. Other users say that it is respected, if you provide the feedback multiple times. The latter may be appropriate, since a single dislike is likely best interpreted not as an absolute, but a signal that gets ingested into the algorithm and weighted appropriately.

\- People want to be able to watch a video and not have it feed into their recommendations. This is currently possible by pausing watch history or search history, but that's deep in the settings and much harder to find. I agree, YOuTube should make a privacy mode toggle that is available right next to the video.

\- Sometimes videos that were already watched are recommended. I'm split on this one - I've certainly seen times they recommend a previously-watched video where I don't think it would make sense to rewatch it. But that is likely based on user behavior as well. And if there are enough users watching some video repeatedly, it might be a fair and correct prediction to suggest it to me. When you click the 'Not Interested' link beneath a video, you can also click 'Tell Us Why' and select the option 'I already watched it' to give them that hint. But the interface is a bit cumbersome, certainly.

</comment><comment><USER79> We have always been at war with Eastasia

<comment><USER80> Did you accidentally comment on the wrong story? Or is this a joke that I'm not getting?

<comment><USER81> They're making a reference to the novel 1984, in which governments routinely recast history such that the current status quo "has always been this way".

<comment><USER82> > They're making a reference to the novel 1984, in which governments routinely > recast history such that the current status quo "has always been this way".

Though the reference they're making is so irrelevant to this story that it verges on a non sequitur. This action is more akin to developing a spam filter for your email service than a government totally rewriting history for political reasons.

If you're going to reference a work as well-known as 1984, make sure it's a _very apt_ reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> But who gets to decide what counts as a "conspiracy"? It's very easy to suppress true and inconvenient information by attaching some vague and undesirable label to it, e.g., the Soviets abusing mental health diagnoses to silence dissidents.

I'd rather have conspiracy videos in my feed than give the YouTube content moderation people the power to decide what counts as conspiracy.

<comment><USER60> I know what you mean, not I can't think of any other way I would fully trust. What committee would l trust? I suppose the only thing we can do is to require more transparency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I know this is about Youtube suggestions, but let me share another google property with suggestions: Google Mail.

[https://twitter.com/300_lines/status/1088288289042415617](https://twitter.com/300_lines/status/1088288289042415617)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Tweet: "Ugh. G-mail's suggested responses to an update from my aunt about my uncle's fight with cancer.

Google Mail suggests: Will do! So cute! Love it!"

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

If this is the quality of AI and their suggestions machine learning, then I have serious doubts. I'd figure the word "cancer" would be enough for basic sentiment calculators to go 'give somber sad answer', not "Love it!"

<comment><USER85> Don't have google write your reply emails then? Sometimes you get a crappy solution because the problem being solved is just not worth the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> "To that end, we'll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11."

Why take moral positions on the content of the videos? Why be the arbiter of what people should watch? Why censor?

<comment><USER87> I agree this is annoying. Personally I enjoyed watching the conspiracy theory 9/11 videos even if I didn't believe it for a second.

<comment><USER47> Maybe they should be there for people who seek them out, but YouTube shouldn't be recommending them onto people who didn't previously want them and who might not be approaching it skeptically.

<comment><USER78> Why is it YouTube's business to judge truth and falsehoods and provide a manicured walled garden? That seems like an avenue for all sorts of manipulation, censorship, etc.

<comment><USER47> YouTube is already an avenue for all sorts of manipulation. They recommend harmful crazy conspiracy videos to unsuspecting people all the time right now. (9/11 conspiracy theory videos might just sound silly, but I'm also thinking of stuff like racially-charged holocaust conspiracy theories and baseless anti-vaccine stuff.) I think you're way too optimistic if you don't think those are likely converting many people at YouTube's scale.

Just because this is the result of non-action by YouTube doesn't make it okay. YouTube becoming a moral arbiter isn't a perfect situation, but it can easily be better than the status quo.

<comment><USER87> I don't find this true at all. Youtube is pretty biased in recommending videos closely related to what is in your history. It's pretty rare I get something that is not directly related to a recently watched video (this is clear because if I delete said video from my history the recommendations go away).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Paradox%20of%20declining%20female%20happiness.pdf

<comment><USER2> Debunked: [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004965.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004965.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe someone with a background in sociology can answer this, but looking at the trends we see that the paper is talking about a change of "happiness" of just one or two percent over 35 years. Is this really significant? Just looking at the trends, it seems the oscillations from year to year are much higher than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's still interesting to note that women are not happier given all the advances they have made with respect to the workplace.

<comment><USER2> Changes in income don't make people happier in the long term. See Hedonic Adaptation: <http://mit.edu/people/shanefre/HedonicAdaptation.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> In the case of women, I think it's more that you are replacing one set of problems with another set of possibly more severe problems.

The reason we are on this forum in the first place is that we don't like the most common form of work, where you are not in control.

So why would you expect women to be happier when they transition from just being a housewife to also (mostly) working for others?

<comment><USER2> I'm not aware of any studies about happiness and its relation to freedom, so I don't know if that's true. My anecdotal impression is that caring for a child full-time is extremely difficult -- which is why the daycare industry exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> More independence/freedom breads unhappiness. This doesn't mean its bad, or the wrong direction. It simply means additional measures need to be taken.

Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" is a great book on the subject.</comment>


Should I leave Austin? - <AUTHOR>

I started Physics grad school this Fall, but I have recently considered dropping out in order to find a job in industry (I'd like to work at a startup). I know this could look really bad to employers, but I just have no motivation to continue my studies
Recently I've been working on a programming project on my own (a sort of video game), as a way to improve my programming skills, and I've been working on it with alot more motivation than studying for my Physics classes. I'm still fairly new to programming so I can't say I'm committed to programming over Physics yet
Anyways, the semester is almost over and I have to make a decision soon as to whether to move back home (Los Angeles) or stay in Austin to find a job. After reading Paul Graham's essays, I think I'm willing to take the risks involved in running my own business, or at least joining someone else's startup.
But my programming skills aren't that great and my statistical analysis software skills aren't either (I've only used SPSS minimally). Also, I have no idea as to what kind of startup I'd like to work for. I'm not interested in Iphone apps, social networking, etc. But analytics seems pretty interesting.
Would I really be missing out on alot of opportunities if I moved back to LA instead of staying here in Austin? <comment><USER2> I know AppSupmo started by Noah Kagen are looking for Python Developers in the Austin Area.</comment>


Innovative model provides insight into the black hole at center of our galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab9532 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://phys.org/news/2020-06-insight-behavior-black-hole- ce...](https://phys.org/news/2020-06-insight-behavior-black-hole-center.html)</comment>


Instagram Growth Hack: Using the Web to Drive Mobile Downloads - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2012/06/05/instagram-growth-hack/ <comment><USER2> A common mistake made in consumer apps is that user acquistion is seen as the key to success. It is true that you need to acquire users, but what you really need is a good hook and then to keep those users. Instagram's hook was that they made filters and sharing easy amd free. People wanted filters and the sharing part was a bonus. However, once they were there, they naturally had to take part in the social aspects which made it far more engaging and therefore they stuck around. After that, it is only a matter of time before others joined in.

<comment><USER3> User acquisition is a necessary but not sufficient part of success. So no, user acquisition isn't the key to success. And yes, you do need to engage your users and make your site/app sticky. But you can have the stickiest app known to man and it's completely useless if you don't have users. You need to do both and the only thing they have in common is being difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They used to, for at least the first 12 months, have quite a large 'download the app now' button.

This I believe was in the 'pre-comments on the website' era.

Couldn't find an image of this so might entirely be in my head.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe nobody likes to be sold, but people won't download it if they don't happen to notice the download button either.

I imagine the likelihood for a person to notice the ad gets better as the button gets bigger and uglier, but on the other hand the percentage of people who don't download out of spite because the button is too big and ugly also gets larger.

There's probably a sweet spot there somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing I've never liked about this page is that the photo owner's username looks like a link.</comment>


Show HN: MissPlete – Misspelling-tolerant autocomplete in 200 lines of ES6 - <AUTHOR> http://xavi.github.io/miss-plete/ <comment><USER2> In the demo I started typing United States and it was showing a bunch of other countries above United States.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I realize that Levenshtein, the scoring algorithm used by default, can actually be worse than a simple `startsWith` if there are no misspellings. In the case of United States, if typed without misspellings, with Levenshtein, it only shows as the first option after typing "united s", or " us" (because ISO 3166-1 codes are configured as synonyms).

The default scoring algorithm can be replaced via the `scoreFn` param.

Probably a variant of Levenshtein, or something else that gives more weight to matches at the beginning should be used as the default, in order to get the best results in all cases.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do you use a data lake instead of a data warehouse? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to better understand why analysts and data scientists sometimes prefer to set up a data lake, which I define as: "a collection of files, in an open-source format like Parquet or Orc, in a blob-store like S3". I often hear two reasons:
- Cost
- Supporting data science workloads
However, the emergence of data warehouses that separate compute from storage, like Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift RA3, has drastically reduced the cost advantage for data lakes. And in my experience, data science workloads are generally compute-bound, so in principal you can just execute a SQL query from your data science environment (Spark, Python) against your data warehouse---the overhead of serializing and deserializing your data an extra time should be a tiny % of your overall runtime.
I suspect that the reason why some data scientist prefer data lakes is cultural rather than technical---basically, they have an irrational dislike of SQL and RDBMSs. However, I haven't done data science work myself in years, so maybe I'm just not getting it. Are there good reasons for using a data lake rather than Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift RA3? Please enlighten me! <comment><USER2> You probably have both.

"Raw" data lands in the lake S3 or similar object store. Processing pipelines take data, slice and combine, and push data back to the lake. Data in the lake will vary from the truly raw like log files to highly processed. Keeping the raw analogy we could say it's like the difference between a cow carcass and a carefully butchered filet mignon.

But you nearly always need a way to query and analyse the raw data, so you have an engine sitting on top like snowflake. Engines might help drive your processing as its much easier to write pipelines against. But also allow people to access at a higher level of abstraction.

It's not an either or.</comment>


What's being built with BOSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000613.html

<comment><USER2> We're actually looking at doing some BOSS-optimized searches on one of our sites, too. Really enjoy using the API so far. Y! gets a lot of points in my book for trying this out.

