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This Video Has X Views
- ggambetta 6y agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20452013
- danpalmer 6y agoYou 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoWho said it has to be impressive? It's simply something fun that relates to the deeper dive he takes in the video.
- danpalmer 6y agoI'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.
- dom96 6y ago> This would be noteworthy if the counter was included in the video Pretty sure that would be impossible, unless I am missing something.
- dheera 6y agoYeah 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.
- dheera 6y agoUh, why the downvote? Can HN institute a policy that a reply is required if you downvote?
- ianferrel 6y agoI 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.
- NoodleIncident 6y ago-1
- jshevek 6y agoIt 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.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoYou'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.
- xwdv 6y agoThat would be spooky, we would hire an engineer like that on the spot due to the cross-domain knowledge required.
- grecy 6y agoI imagine it's possible to update the counter as closed captions for the video....
- danbruc 6y agoIf 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.
- gh123man 6y agoSame 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 6y agoMy guess is it's more likely some YouTube employees hacked around this as a show of "support" for YouTubers?
- diggan 6y agoMore likely they have a cache for the views with a longer expiration time set than the update interval of Scott's script.
- darkstar999 6y agoThat's what I thought too. He probably got a rate limit lifted.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoThat's unnecessary. The slower the view count updates (and it's very slow), then the more likely the title is to be correct.
- thomasahle 6y agoI think his point was more that it won't increase every time you refresh the page. But then neither will the actual view counter.
- donatj 6y agoI 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- diggan 6y ago> 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 6y agoI don’t, but Node Red is giving me the same fun feeling I had with Yahoo Pipes, but for Home Automation.
- onli 6y agoNot sure about open source and paid hosting, but there is node-red, https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/, which is open source and easy to get started with. Combining stuff is something Zapier excels in, https://zapier.com/ 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/ 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 :)
- weinzierl 6y agoDespite 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 6y agoIt'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.
- flingo 6y agoOr, someone at youtube saw the video and thought it was cool. Like how this video will always have 301 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redisman 6y agoThe view count is definitely cached for some second at a time. Part of me wonders if that statement is just part of the viral-magic of this video. No way! He said it would be a miracle!
- PudgePacket 6y agoPretty sure only hn admins can edit a title.
- weinzierl 6y agoUsers can too, at least I can, but probably there is a karma threshold.
- djhworld 6y agoI 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 6y agoAll the software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.
- diggan 6y agoThat'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 6y agoProbably left-pad
- solarkraft 6y agoLike ourselves and the rest of the universe.
- sneak 6y agoI think that thinking this way is a coping mechanism in response to the massive loss of control we experience being subject to the whims of giant corporate platforms deciding what we can and cannot run on our own devices. The alternative is to face how insanely unfair and belittling it is to have bought an app and a device and due to circumstances out of your control arbitrarily no longer be permitted to run “your” app on “your” device.
- TomMckenny 6y ago>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.
- diggan 6y agoReminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 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 6y ago> 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!
- bparsons 6y agoThe title was exactly correct
- hugs 6y agoAs 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 6y agoThank you for your work sir. I love Selenium.
- hugs 6y agoIt's a team effort! I'm more of a fan and advocate for the project these days.
- thatguyagain 6y agoAmazing work!
- Mandatum 6y agoIntroducing Selenium to testing teams has been a complete game-changers for a lot of organisations I work with. Often traditional orgs will assume you can't automate front-end testing because it requires a user to go through all of these processes in different front-end SaaS apps. It's literally saved hundreds of man-hours across the organisations I've introduced it to and allowed the project teams to focus on features and reporting instead of testing. Thank you!
- azemetre 6y agoI got my first job in software writing selenium code, your library literally changed my and my family's life. Your work has had a huge impact in my career and life.
- joshfraser 6y agoI love and use Selenium all the time. Thank you!
- tonydiv 6y agoI want to make an Instagram that will only ever have 42 followers ;)
- diggan 6y agoInstagram 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.
- kuu 6y agoYou could automate something in their m.instagram.com site with selenium :)
- diggan 6y agoGuessing they are redirecting to instagram.com based on user-agent or something, because I end up on the lame read-only desktop website. Does m.instagram.com allow you to post content and everything the mobile app allows you to do?
- kuu 6y agoSorry for the late answer. I can post content from m.instagram.com if I change the user-agent as you mention, but this is quite easy to do with the browser default dev-tools, just press F12 and change the device to any mobile. I think the only thing it does not work is the stories.
