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Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them
- tluyben2 5y agoAmazon Mechnical Turk for your own team?
- tgv 5y agoI thought they were called Epsilons.
- iR5ugfXGAE 5y ago"They are happy to be where they are, and would not be happy to be where we are."
- newsbinator 5y ago"Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons."
- jdub 5y ago"Human Lambdas"… "Mechanical Turk"… you're fully aware these are horrible names for horrible ideas, right?
- Closi 5y agoThis is how the sausage get's made. If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and it's better to call a spade a spade.
- thraxil 5y agoThat might not be a great example. The meat industry is pretty notorious for euphemisms. They're usually called "meat processing plants" rather than "slaughterhouses". When farmers need to conduct a mass extermination (more officially referred to as "depopulation"), one common technique is to shut off the air supply to the barn which causes the heat to rise so the animals suffocate and roast to death. The technical term for that technique is "ventilation shutdown". And that's all without getting into whether terms like "meat", "sausage", "beef", "pork", etc. are just polite ways of saying "parts of animal corpses" and "livestock" as "animals that we feel are acceptable to kill."
- Closi 5y agoI think that is a difference between internal and external communication. Within the industry in the UK at least, meat processing plants can be both 'kill-facilities' and 'no-kill facilities' which is specifying if they have a slaughterhouse in them or not, but the term meat processing plant includes both. The site operators will not shy away from what is happening - you can't when you are in the room when it happens, and it's actually worse for workers if you de-associate from it. That doesn't mean when you write a press release you use these terms. External communication gets fluffed-up for the rest of the world, and you don't write 'kill facility' on your address in Google Maps because you don't want to get splattered in red paint.
- clarkevans 5y agoWe don't have to make sausage.
- Closi 5y agoAs long as people are buying sausage, people will make and sell it. And to extend the metaphor beyond where it should probably go, products taste better when sausage is added and people don't always need to know the ingredients. Your data will have gone through something very similar to this a million times - it might have been validating your photo on a dating site or transcribing your receipt for expenses, but these sort of use-cases would not be done as cleanly if it wasn't for human in the loop.
- musingsole 5y ago> it's better to call a spade a spade. There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a different name and not encouraging your butchers to see themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple Grandin's books provide this insight)
- nathancahill 5y ago> it's better to call a spade a spade Speaking of political correctness..
- intergalplan 5y agoIt's fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade Any concern over it is very recent and ahistorical. Like the false etymologies of "rule of thumb", but far less well-established (and hopefully it remains poorly-established—there's plenty of justified language-policing, we don't need to make up reasons to do more of it)
- Closi 5y ago> Speaking of political correctness. Ironically your statement is an example of “political correctness gone mad” for me at least. It’s a metaphor about shovels, there isn’t anything politically incorrect about it. Someone has just dreamed up an alternative meaning to be offended about.
- xwdv 5y agoMaybe a better term would be “micro freelancing”.
- prepend 5y agoMechanical Turk is on of the best product names I’ve ever seen. It’s accurate. It has a clever story behind it that almost no one knew beforehand. I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when people learn. As opposed to other “quirky” names that aren’t clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.
- the_local_host 5y agoApplying "human" as an adjective to something else seems almost guaranteed to sound unkind to humans. No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".
- aequitas 5y agoWe had something like this for a project which would allow you to create multiple CDN accounts using a single interface. Where some CDN's could not be automated by API or we didn't have the time (yet) to implement. So the default API implementation was the FrankAPI (named after the guy handling the manual requests). It would create a pending database record and Frank would get an email with details and the instructions along with a link to a Django page to fill the record with details when the CDN was created. It was so simple and efficient. We loved the solution, he loved the solution. It was great. Though we where all more tech minded people, so talking with computers was natural to us. I don't know how these kind of interfaces would pan out for other kinds of people, if they would miss the human aspect in the interaction?
- vincnetas 5y agoAt my previous position (bank) we called this concept "baba layer". Baba in most slavic languages means "old woman". And when used this term "baba layer" was as an indicator that your system sucks (a bit) that you cant really automate some things away. Or as and easy "solution" to difficult problems. "Well, we just let baba layer solve this"
- mushishi 5y agoThanks, now then name of the (great) puzzle game "Baba is You" makes sense to me.
- lwansbrough 5y agoI actually think this is a great idea. If I’m understanding it correctly, it’s essentially Amazon MechanicalTurk for people in your company? Paired with some capabilities for building custom interfaces (if that doesn’t already exist), this would allow many less savvy companies slowly integrate their human processes into their software processes. Of course there’s something to be said about making human redundancy so interactive and personal for the victim, but from a cost savings/business standpoint it’s probably hard to ignore the potential value. Good luck! I may pitch this to my team next time we need something semi-automated (btw you’re kind of competing with Slack bots, that’s what we use now.)
- sanitycheck 5y agoWhat next, human Kubernetes? (No no no it's a Joke, Deliveroo and Uber staff, don't you dare paste that into Slack)
- mring33621 5y agoWill Job X run on Node Y? [] yes [] no
- namelosw 5y agoHuman Kubernetes == System Admin. It's already there. But yeah, it could be a fancy new word for VC haha.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoGoogle keeps saying that Kubernetes is a real world, κυβερνήτης, Greek for "helmsman" or "pilot" or "governor"[0][1], but its predecessor was called Borg, so in my mind, the true meaning of "Kubernetes" was always "a network of (Borg) cubes". This way, I've already seen on TV what "Human Kubernetes" looks like. Resistance is futile. -- [0] - Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History. [1] - Curiously, it's also the etymological root of cybernetics; cybernetics -> cyborg -> the Borg.
