[HN Gopher] This Video Has X Views
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This Video Has X Views
Author : sususu
Score : 212 points
Date : 2020-04-06 23:22 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| akubera wrote:
| I'm reminded of this little gem: https://hookrace.net/time.gif
|
| (Relevant post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715)
|
| But on the topic: is there actually a dearth of APIs "these days"
| vs peak Web-2.0, or have the major players just restricted theirs
| due to abuse, and thus it seems like the whole world of
| possibilities have veen restricted? One can easily find lists of
| public apis (e.g https://github.com/n0shake/Public-APIs), but
| perhaps the video was more about the facilitators, like Yahoo
| Pipes.
| diggan wrote:
| Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 ("Show
| HN: This up votes itself") which I came across right after
| joining HN and really set the tone for what HN is really all
| about, for me. Thanks olalonde :)
| libria wrote:
| > really set the tone for what HN is really all about, for me
|
| Can't tell if you're referring to clever hacks or upvote
| farming, but I agree!
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| Web 2.0 was a big heart of love.
|
| :(
| stickfigure wrote:
| The voice, oratorical flourishes, and narrative style really
| remind me of James Burke's Connections. "And that's why I chose
| to film this here..." Delightful!
| atomwaffel wrote:
| You'll enjoy the rest of his videos then. He's one of the few
| Youtubers whose videos I watch regularly. In addition to being
| interesting, I always find them well-researched, well-produced
| and exactly as long as they need to be without any fluff or
| clickbait.
| jinushaun wrote:
| You should watch his other videos. He often comes up as
| recommended for me. I think it's the accent and the cadence of
| his speech that is so appealing.
| bparsons wrote:
| The title was exactly correct
| danbruc wrote:
| _If it 's actually spot on, it's a miracle._
|
| I got the counter and the title both showing 3,690,744 when I
| first opened the link - so how unlikely is this actually?
| Probably not really too unlikely. Or I got really lucky.
|
| EDIT: Thinking about it, as YouTube probably updates the view
| count only every couple of seconds or minutes it might actually
| be spot on most of the time if the title gets updated at about
| the same frequency.
| duxup wrote:
| Same here, they matched.
| kube-system wrote:
| YouTube's view counts update at a notoriously slow rate. It's
| not hard to find new videos with more likes/dislikes than
| views.
| diggan wrote:
| > new videos with more likes/dislikes than views
|
| That doesn't mean that the view counter is slow. Views are
| only counted when you watch the video for X seconds (or
| percentage complete, can't remember) while you can
| like/dislike the video by going to the page, clicking the
| like/dislike then close the page before the view would even
| count.
| thomasahle wrote:
| I think his point was more that it won't increase every time
| you refresh the page.
|
| But then neither will the actual view counter.
| gh123man wrote:
| Same here. However I think that the way he is communicating
| information in this video is meant to capture your attention
| not just now, but when this video is visited months or years
| from now.
|
| It will be very cool for viewers to stumble across this video
| when it doesn't work, effectively proving his point.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| My guess is it's more likely some YouTube employees hacked
| around this as a show of "support" for YouTubers?
| diggan wrote:
| More likely they have a cache for the views with a longer
| expiration time set than the update interval of Scott's
| script.
| darkstar999 wrote:
| That's what I thought too. He probably got a rate limit
| lifted.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That's unnecessary. The slower the view count updates (and
| it's very slow), then the more likely the title is to be
| correct.
| donatj wrote:
| I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden
| age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I
| still long for this time.
|
| I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API
| with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of
| all of my data.
|
| I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds
| through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to
| English, just for kicks.
|
| My friend seemed very skeptical such a time ever existed.
| duxup wrote:
| It reminds me distantly of an earlier time when just the web
| was sort of owned ... by the web folk.
|
| In the sense that even corporate sites if you found it would
| have a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that
| mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic. Some sort
| of character or tidbit before any of the branding drones were
| really aware of the web. All just because the 'webmaster' was
| the only one really in charge / who understood the site was
| even there and they wanted to share.