If you can't be the #1 search engine, get a piece of all the little vertical search engines.</comment>


Thank You, Arash - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/-thank-you--arash.html <comment><USER2> Arash is alive and leaving Dropbox, for those who miss the single sentence distinguishing which is the case halfway down the page.

<comment><USER3> I could not see it even after reading your comment...

This type of corporate writing is not serving anyone...

<comment><USER4> "But now, it's time for me to share that my close friend and co-founder is leaving Dropbox."

<comment><USER3> Exactly, that should be the first statement of the whole thing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite refreshing note than so many exec "Thank you" emails.

PS: Interestingly, Arash has Mac and Drew has Thinkpad in first picture :).

</comment><comment><USER6> Dropbox was great way back then but now it seems like they are trying to compete with Microsoft Sharepoint and my Office 365 already comes with a 1TB storage plan.

Perhaps Jobs was right ... it is a feature not a product.

<comment><USER7> But they do it really well. OneDrive, Google Drive and iCloud Drive lack the polish and reliability of Dropbox for me.

All said, I stopped paying for Dropbox about 6 months back as I couldn't convince myself paying $9.99 for something I was already getting with Office 365.

All I needed from them was like a $2.99 plan for 200GB and I would have continued to be a paying customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT but every time I visit this site I wonder how such smart people got duped by their designer. It used to be a joy to visit, but now it physically hurts me just to look at it. It's ok, great even... heck sometimes crucial, to be contrarian when you're creating art. But a UI isn't supposed to be art.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really nice story about some of the personal history behind Dropbox. It's all news to me. I had never heard of Arash until today.

Anyone know what he's going off to do that he's leaving Dropbox?

<comment><USER10> I don't know what he's been up to. But I'm certain he has inspired many Iranian-American tech entrepreneurs indirectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dropbox writes good farewell letters; the one to Guido was a real treat.

</comment><comment><USER12> May be it is just me, but there should have been a tldr summary or better title (Arash, co-founder of dropbox leaving) or first paragraph. I was reading it half scared wondering if someone died (due to the recent Corona related news).

<comment><USER13> While yes, that would have been a better title in terms of telling us what the post was about, but then you get a different tone for the post.

I think the post is first and foremost for thanking Arash for his work on Dropbox and about the partnership he had with Drew, and telling us about it comes second.

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree with you but at this moment in time it just seems a bit prudent to add something like this at the top:

"Arash – our co-founder and great friend – is leaving Dropbox for new adventures."

Just one simple sentence like that at the top lets us know the rest of the post isn't a eulogy, or at least not the kind where someone passed away.

Any other point in time when there isn't a global pandemic you can leave that out, but right now times are weird and confusing.

<comment><USER15> I think the "thank you, first name" format is common when a well known company founder or elder statesman is leaving. Here is Guido's from last year. [https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you-- guido](https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido)

And Arash is well known at Dropbox (and also here.)

<comment><USER14> Maybe you're right, I can't say that resonates with me but I may well be in the minority. I do find it interesting though that the post you link to has this as it's first sentence:

"After six and a half years, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is leaving Dropbox and heading into retirement."

No ambiguities regarding the reasons for the post then.

(Also, for what it's worth, I had no idea who Arash was prior to reading this post.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Keeping up with Rust's breaking changes - <AUTHOR> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-April/009543.html

<comment><USER2> How do people who have experience with both think about Go vs Rust? I'm not even sure if that's an apt comparison but people seem to be pitting them against each other these days.

<comment><USER3> It's an inapt comparison and the comparison should _not_ be made naively.

If I spent the next 6-12 months writing libraries in Rust targeted towards Python-level code, we could spend time comparing Rust + those libraries vs. Go and have a productive discussion.

Personally, I think that Go is a clumsy language, a chimera of C plus Python, having neither type safety nor significant abstraction nuance. More sophisticated minds than I have flamed Go in depth, I won't bother parroting them. :-)

Go's primary advantages are:

      1. Google.
      2. Targeting the Python/Ruby developers & needs.
      3. Compiled & statically linked
      4. Relatively stable.

Rust's chief disadvantages are:

      1. Still < 1.0.
      2. Semi-manual memory management. Gc'd pointers are kind of a pain.
      3. How many pointer types again? >.<
      4. Strongly typed. [1]

If I was given a mandating hand to develop a reliable and efficient system for _most_ applications to maintain (with funding) over the 5-10 year term, I would be OK with choosing Rust today, with the expectation that we'd have some porting and heavy lifting as things change, possibly even contributing development time to the Rust project.

[1] Probably should expand this. You have to spend serious time understanding how the type system works after you get into the more advanced type systems. Haskell, ML. It's a disadvantage for quick learning and the quick hack to get the system working. Changes simple in a less typed language (e.g., Perl) can have non-local type ramifications in a project. /me handwaves. It's double- edged.

<comment><USER4> > 2\. Semi-manual memory management. Gc'd pointers are kind of a pain.

Well, that's exactly what makes Rust so useful for many domains. Rust is useful for systems code because it doesn't use GC for everything.

