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The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also h

The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. It's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit, its a timestamps worth in fact... /pedant

hk__2 6y ago
> The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. t's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit. It’s still one bit. The time is not part of the transmission.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Time is absolutely part of the transmission. It matters when you say "Hi" to someone. Differently timed "Hi"'s can say different things. Even if you repeat "Hi" many times, it's still just "Hi" but the amount of them also matters and becomes part of the transmission when looking at all of them together. I feel like many, especially developers, fail to see what is in between the data to matter as well as the data itself. Seems like a common hole to fall into.
  - admax88q 6y ago
    If we're in different locations and we run a wire between us, and I send a single pulse down the wire. That's one bit of information. You as the receiver derive the other relevant information from that. A timestamp was not encoded and transmitted, a single bit (pulse) was transmitted from me to you. That's the thesis of the article I believe. That single bit can "carry" a lot of additional information due to the context and understanding of the receiver. Information that wasn't actually transmitted in the message, but derived from it.
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      That’s not one bit of information. If there is only one possible message you can send, there’s zero bits in the message itself. One bit would be if you had two messages to choose from. All the information in Yo is in the timing.
      - hk__2 6y ago
        Timing is the context, not the information actually transmitted.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        You do have two messages to choose from. One is no message, the other is a message.
        SamReidHughes 6y ago
        In that case you have 1 bit per nanosecond of information, or however frequently you want to model sampling the message, not 1 bit of information. I mean ultimately you need to somehow map the sequence of Yo messages into "information" in a fairly precise manner. Receiving the message takes you from one probability distribution about the world -- or some particular question about the world -- to a smaller probability distribution. I'd describe the information the message carries based on that. It's contingent on what the question is.
  - stevenhuang 6y ago
    More accurate to say time can be derived from the transmission. It's still not a part of it. Your latter contribution misses the mark by failing to consider that you all might just be talking past each other, arguing over semantics. That's the most common hole to fall into. It's a 1 bit transmission with the ever-present time side-channel.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit. Someone receiving a PCAP with the data would not get more than 1 bit of information. However, you're also right that the people sending and receiving the bit can derive more information from it.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit. I don't understand the argument here. In order to get up to one bit of information, you need to take account of the fact that "yo" is only sent at particular times. If you ignore that fact, sending "yo" provides exactly zero bits of information, because it is the only possible message. All of the information content comes from the existence of the message; none of it comes from the contents. So in order to claim that there's any information present at all, you have to admit that time of sending carries information. The amount of information carried then depends on the duration over which messages might have been transmitted, since that possibility is what imbues information into messages that are transmitted. It also imbues information into messages that aren't transmitted, unless you believe that a binary message of 01000110 transmits just 3, and not 8, bits of information.
      - stevenhuang 6y ago
        It's called a side channel. The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit. I'm not sure how you're calculating this, but it is obviously wrong. The information conveyed by the contents of a message is the log of the number of possible messages. Here, there is one possible message. The log of one is zero. There's a big difference between one bit of information and zero. You can interpret a "yo" message as conveying one bit of information, and the only way to do that is to draw it from the contrast between "sending a yo" and "not sending a yo". If you do that, "sending a yo" sends one bit of information, and "not sending a yo" also sends one bit of information. Thought experiment: with three bits of information, you can disambiguate between eight possibilities. Try to design a protocol in which, by sending up to three "yo"s, you achieve 8 distinct messages.
- ericjang 6y ago
  It is widely believed by neuroscientists that spike timing in animal brains (whether by aggregate rate or by individual spikes) does the majority of information encoding.
- wave_function 6y ago
  I’d argue that choosing the time to send a “yo” constitutes log2(N) bits, where N is the number of times the yo could have been sent (It’s not quite an integer but you might say resolution faster than a minute is irrelevant and call N the number of minutes). Not much, but still more than one.
sixstringtheory 6y ago
“now!” would be just a timestamp. Any additional message content adds context, so your assertion is wrong.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  That was his point, right? A yo-train is just an array of increasing timestamps tied to the sender and the recipient: { to: 12, from: 15, messages: [ 1604885969953, 1604885969964, 1604885969973, ... ] } The message is "factored out" and contains no information since it's the same every time.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    >increasing timestamps Bold assumption :)
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    You’re talking about the implementation but ignoring that Yo is an extension of people’s communication in a dynamic environment. For instance, I bet more Yos were sent during the election. Most Yo users are not performing code reviews when sending and receiving Yos.
btrask 6y ago
Guys, I worked it out. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle/Fourier conjugate. Let's say you send a yo now, and then you're going to send another one in 5 minutes. Then you decide to send a third in between. How much information does it contain? Less than a full timestamp's worth, because the timing is constrained. Once you are sending yo's at the maximum line rate (certainly at least every nanosecond, it's such a critical piece of infrastructure), sending or not sending an individual yo is down to one bit of information. The time component is basically completely gone. In other words, you cannot know the precise position of a yo at the same time as knowing the precise momentum.
maguay 6y ago
Author here—this is the best part of HN. I perhaps took the idea too far. Any iOS push notification can be up to 4kb, and Yo’s API shows that each Yo includes a created time, sender name, avatar, User ID, message status, and more. That’s for traditional Yo’s; newer ones can include a location or link or RSS feed item for a news update, which goes far beyond the core concept. So on a technical level absolutely, a Yo is far more than bit. Conceptually though a single ping—a single bit—could contain the same information, like a single dot telegram, with you or your local device recording the time received. If you only Yo’d with one other person, the time and the sender and the message they intended to convey would all be data points you would assemble in your head with the ping to get the full information. Anyhow. That’s perhaps taking the idea too far :)

hk__2 6y ago

> The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. t's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit. It’s still one bit. The time is not part of the transmission.