- akubera 6y agoI'm reminded of this little gem: https://hookrace.net/time.gif https://hookrace.net/time.gif (Relevant post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715 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 https://github.com/n0shake/Public-APIs), but perhaps the video was more about the facilitators, like Yahoo Pipes.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWhat the GitHub list doesn't show is the amount of APIs that require you to enter a relationship with the API provider. APIs I can just point my script at to get data are fun and useful for mashups. APIs where I have to sign a contract with someone are only worth it in rare cases, or if I need them for a business.
- stickfigure 6y agoThe 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 6y agoYou’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 6y agoYou 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.
- smcl 6y agoI don't know if it's accidental or learned but he's really nailed the speech style of typical BBC documentary programming. Either way, his videos are generally very good and entertaining
- HugoDaniel 6y agoWeb 2.0 was a big heart of love. :(
- LilBytes 6y agoIn the opening snapshot of his code when the video starts, Tom's referencing a URL to YouTube which takes you to, you guessed it, a Rick Roll. :)
- jachee 6y agoMy twitter bot, @fiveobot[0], lives on, within a `screen` session on my VPS. Its time zone and geographical data are both at least 2years out of date, but I'd have to adapt new tools, or hook into APIs that will eventually fail to access up-to-date data. I made it for an audience of one, and I'm still amused by it, today. [0] https://github.com/jachee/fiveobot https://github.com/jachee/fiveobot
- cryptonector 6y agohttps://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- Sargos 6y agoThis "open APIs" feeling where you can build and mash up all kinds of services together to build cool things is how writing apps on Ethereum feels right now. All of the data and functions of other people's contracts are on chain and available to you for use in whatever way you want to use it. It's very powerful and makes developing fun again for me. As an example there is a project called Maker which produces a stablecoin called Dai which is pegged to $1. Another project called Compound took Dai and used it without asking anyone at Maker to create automatic loans where you can put in money and get interest automatically. A third project, Pool Together, started using Compound, again without asking, to pool everyone's funds together for a month and give the interest earned to one winner as a "no-loss lottery". I bet in a few months something will be built on top of Pool Together as well. None of these teams needed to work together or ask permission. They just built cool things. An added bonus is that these projects can't be turned off by anyone which means Pool Together can trust that their app will work next year just fine, which isn't really something you can rely on in Web 2.0. It's a very exciting time for composability and neat experiments and I'm looking forward to what else will be built.
- minton 6y agoPool Together is sponsored by Maker.
- ajayyy 6y agoI guess one big difference is who is paying the fee. In an ethereum "app", the code stays dormant until a user interacts with it and pays a transaction fee.
- xu_ituairo 6y agoYeah, interaction with Ethereum APIs costs a little bit instead of being completely free, but that’s what makes it sustainable, I think. As a result Ethereum apps/platforms don’t need to be centrally owned or become ad-supported and won’t die when its maintainers vanish. This also serves to stop abuse like spam, which would become too expensive to perpetrate. Free apps and APIs were a good way to bootstrap wide internet adoption, but I think users might now be comfortable paying fair nominal fees for interactions instead of dealing with free ad-filled, privacy-invading services.
- Paraesthetic 6y agoI love Tom Scott's videos. He does a fantastic job of explaining complex things in a simple way.
- enjoyyourlife 6y agoReminds me of the CGP Grey video that shows how much the video made in ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo)
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- mav3rick 6y agoWtf. Didn't expect to see Govinda on HN
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- in9 6y agoDoes anyone know of some reading material on "entropy will get us all" perspective? What does entropy mean in this sense?
- flingo 6y agoheat death of the universe.
- 0xcde4c3db 6y agoIf you're into sci-fi short stories, Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" [1] is more or less the story about this, although it's heavier on the twist ending aspect and lighter on the solving-the-problem-in-reality aspect. [1] https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- nayuki 6y agoSpeaking of the YouTube view count, Tom Scott also did a great explanation on distributed computing and eventual consistency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY_2gElt3SA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY_2gElt3SA "Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes" And here's a video from Computerphile about overflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0Rl6Ne5C8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0Rl6Ne5C8 "How Gangnam Style Broke YouTube"
- stursby 6y agoIf anyone is curious, I took a crack at building out a bot that does this with Node.js and the YouTube Data API! (https://github.com/stursby/this-video-has-x-views https://github.com/stursby/this-video-has-x-views)