|
| I suspect to some extent the APIs were the same. Someone who
| really didn't mind was all "Yeah sure if someone wants to see
| what I did.. awesome."
| diggan wrote:
| > I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS
| feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before
| back to English, just for kicks.
|
| Yahoo Pipes was one of the greatest services I used, just when
| I started getting into programming. Maybe it was so cool
| because I was naive, but I really miss being able to pipe
| services together in the same way. Anyone know of any similar
| attempts that is open source + offers a hosted version with
| paid plans?
| zwily wrote:
| I don't, but Node Red is giving me the same fun feeling I had
| with Yahoo Pipes, but for Home Automation.
| onli wrote:
| Not sure about open source and paid hosting, but there is
| node-red, https://nodered.org/, which is open source and easy
| to get started with. Combining stuff is something Zapier
| excels in, https://zapier.com/, and the free tier can suffice
| for some tasks (not open source). You could also try my
| attempt at a spiritual pipes successor,
| https://www.pipes.digital/ (but it's also not open source).
| If there is something missing there to reproduce how you used
| Yahoo Pipes I'd definitely be interested in hearing from you,
| so I can restore it :)
| diggan wrote:
| So, the requirements of open-source + have entity with paid
| hosting are both equally important. First one to ensure I
| can continue using whatever I setup on the hosting, in case
| the entity behind it cannot. And the paid hosting is
| important because it gives better odds towards the service
| actually sticking around.
|
| What I likes with Yahoo Pipes compared to NodeRED (at least
| as far as I looked at NodeRED, I might be wrong) is that
| Yahoo Pipes worked out-of-the-box with services out of the
| box. I seem to remember that you could use the Google
| Search API for example, with Yahoo Pipes and pipe that into
| other things. That's what Zapier does as well, but with
| less flexibility than NodeRED.
|
| So I guess my dream would be something like the
| integrations provided by Zapier but with the UI and
| flexibility of NodeRED.
|
| Haven't seen pipes.digital before, I'll take a look as it
| looks interesting, but for anything serious, open source is
| a hard requirement (gotta learn from the Yahoo Pipes
| history :) )
| r-w wrote:
| I don't think those requirements will be met until people
| like us who miss it put our money where our mouth is ;)
| routerl wrote:
| I haven't used it but https://n8n.io/
|
| It reminds me of zapier, which reminds me of Yahoo pipes.
| ivanfon wrote:
| From a quick search, it looks like someone is recreating
| Yahoo Pipes here: https://www.pipes.digital/
|
| Unfortunately, it looks like it's not open-source, their
| Github repo is only for bug reports:
| https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes
| cjhopman wrote:
| There are 3 big problems with open APIs
|
| 1. they enable people to do things that other people think
| shouldn't be done
|
| 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens
|
| 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting
| apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think you are missing what is probably the biggest factor:
| they can be very expensive to run if successful.
|
| If you create a popular API, people are going to find
| creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be
| automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that
| many users.
|
| There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on,
| because the people writing apps that consume the API have no
| incentive to moderate their usage, or try to be efficient.
|
| Since the company that is providing this API is paying for
| the resources to run it, they can quickly get very expensive.
| Unless there is a clear financial benefit for allowing it to
| continue, most companies will shut them down eventually.
| ericflo wrote:
| The framing of open APIs disappearing because of bad actors
| doesn't ring true to me. In my view, the golden age of APIs
| disappeared one-by-one as tech companies realized they won
| their respective markets and consolidated their power.
| amatecha wrote:
| Heck yeah! Years ago I had a nice little feed of my latest
| Tweets and Flickr photos on my personal website! It was fun
| incorporating them cleanly/seamlessly into my custom design.
| One day I'll get my site going again and have fun stuff like
| that -- if the 3rd party APIs even allow it these days :P hehe
| dylan604 wrote:
| "OK Boomer!"