> 3\. How many pointer types again? >.<

There are references and then smart pointers, of which owned pointers (~) are one kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was recommended by someone to learn Rust, but without reason. Does anyone have any reasons for why I should look into this, apparently, new language?

<comment><USER4> The biggest selling point of Rust is that it allows you to write low-level code with memory safety (so no use-after-free, buffer overruns, Heartbleeds, etc) and without runtime overhead. Right now this is a niche that Rust has to itself, as far as non-academic languages go. It's like having a C++ static analyzer with guaranteed no false negatives built into the language.

You also get nice high-level productivity features like type inference, lightweight closures, a module system, a modern take on interfaces, etc.</comment></comment>


Any idea what this old IBM machine is? - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/9wwBb8f.jpg <comment><USER2> IBM Executary Model 212. Magnetic belt "ejected". [https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_450...](https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV4019.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! I knew Hacker News would come through - thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products)

I'm guessing something weird from this list like IBM 939: Electrostatic Address Label Printer.</comment>


That feel when you can't captcha [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGW7TRtcDeQ <comment><USER2> It used to be some benign OCR task, now it's "please identify street signs from photographs we've taken". Once they can correctly classify street signs, what else will they want? "please click on the faces you recognise?"? "please click on the faces of your friends that are labelled with the correct names?"?

I've started opting out of Google Captcha's wherever doing so isn't too burdensome. If I see a Google Captcha and I don't _really_ want to get to the other side, I just close the tab and forget about it, rather than subject myself to their capricious gatekeeping.

<comment><USER3> Some people I know online have basically started buying "captcha tokens" \--- the same ones that spammers use when they want to bypass them in bulk. Depending on your morals (keeping in mind these services are mainly third- world-country sweatshop labour), it might be a better choice than spending your own brainpower on such things, and a way of giving Google a virtual middle finger.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't Google get what they want either way?

<comment><USER3> They get solved captchas, but they're not using the user's brainpower and time to do it.

<comment><USER5> All google cares about is getting the captchas solved to train their AI.

<comment><USER6> Cut the middle man out, they could hire the sweatshop directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use the Tor browser pretty frequently so I've gotten pretty good at these. It's much easier once you realize that there are three sources of data that determine correctness: basic computer vision, hurried/lazy humans, and a lot of bots. It's not about truth it's about following the crowd.

\- Forget the slivers. If it's not more that 75% of the square forget about it.

\- Anything not in the foreground might as well not exist.

\- Poles != Signs If you saw pole sticking out of the ground you wouldn't call it a sign would you?

\- It's not about whether it's a storefront, it's about whether it obviously looks like one. If you spend literally any time thinking about it it's a no.

\- Mark the most prominent vehicle and skip everything else. Only mark a second vehicle if they're equally sized.

<comment><USER8> So that means we have to think like bots not humans. Otherwise it wouldn't have these rules and people would easily solve these. What's the point of captcha?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember 15 years ago making a neural net captcha OCR cracker (for DNS registrations). And after about 3 hours I have my accuracy, recall and confusion numbers and I'm not really getting them any better. This was a captcha like from those old PHP libraries. Many colors (sometimes bright yellow on white GRMBL), varying background color, a few things on the background that were clearly not letters (like large circles).

Now in order to train this network I had to download 1000 or so captchas and solve them manually, so I had written a quick program that allows a person to solve captchas. So I figured "let's see how good it is", and used the program to test myself (I figured, worst case I have some more raw data).

Turns out the neural net was 2% better than I was. It actually scored 2% better on captcha solving than I did, and this was when I was trying really hard, pausing when there's doubt and giving it 5 seconds thought. I was a bit surprised that trying really hard or just going with my first guess didn't make more than a percent difference.

Then I got someone who had nothing to do with IT to solve 50 captchas and calculated ... precision was 8% below the neural net (also known as she'd do about 1 in 6 wrong, whereas I only had one in 10-12 or so. The neural only had one in 14-15 wrong. It was a pretty sizable difference).

And lastly I figured, this is not possible. I'm somehow messing this up. After all, I should have made that same 8%+ errors on the original set of 1000 captchas I downloaded, did the network really _learn_ to read better than I can, while being fed close to 10% falsehoods* ? So I generated the set where it consistently errors. And ... Yep. It did. About 40% of those was just me doing the ground truth wrong. I fixed them, but it only improved the CNNs performance slightly.

* of course of those 10% wrong would still almost always have 4 out of 5 letters correct

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel like users should be compensated for giving Google their time and mental energy since this is literally making users manually tag their machine- learning corpus for free.

<comment><USER11> your being paid with website content.

Take your pick. Do you want to pay with:

1) a few seconds of your mental energy

2) your privacy

3) background cryptocurrency mining

Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.

<comment><USER12> > Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.

Not true. Some (most?) of the best content on the internet is there completely for free, because people believe in it and put it out there out of their own pocket.

The internet is _worse_ , because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s when content was there by the methods I just described.

I do think there's some value in paying artists and writers for their work, with, you know, _money_ , because those people have to eat too. But I refuse to buy into this narrative where "I pay you for content and you give me content" (a consensual transaction) is the same as "I request content from you and you pretend to give it to me for free while secretly violating my privacy, stealing my attention, and otherwise screwing me without my consent". These are _not_ the same thing.