capableweb 6y ago
Time is absolutely part of the transmission. It matters when you say "Hi" to someone. Differently timed "Hi"'s can say different things. Even if you repeat "Hi" many times, it's still just "Hi" but the amount of them also matters and becomes part of the transmission when looking at all of them together. I feel like many, especially developers, fail to see what is in between the data to matter as well as the data itself. Seems like a common hole to fall into.
- admax88q 6y ago
  If we're in different locations and we run a wire between us, and I send a single pulse down the wire. That's one bit of information. You as the receiver derive the other relevant information from that. A timestamp was not encoded and transmitted, a single bit (pulse) was transmitted from me to you. That's the thesis of the article I believe. That single bit can "carry" a lot of additional information due to the context and understanding of the receiver. Information that wasn't actually transmitted in the message, but derived from it.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    That’s not one bit of information. If there is only one possible message you can send, there’s zero bits in the message itself. One bit would be if you had two messages to choose from. All the information in Yo is in the timing.
    - hk__2 6y ago
      Timing is the context, not the information actually transmitted.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      You do have two messages to choose from. One is no message, the other is a message.
      - SamReidHughes 6y ago
        In that case you have 1 bit per nanosecond of information, or however frequently you want to model sampling the message, not 1 bit of information. I mean ultimately you need to somehow map the sequence of Yo messages into "information" in a fairly precise manner. Receiving the message takes you from one probability distribution about the world -- or some particular question about the world -- to a smaller probability distribution. I'd describe the information the message carries based on that. It's contingent on what the question is.
- stevenhuang 6y ago
  More accurate to say time can be derived from the transmission. It's still not a part of it. Your latter contribution misses the mark by failing to consider that you all might just be talking past each other, arguing over semantics. That's the most common hole to fall into. It's a 1 bit transmission with the ever-present time side-channel.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit. Someone receiving a PCAP with the data would not get more than 1 bit of information. However, you're also right that the people sending and receiving the bit can derive more information from it.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit. I don't understand the argument here. In order to get up to one bit of information, you need to take account of the fact that "yo" is only sent at particular times. If you ignore that fact, sending "yo" provides exactly zero bits of information, because it is the only possible message. All of the information content comes from the existence of the message; none of it comes from the contents. So in order to claim that there's any information present at all, you have to admit that time of sending carries information. The amount of information carried then depends on the duration over which messages might have been transmitted, since that possibility is what imbues information into messages that are transmitted. It also imbues information into messages that aren't transmitted, unless you believe that a binary message of 01000110 transmits just 3, and not 8, bits of information.
    - stevenhuang 6y ago
      It's called a side channel. The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit. I'm not sure how you're calculating this, but it is obviously wrong. The information conveyed by the contents of a message is the log of the number of possible messages. Here, there is one possible message. The log of one is zero. There's a big difference between one bit of information and zero. You can interpret a "yo" message as conveying one bit of information, and the only way to do that is to draw it from the contrast between "sending a yo" and "not sending a yo". If you do that, "sending a yo" sends one bit of information, and "not sending a yo" also sends one bit of information. Thought experiment: with three bits of information, you can disambiguate between eight possibilities. Try to design a protocol in which, by sending up to three "yo"s, you achieve 8 distinct messages.
ericjang 6y ago
It is widely believed by neuroscientists that spike timing in animal brains (whether by aggregate rate or by individual spikes) does the majority of information encoding.
wave_function 6y ago
I’d argue that choosing the time to send a “yo” constitutes log2(N) bits, where N is the number of times the yo could have been sent (It’s not quite an integer but you might say resolution faster than a minute is irrelevant and call N the number of minutes). Not much, but still more than one.

sixstringtheory 6y ago

“now!” would be just a timestamp. Any additional message content adds context, so your assertion is wrong.

anonytrary 6y ago
That was his point, right? A yo-train is just an array of increasing timestamps tied to the sender and the recipient: { to: 12, from: 15, messages: [ 1604885969953, 1604885969964, 1604885969973, ... ] } The message is "factored out" and contains no information since it's the same every time.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  >increasing timestamps Bold assumption :)
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
  You’re talking about the implementation but ignoring that Yo is an extension of people’s communication in a dynamic environment. For instance, I bet more Yos were sent during the election. Most Yo users are not performing code reviews when sending and receiving Yos.

btrask 6y ago

Guys, I worked it out. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle/Fourier conjugate. Let's say you send a yo now, and then you're going to send another one in 5 minutes. Then you decide to send a third in between. How much information does it contain? Less than a full timestamp's worth, because the timing is constrained. Once you are sending yo's at the maximum line rate (certainly at least every nanosecond, it's such a critical piece of infrastructure), sending or not sending an individual yo is down to one bit of information. The time component is basically completely gone. In other words, you cannot know the precise position of a yo at the same time as knowing the precise momentum.

maguay 6y ago

Author here—this is the best part of HN. I perhaps took the idea too far. Any iOS push notification can be up to 4kb, and Yo’s API shows that each Yo includes a created time, sender name, avatar, User ID, message status, and more. That’s for traditional Yo’s; newer ones can include a location or link or RSS feed item for a news update, which goes far beyond the core concept. So on a technical level absolutely, a Yo is far more than bit. Conceptually though a single ping—a single bit—could contain the same information, like a single dot telegram, with you or your local device recording the time received. If you only Yo’d with one other person, the time and the sender and the message they intended to convey would all be data points you would assemble in your head with the ping to get the full information. Anyhow. That’s perhaps taking the idea too far :)