|
| One of the core tenets with the internet was information wanted
| to be free (as a bird). Then the evilCorps realized they could
| monetize information, and there went the free access. The
| information is less valuable if anyone can access it.
| pevezzac wrote:
| I also remember vividly those optimistic times. You should show
| this video to your friend as proof:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
| [deleted]
| anonytrary wrote:
| I remember when you could just stream in every tweet and reddit
| comment ever posted with a few lines of code. There used to be
| dedicated API methods for doing so. Now, there's all sorts of
| namespacing, rate limiting, pagination, and upper bounds on
| data access that make this impossible, or at least infeasible.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Despite that the video starts with
|
| _" The title of this video won't be exactly right. [..] If it's
| actually a 100% spot on it's a miracle"_
|
| the title _was_ exactly right when I saw it the first time. I
| even screenshotted it.
|
| I also wondered if it would work on HN. Is there a limit on the
| number of times you can edit a title on HN? Obviously there isn't
| on Youtube, which I find quite surprising.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| It's apparently very common to see it be exactly right. My
| guess is that YouTube is doing enough batch/cache/snapshot
| magic to view counts, and applying the scheme equally to the
| web UI and API, such that it's not actually necessary for the
| script to poll super-frequently.
| [deleted]
| djhworld wrote:
| I really liked this video, it highlights that a lot of software
| we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop
| working.
|
| The frequently updating title thing is cute, it'll be interesting
| to see what dies first - YouTube pulling the "title update API"
| or Tom's script running wherever he's put it
| travisjungroth wrote:
| _All_ the software we write is ephemeral and will one day
| either be retired or stop working.
| diggan wrote:
| That's a grand assumption :) Who knows whos GitHub code will
| be included in the "Big MasterScript" that is written into
| the consciousness of the universe in the future, making it
| forever.
|
| I know, far out there and in theory, I agree with you,
| everything is temporary and nothing is forever. But who
| knows, maybe in the future, things will no longer be
| ephemeral.
| sjilo wrote:
| Probably left-pad
| solarkraft wrote:
| Like ourselves and the rest of the universe.
| romwell wrote:
| You can say that about anything we do.
|
| However, at my previous job I integrated an LFBGS[1]
| implementation into our production code.
|
| That was written in the early 80s in Fortran '77.
|
| The code outlived all hardware that it ran on when it was
| first written (we ran it on an OpenMP cluster for a
| scientific-computing problem related to lithographic mask
| optimization), if not its authors.
|
| It will continue to exist, and run, for a very long time.
|
| Sure, all software is ephemeral. But as you say so, you
| probably used SciPy/NumPy. Deep inside, there's an
| implementation of LAPACK/BLAS doing the heavy lifting for
| you[2]. It started in 1979, and is still kicking.
|
| (And it's still in FORTRAN)
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprog
| ra...
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Unless you're a game developer! Lots of people are still
| playing Super Mario Brothers daily! They're running it in an
| emulator now, most probably, but all of the original code is
| doing the work.
|
| Obviously it won't outlast the heat death of the universe or
| anything, but I'd say it's has the potential to live as long
| as any other human creation.
| wil421 wrote:
| I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents
| basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off
| on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy.
|
| Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile
| games. Let alone be able to play them.
|
| Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?
| saagarjha wrote:
| The will once emulating an iPhone is something that people
| can feasibly do. While there's been commercial interest in
| this area, it's not widely available yet.
| itzael wrote:
| This is what I experienced with Tap Tap Revenge on iOS. What
| used to be one of the highlights of iPhone and iPod touch
| gaming was eventually bought out by Disney, ported to Android
| (poorly), and then phased out. Luckily, users had dumped some
| of the song packs and put then online, and with some reverse
| engineering and hooking, you could swap the game's server
| endpoint with a custom one and play it again. This was my
| main side project in high school junior/senior year and a
| highlight in my college application.