This is _not_ "just how the internet works", it's how a few people have decided they want the internet to work because it's profitable to them, and we don't have to put up with it.

<comment><USER13> > The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the > methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s...

Yeah, when people comment that online content must be subsidized, I always find it a little ironic. They're contributing information and analysis to a discussion. Who's paying the subscription fee?

How could such a lifestyle, where they give away their mental energy for free, possibly be sustainable?

The frequent rebuttal of "but my comments are low quality and barely worth anyone's time!" is fun too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I miss the days when you just had to help them digitally encode writing. Now I'm in the same "is the pole part of the sign" situation as this guy all the time.

Does anybody know if captcha's are triggered or are made harder by ublock? It seems to me like captchas are easier on my work chrome profile, which does not have any extensions since I only use it for internal sites.

<comment><USER15> I think they are made more difficult by when Google observes "bot-like" activity coming from you. When they started the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, I used to be able to just check the box and it would let me through, every time. Then, one day I had to download several dozen files, and each download had one of these checkboxes. The first 10 or so files, it let me through like it always did. Then it started giving me one CAPCHA screen for the next 10 files. Then 2 screens. Then 3, and so on. That was several years ago, and ever since then it _always_ gives me a long series of difficult CAPCHAs every single time. I guess Google still thinks I'm a bot even after several years of solving these things pretty consistently (I'd say I have about 90% success rate).

For the record, I do tag boxes containing only sign posts, or only tiny slivers of signs.

<comment><USER16> I find myself intentionally slowing down when completing forms in order to not appear too bot-like and be forced to complete a captcha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Part of the reason these are so difficult is that it will intentionally fail you sometimes even when you're right to prevent malicious bots from learning off of it, also a decent number of them are not fully solved by Google (they show you both ones they know and ones they don't).

Basically its meant to be somewhat confusing.

<comment><USER18> Many sites do a canvas fingerprint, and send you to the captcha if the fingerprint fails.

And then it's captcha hell.

<comment><USER19> A fingerprint? Like this thing?

[https://panopticlick.eff.org](https://panopticlick.eff.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait until you go abroad and instead of saying "find the street signs" it says something in Japanese with no way of changing the language.

</comment><comment><USER8> I get these all the time when using VPN/proxy. These are basically harassment for users.

They replaced the text captcha with these. Google knows that these stops humans from going in. But, they don't fix it because they need to harvest data. So, Google is evil. There is no doubt on that.

</comment><comment><USER21> These Google captchas were much easier about 1 year ago. These days, I stop and ask myself "Do I _really_ need to get past this guard?".

</comment><comment><USER22> I think it depends a lot on your IP too. I tried to do some google captchas in TOR browser once and it took forever! Just like this video, even when you got it right it still kept asking for more..

<comment><USER23> Happens relatively frequently when using a VPN. If, for whatever reason, the IP I'm using is currently getting the captcha-hell treatment, shifting to a different exit address clears it up 95%+ of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone should create a neural net that does this for you.

<comment><USER25> And train it by making people identify the correct solutions to get access to a website

<comment><USER26> Heh, i recall claims that hackers where using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service as a means of defeating captchas their botnets encountered.

<comment><USER27> I recall that hackers were sending captchas to porn sites. "Want to see this picture, then solve this captcha." And then the answers were redirected back to the original, legitimate site.

<comment><USER19> True, sexual drive can be a great motivator. Porn users are tolerant of a lot (popup ads, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Chrome plugin Privacy Badger ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy- pass/ajhmf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy- pass/ajhmfdgkijocedmfjonnpjfojldioehi)) is supposed to be useful to avoid those.

I haven't been able to reach a conclusion on whether it is effective, anyone uses this?

</comment><comment><USER29> So, are you supposed to click on the sign support sticks?

What about squares which have just a sliver of the sign?

<comment><USER30> Technically the sign support sticks aren't signs. And some of the signs clicked on weren't street signs, if you identify street signs as those put up by a government agency to regulate or assist with driving on a street. Also, he clicked a hotel, which isn't a storefront. When Google says storefront they mean a multi-tenant store facing a street with a big sign indicating the store's name or purpose. Sometimes these locations are closed, but they rarely look like hotels, houses or apartments. I have also had to pass, twice, by saying nothing was relevant and not clicking anything. I've also had it show me streets with cars and had it ask me to select storefronts... (Trick questions, maybe to see if I click wrong then change my mind?) And I'm much more likely to get it wrong on my iPhone than on a computer, perhaps Google doesn't have as much mouse movement data that way, and can't fingerprint an iPhone as uniquely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hard on humans, easy on bots.

</comment><comment><USER32> We are working on hashcash.io - replacement for captcha. no more frustration to guess what google meant, just computer proof of work and you are good to go

<comment><USER33> Please, do not drain my batteries, waste resources of my planet and make me (or my employer, or my coffee shop, or my train company, or my library) pay electricity to prove I'm not a robot.

Please, do not make Internet an energy hog more than it already is.

<comment><USER34> Your last statement theoretically could be addressed by tweaking the algorithm settings such that it consumes at most [the time it takes for a human to solve reCaptcha] x [average power consumption of a smartphone]. Not sure if it would still hold its purpose, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used to never get these back when I used Chrome. I started getting them once I switched to Firefox. Is this a thing? or was it coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER36> So at the end, when he says despondently, "I'm not a robot!"...

Paranoid fantasy: it's a PhilipKDick/BladeRunner thing. You see, actually he _is_ a robot (as, apparently, are most of us), and this test is designed to _prove_ it. It's a precursor to the Voight-Kampff machine...

</comment><comment><USER37> I suspect the bad guys using captcha won't go to the good low barrier captcha because there's no microcent transaction in it. It's a Gresham's law case: bad captcha with revenue drives out good captcha with low overhead

</comment><comment><USER38> Hopefully more sites will upgrade to the new Invisible reCaptcha by Google. I am using them on my sites and it is certainly less annoying and the user experience is better.

<comment><USER39> Interesting side note, when Google isn't completely convinced you're not a robot, it'll actually swap the invisible captcha out for these photo picker ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Whenever I see this, I intentionally select incorrect boxes. Let the AI eat those incorrect data. If sufficient people do this, these AI free loading stuff will stop.

</comment><comment><USER41> My hope is that in the future lightning network micro payments will be a better alternative than captchas for rate limiting page access.

</comment><comment><USER42> cool seeing taran from ltt on hn...

</comment><comment><USER43> Oh I hate these so much.</comment>


Powerful Android Emulator GenyMotion 2.0 released, adds commercial features - <AUTHOR> http://www.genymotion.com/

<comment><USER2> awesome! for dev and gamer</comment>


My webapp: pik - <AUTHOR> http://www.getpik.com

<comment><USER2> You'll have problems in Denmark - pik means dick.

I must admit that I found the heading " _Do more on the web with pik._ " rather amusing.

<comment><USER3> Same in The Netherlands. 'Pik' is slang for penis.

<comment><USER4> Denmark and Netherlands using the same slang is easy to understand. But it's quite strange that in Brazil it means the exactly same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be nice if you had a way to demo it without putting it on the bookmarks bar. Maybe already running on your site, or launchable from the installation button (instead of telling me to install it).

</comment><comment><USER6> Using Chrome 5.0.342.9 beta on Ubuntu 10.04. Got a popup saying "The latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari are recommended for using pik."

<comment><AUTHOR> I will add that to my whitelist. You should be able to close the warning and continue.

I'm whitelisting OS/Browser combos, and I haven't added linux yet.

<comment><USER7> I'm using Chromium 4.0.299.0 (36335) on my Mac and I get that popup too.

According to jeresig, author of jQuery, one should not perform browser detection, instead you should use feature detection. Browser agent is not going to give you an accurate picture of what is supported because every browser likes to say they are mozilla/webkit/netscape/etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. Making the commands visible without clicking the button (but more subtle/better designed) would be nice, else I'll just forget the button is there. Good stuff. And yes, pik means dick in Belgium too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Most of this feedback is technical; can someone comment on whether they would use this or some future iteration of this project?

<comment><USER9> I just installed it. I don't know how much I will use it, but it's definitely something I would use, if that makes sense. Readability, bugmenot and google cache are all things that I've never bothered to make easy before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice, gave me collapsible threads on HN.

Works fine on Chrome 5.0.342.9 beta Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it a clone of Quix? Right?? <http://quixapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like a competitor. Pik has a UI that's in the browser window rather than a pop-up prompt, which allows you to search for commands. Pik also shows you what commands are popular on a given site/page, which makes it easier to discover commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm using Chromium 5.0.386.0 and it's not supported by your app. Is this right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Try closing the notification and using it anyways. I'm whitelisting browsers that work and I haven't gotten around to all of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Chrome 5.0.375.17 dev on OSX: I am unable to drag the button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll look into it. It's working for me on Chrome 5.0.342.9 on OSX.

<comment><USER14> It's a chrome bug as far as I know. He'll just have to wait until the dev builds are updated to fix this problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some practical steps to improve ones security? - <AUTHOR>

In the light of NSA revelations, I'm wondering what are some practical steps to improve ones security. I do realise that I won't be able to defend against NSA/other spying agencies, however as they create so many vulnerabilities in products I use, it's only a matter of time when ordinary criminals will start to exploit them.
Is OS X considered secure enough, or should I switch to Linux?
Is FileVault secure? How does it compare to TrueCrypt?
Which mobile platform provides better security? (I do realise that it'd be best to ditch mobile devices, but it's a rather drastic step for most people).
What software use for IM? Is there any secure solution? <comment><USER2> 'Ordinary' criminals? The distinction between ordinary and extra-ordinary criminals no longer exists in the face of a power which views every single person on the planet as a criminal (in potential, at least).

You're a criminal. Stop worrying about a distinction that the system in power doesn't make. Go get some cover.

</comment><comment><USER2> Check out [http://prism-break.org/en/](http://prism-break.org/en/)</comment>


Show HN: Automate Software Documentation - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalbrain.app/ <comment><USER2> I browsed your site and watched the only sample movie you have. For a product claiming automated documentation I guess you are not eating your own dogfood here.