|
| Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple's
| discontinuation of 32bit apps.
| amatecha wrote:
| I have a huge folder of iOS apps, but.. unfortunately in I
| think iOS 9 or so, Apple made it so backing up your iPhone
| stopped backing up the applications, and I believe made it
| impossible to install applications from your hard drive
| backups (that may have happened in a later iOS version - I
| forget). Meaning... iOS apps are now simply unrecoverable
| once they aren't on App Store anymore. Good thing I have a
| couple old iPhones which actually allow installing these old
| backed up applications. Even then, the entire ecosystem is
| completely reliant on internet authentication to even install
| the OS, so if your phone needs to be restored -- good luck.
| Very sad times, indeed.
|
| Yeah the personal effect of this for me is, I can't show
| people the song I had in Tap Tap Revenge anymore. I do have
| an old iPhone that still has it installed, but it's not like
| I carry that around with me. The app is no longer on App
| Store and I thus could never install it on my newer iPhone,
| nor restore my backed up copy to it (and even if I could
| restore it, it wouldn't run anyways because of the breaking
| of backwards compatibility in recent iOS updates). Overall, a
| whole ton of user-hostile product choices in the iOS
| ecosystem, sadly. Not the Apple I grew up with, where I could
| modify anything to my heart's content (ResEdit, anyone?)...
| slg wrote:
| Some of those NES and Gameboy games might not work as
| originally intended. Lots of them had internal batteries in
| order to save information and those batteries are starting to
| die. Floppies from that era and early CDs are also at the age
| in which they are likely to degrade. So while some of this
| old tech might have a longer shelf life than tech today, as
| the video says, entropy will get us all in the end.
| makapuf wrote:
| Well you can still download the rom and the machine is
| fully emulated, forever. Not sure there is a way to play
| geometry wars in any fashion. Besides batteries can be
| replaced and even then you'll miss your high scores but
| you'll still be able to play.
| function_seven wrote:
| > _Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite
| mobile games. Let alone be able to play them._
|
| I'm already feeling the pain of this. There was a game for
| iOS called GeoDefense (and a sister game, GeoDefense Swarm).
| To this day these were my favorite games on the phone. But
| iOS 10 ended support for one of them, then a later OS update
| bricked the other one.
|
| The developer hasn't updated these games to work in new iOS,
| so they're lost to time.
|
| If I had a time machine, I would go back and warn past-Me to
| reserve a 4S for just playing these games.
| function_seven wrote:
| Sorry for self-reply , but hopefully someone out there can
| point me to some similar tower-defense games? Everything I
| see on the app store now is bloated with graphics or IAP
| and shitty gameplay. If you're familiar with the GeoDefense
| games[0], you know what I'm talking about.
|
| [0] http://www.criticalthoughtgames.com/geodefense.html
| jldugger wrote:
| I have a humble bundle set of android APKs I think.
| def8cefe wrote:
| It's pretty easy to backup and install Android apps to/from a
| file.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either
| be retired or stop working.
|
| You're giving me a lot of credit by implying the software I
| write works to begin with! Can we hurry up and get to the day
| with software like Facebook and Twitter stop working?
| ggambetta wrote:
| This would be noteworthy if the counter was included _in the
| video_ (like the similar video that shows its own URL [0]). But
| as it is, it 's just the title that changes to match the number
| of views, so... not much to see here.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20452013
| danpalmer wrote:
| You seem to have missed that this is a science-communication
| video aimed to help lay-people understand APIs, standards,
| online abuse, privacy issues, and how automation is playing
| into the issues we have in society stemming from social media.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I don't think that changes the fact that the gimmick, that
| gives the name to the video and the submission in HN, is
| pretty unimpressive.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Who said it has to be impressive? It's simply something fun
| that relates to the deeper dive he takes in the video.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I'd go further and say that it needs to be simple above
| all else, to help communicate the message. Confusing that
| with the ideas of video editing/compositing and uploading
| would make the message less effective.