The movie shows no documentation at all except flashing poorly filled API docs which everybody already generates using any doc framework that pulls that from source code comments. The other part of the movie shows options to type documentation and an image that appears when you right click and select UML. The image isn't UML though nor is the movie showing anything on how it was obtained or generated.

I wish you luck but it seems you did not solve the problem yet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News! We're Kesava and Dmitry from Digital Brain [digitalbrain.app]

We're building a platform to automate processes when you're doing software documentation.

We live in a hacker house and we're surrounded by some world-class engineers working on cutting edge startups, but one of the biggest bottlenecks is software documentation. So we built Digital Brain to help solve this problem.

Digital Brain auto-generates your source code documentation and then provides a beautiful Notion-like interface to finish up with the documentation process — streamlining and recommending what to document when.

Here's a quick demo if you'd like to see it in action before trying us out:([https://bit.ly/3eGwCdG](https://bit.ly/3eGwCdG))

We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do like the concept, and we have struggled internally to document things. I am interested in it but the biggest thing missing for me is documentation. I can't really tell how to do it, so for me I am not really willing to try and connect and just figure out.

I do wish you luck and I think you are in the ballpark of something good here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Sorry we did not have a better CTA. Here's a one-minute form to help you get onboard: [https://bit.ly/3aoFAZO](https://bit.ly/3aoFAZO)

There's actually no need for documentation - we have a one-click integration to Github, where you'll click the repo and the documentation gets auto- generated. Excited to let you try it!

<comment><USER4> There is very much a need for documentation. I keep hearing "auto-generated" documentation, but I don't see what differentiates this from other tools that generate docs from code comments. Without more detailed information about what this tool does, there is no reason to pursue it further.

There are myriad questions that need answering with docs:

\- What does autogenerating documentation mean? (in my book, exposing code comments is not autogeneration so hopefully there is more)

\- When I edit function documentation does it also change the code comments? Vice versa?

\- How is the documentation version controlled?

\- How are multiple versions of a library documented?

\- What level of customization do I get? Just look at the Sphinx ecosystem for all of the things that people end up needing to customize.

\- The chore part of documentation is thinking about what to write and writing it so that it is easy to understand - does this actually help me here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One big thing that seems to be missing is what languages/frameworks does this tool support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, we're able to fully support Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So little information about what it is that I don't even want to waste time requesting early access.</comment>


What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html?c=y&story=fullstory

<comment><USER2> I'm reminded of the discussion of Joseph Weizenbaum in Pamela McCorduck's _Machines Who Think_.</comment>


Richard Stallman's lifestyle - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html <comment><USER2> While I don't agree with many of his ideas, it's admirable that someone is so adamant about following his ideas and not making compromises.

I strongly agree on his views about not having children though: [https://stallman.org/articles/children.html](https://stallman.org/articles/children.html)

<comment><USER3> At what cost?

If he didn't follow these artificial principles he would be much more widely known, spreading his message further and possibly making a difference in the fields he believes in most outside the tiny world of his closest research peers.

Instead, he's the equivalent of a digital hermit with a window due to his "no touch" views on privacy.

Everything he's done hints at a predilection towards severe risk aversion. And, in my opinion, it has hurt the world when we needed him the most.

<comment> no-s I think it's really the proper duty of everyone who understands to help protect intellectual freedoms. We don't need a popular cult of personality to make it work. His writings from 30 years ago are very relevant and prophetic even today, but like Ayn Rand people conflate the personality with the idea, an idea which stands on it's own merit when you separate it from Stallman. However he is amusingly charismatic, my entire family still remembers him from an FSF picnic roughly 20 years ago. Thankfully his publicist intercepted my wife before he could really get into it, but my daughter (who was 3-4 at the time) still vividly recalls his explanation of why he couldn't swim under water (might forget to how to breathe upon surfacing). Also my family paid me the highest compliment by afterwards describing Stallman as being "just like daddy"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting how many of these things come at the expense of others: he's not OK being tracked at stores, or on phones, but is OK enabling others to be tracked. He'll exasperate colleagues if it helps him learn a language more conveniently.

The "c...rap" thing is also not a good look.

<comment><USER5> I too dislike rap music. Why so aggressive? Why so angry? I'll pass on that.

<comment><USER6> Not all rap is angry and aggressive, just like not all rock is heavy metal. It's a global musical genre which can vary greatly in theme, tone and context. But the rap that is aggressive and angry is likely an expression of a culture that probably just doesn't apply to you. That doesn't make it bad, it just makes that particular subgenre of rap not for you.

You may like some of these other examples of rap:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf9OAFML_Eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf9OAFML_Eg) (Deltron 3030 - Mastermind)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-9uhUBKah8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-9uhUBKah8) (Sage Francis - Escape Artist)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEBGCOCxLgA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEBGCOCxLgA) (Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QljRe99OMCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QljRe99OMCU) (EUNG FREESTYLE (응프리스타일) - LIVE, SIK-K, PUNCHNELLO, OWEN OVADOZ, FLOWSIK)

<comment><USER5> Cool tunes, thanks for linking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I respect anyone who has deeply thought out their life and personal philosophy enough to write up such an article. I don't agree with everything he says (some of it is absolute nonsense to me), but that is exactly what makes it so compelling -- So many people don't take the time to step back and make conscious decisions about how they live heir lives, so it is refreshing to hear from someone who does.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read this article[1] a while ago and it seems he has a lot of time on his hands. It's very hard to come across a piece of tech that isn't proprietary, yet Stallman has a workaround in such cases(like how he accesses web pages from his machine). Is there anyone else who uses methods similar to those mentioned in the article?