| grecy wrote:
| I imagine it's possible to update the counter as closed
| captions for the video....
| dom96 wrote:
| > This would be noteworthy if the counter was included in the
| video
|
| Pretty sure that would be impossible, unless I am missing
| something.
| a3r0 wrote:
| I was thinking it would be a video counting from 0 to 1
| million or whatever. Combined with a service to redirect you
| to the video at the correct timestamp using YouTube's
| "t=1m23s" parameter.
|
| But 10 hours of video with 1s timestamp parameter resolution
| would only get you up to 36000
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately Youtube doesn't let you edit videos, which
| sucks for creators who want to fix minor mistakes after a
| video has gone viral.
|
| You can, however, add and edit "cards" on top of the video.
|
| On another note, it would be noteworthy if the title on
| Hacker News also included the counter.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| If such a feature existed, it would be used for abuse 99%
| of the time
| dheera wrote:
| Vimeo does have such a feature. The ability to do such
| could be based on karma on YouTube.
| dheera wrote:
| Another downvote? Really? For factual information?
|
| https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360000817648-Rep...
|
| Geez, HN has become worse than reddit.
| icebraining wrote:
| Maybe they aren't downvoting for the fact, but they
| disagree with you that tying to karma solves the problem.
| dheera wrote:
| Uh, why the downvote? Can HN institute a policy that a
| reply is required if you downvote?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You're just farming more downvotes by clearly being
| affected by them and then complaining about them.
|
| If this is how you respond to pointless vote counts, I
| would avoid revisiting comments after you leave them for
| the sake of your mental health.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| -1
| gpm wrote:
| > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
|
| > Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning
| into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the
| hills.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jshevek wrote:
| It is fortunate, not unfortunate, that YouTube prevents
| editing of the video itself after a video has been
| uploaded, viewed, interacted with, shared, commented on,
| and started to accumulate karma of various sorts.
| ianferrel wrote:
| I didn't leave a downvote, but that sounds like a
| horrible policy. You'd get a ton of short comments on the
| least-valuable (as judged by voters) comments, bloating
| the comment tree and making it way less readable.
| iso947 wrote:
| It's sucks for them (and their viewers). It doesn't suck
| for viewers who want to see the thing that went viral - not
| some new video with product placement etc.
| baddox wrote:
| It would start out working fine at zero.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I agree, but when someone does something we consider to be
| impossible, that's interesting and noteworthy. This, not so
| much.
| xwdv wrote:
| That would be spooky, we would hire an engineer like that on
| the spot due to the cross-domain knowledge required.
| hugs wrote:
| As the founder of one of the screen-scraping tools he alluded to
| in the video (Selenium), I just want to say the video has one of
| the best explanations for the difference between automating a
| process through a user interface vs an API. In the end, entropy
| always gets you, but you can push it off a little bit longer if
| there's an API.
| Madmallard wrote:
| Thank you for your work sir. I love Selenium.
| hugs wrote:
| It's a team effort! I'm more of a fan and advocate for the
| project these days.
| thatguyagain wrote:
| Amazing work!
| tonydiv wrote:
| I want to make an Instagram that will only ever have 42 followers
| ;)
| diggan wrote:
| Instagram has one of the least interesting APIs of all popular
| services, with basically just 2 GET endpoints or something. So
| if you do want to build this, you're gonna have to do a lot of
| reverse-engineering of the smartphone application. Probably a
| fun project on just it's own.
| TomMckenny wrote:
| >If it's actually spot on, it's a miracle.
|
| Not that it matters, but I think Tom may have gotten this wrong.
| If his code is invoked many times faster than google updates it's
| video count then the odds of seeing an exact match in the total
| is proportional to that difference.
|
| Which, ironically, means it's using even more cycles than
| necessary to do his intentionally silly trick, further proving
| his point.
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(page generated 2020-04-07 23:00 UTC)