[1] [https://stallman.org/stallman- computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> He could buy a burner cell phone, and not ask people to use their phones like a complete douchebag.

<comment><USER10> Burner phones need a SIM card, most countries' pre-paid cards require an ID on purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like how he calls rap c...rap. Such a brilliant mind.

</comment><comment><USER12> I broke at 'not smiling in photos'.

<comment><USER13> Hey, that's my stance as well! I'm from Eastern Europe and I don't think it was customary here until very recently (now things are changing as we become Americanized...) to smile in photographs. I too prefer to not create a fake, infantilized version of reality for the photo. For me, it's part of the American obsession/oppression of having to hide your real feelings and pretending to be happy and successful at all times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure his favourite text editor is emacs.</comment>


Analyzing Diaspora - <AUTHOR> http://jonchu.posterous.com/analyzing-diaspora

<comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

* I don't think that they are outsourcing the coding to Pivotal. I got the impression that Pivotal liked their idea and offerend to give (rent?) them office space and monitors and give (probably not for money) them some high-level guidance on how to manage the project and the major implementation details. I didn't really get the impression that Pivotal was writing code for them, save maybe "can you help me with this bug?" or the like. If anyone knows that I'm wrong, please correct me.

* I agree that Diaspora is almost certainly not going to topple Facebook. I think what they meant when they said they'd probably succeed is that they'd probably meet the deadlines they have set for themselves and have a product to release at the end of summer that does all the major things they were planning to have it do.

* If Diaspora does have any chance of catching on (beyond "catching on" in the Quroa sense where a whole bunch of tech-savvy people from the Valley use it and not too many others do), I think some kind of "DiasporaHub" site will have to come around. Someone that basically says "for free, we'll host you a Diaspora node with a forked version of Diaspora that's only different in that there are ads on the side. We promise never to access your data or otherwise violate your privacy." If some viable _free_ option comes along, it would at least have some chance.

* I highly doubt that every single Facebook employee can code.

<comment><USER3> I majorly agree with you.

Also, I can't help but get feelings of the author being too critical and dismissive. Is this because the Diaspora folks got a lot of initial funding from their petition? Or is it the author's own ego? Either way, the article gives me a nagging feeling of superiority.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did get the feeling I was being a little over belligerent. I was just extremely angry that the general public is so caught up in the hype that they failed to see the major failure points. $200,000 is a lot of money that could have been put to better use (such as charity or donated to OSS) instead of being wasted on a project that's business model contradicts its reason for existence.

<comment><USER4> The original commenter has pointed out all of the technical issues I see with your post, minus the tone. I felt you were overly harsh. I can understand being frustrated with the situation, but, come on... in 3 months it will either die away or they will have succeeded (for some amount of success) and we can easily move on with our lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Facebook. A CEO that's proven that he understands technology. A team where > every single engineer is brilliant. A company where every single person > including sales, design, and business employees, can code.

Talk about putting Facebook on a pedestal. Especially that last sentence. Where the hell did that come from?

<comment><USER6> When I interviewed with facebook, I was told that every person in the company knew how to code so that if someone had a cool idea, they didn't have to wait for an engineer to implement it.

<comment><USER5> Wow. I know people at Facebook who don't know how to code. And that's fine, they are business types. Seems really disingenuous for Facebook to claim that during interviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, what's the point of questioning how good they are at coding if it's going to be open sourced by the time anyone can use it?

Also, I think you misunderstand how the node model is supposed to work: one node is going to support multiple user accounts. More like OpenID than pure peer to peer.

Also, who cares about what Facebook is doing? This represents an entirely different operational model.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the author is missing a key point... these guys are letting you own your own data, whether you host it on your own server or on a wordpress.com- like shared host. Presumably since you control the database your info is in, you can easily export it (and your friends') or extend it as you wish.

I don't see how the author can ignore that point. Data portability is a key driver for Diaspora.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't ignored. The point was that if its on a worpress.com-like host, someone still has control of your data that isn't you. What's the different if its on a wordpress.com-like host or if its on Facebook? Someone else still has control and a copy of your stuff.

<comment><USER8> It was ignored. The point is not who can see your data (privacy), the point is whether or not you can take your data and move it elsewhere (portability).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the analysis is great but not factual. To assume that they're not good coder, or even coders is just based on nothing. Do you know that for a fact?

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope they be a lot clever and end up with something different than they are proposing, otherwise they will just burn cash and time.

The founders don't look any hacky.

<comment><USER11> How do you look "hacky"?

<comment><USER12> Step 1: cut a hole in a box...

<comment><USER6> Step 2: put your junk in that box...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thinking Machine 6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bewitched.com/chess/ <comment><USER2> In one of my games the computer castled while in check, so the rules engine needs a little bit of improvement...</comment>