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoSome shops that manually manage docker containers on VMs call it "meat scheduling".
- sam_goody 5y agoYou know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans. In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers. That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.
- fny 5y ago> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it. No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.
- ath92 5y agoGetting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job. I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
- Closi 5y agoGood luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts. If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".
- mahesh_rm 5y agoPricing?
- motoxpro 5y agoMaybe they forgot?
- weeboid 5y agoI honestly can't tell if this is satire or no; leaning towards former
- skinnymuch 5y agoI don’t think it is satire. I find the comments that want to spin cogs into a good thing by changing the name and manipulating the imaging so lowly people don’t know how you they are really viewed, worse than any thing this app is doing, satire or not.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI also assumed it is satire. I think a lot of devs eventually realize that the whole "gig economy", as it is, is essentially an API for humans. I also agree that, on the off chance this isn't satire, its current, honest form is much better than the proposed "marketability improvements" would make it.
- skinnymuch 5y agoI passed this off to my brother and two friends. All who I know have used mechanical Turks for their academic work. None of them brought up the name or any weirdness. Nothing to write home about. But another anecdote for me
- Closi 5y agoThis is great - I could use something like this (without having to face into Mechanical Turk), and definitely would use this if the pricing was right. What's the pricing structure?
- stevesimmons 5y agoThis looks like a great piece of tooling for when you don't need a full workflow system. What other similar solution are in this space?
- lsb 5y agoInteresting launch! 0) Why is this better than MTurk's predefined workflows? 1) How much does it cost?? MTurk charges min(0.005, 10%) for each Human Intelligence Task. 2) How is quality checked??? 3) People doing tasks generally report greater satisfaction and generally produce greater accuracy with a smaller topic shift (instead of doing NLP classification about everything at all times, first do topic A, then topic B). I bet you could train a simple classifier to group topics together
- evrydayhustling 5y agoYou're getting a lot of comments on the naming/presentation that I think are worth considering, but I want to say that the tool itself looks great. There are so many workflows that we twist into pretzels, and over-engineer one interface point or another, because we don't have a way to trivially put a human interface in the right spot. I will 100% try this. With that said, I see a big blocker to many use cases. One of the main reasons you add humans to workflows is to deal with unstructured data, which can often be sensitive. Have you considered offering a managed service or self-hosted option so that orgs can control their own data flow?
- dmd 5y agoThis is essentially how the young lady's illustrated primer works in The Diamond Age.
- HiroProtagonist 5y agoI am currently reading this book! :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- benjaminjosephw 5y ago> Outsource tedious, repetitive and boring work to our workforce in just a couple of clicks. This is exactly how you create an environment that is just asking for regulation and rightly so if you show such disregard for other people. Explicitly treating human laborers in more-or-less the same way you treat a machine is unethical design as well as being an ugly and harmful philosophy. You are literally building a system that enables dehumanizing labor. Is this the kind of future you're happy being a part of building?
- oneshoe 5y agoYou really made me consider the ethics associated to this type of project. I'm curious about your thoughts about an internal questions I had in my head. What is different from this than say hired labor for picking up produce or something to that extent?
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoThere's a difference between fulfilling work and drudgery in every domain. I've worked a few very dehumanizing programming jobs where I didn't have any agency and just worked to someone else's instructions without any room for input. Some people enjoy programming against a clear specification but I don't think anyone really wants to be a code monkey[0]. I think managers and job creators (like those building products in this space) need to think carefully about the humans they create jobs for. Just because someone is willing to do a soul destroying job for some amount of money doesn't mean that the job's designer is freed from the duty to consider the impacts of the job itself. Jobs are, after all, not just a contract between inanimate objects but context of work for human beings - efficiency and economics can't be the only considerations. Participation in building structures like these carries with it an ethical responsibility which can't be ignored - especially where the harms are so blatantly dehumanizing. [0] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20monkey https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20monke...
- nexuist 5y ago> You are literally building a system that enables dehumanizing labor As opposed to the rest of us building systems that will put thousands out of jobs en masse? Sure, there should be regulation regarding minimum pay and such. But an idea like this is not unethical on its own. It's unethical when combined with a society that is prepped to view automation as a danger instead of a savior, because the moonshot idea that we could just work less in the information age seems to be obliterated at this point.
- prepend 5y agoI find these cognitive surplus [0] really promising. If not for identifying the people for whom a task is easy. It’s always neat to me how some things are easy or hard for people and the time is spent trying to match this effectively. I have a friend who is a regex expert and can answer in seconds what takes me hours. But I’d never want a thousand people to ask vim each arcane question in case ve also knows the answer for that topic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus
- weatherlight 5y agoHeres an idea. It's not novel or revolutionary. Maybe the the abject alienation from the product of one’s labor is a bad idea...
- motohagiography 5y agoImpressive, we could instrument a lot of municipal licensing and public service form filling with these templates. It's like kiosk applications as a service. I'm interpreting that it's like taking the features of a PowerBI app, but something with less overhead, and more accessible to smaller orgs.
- dekhn 5y agoIBM used to call this "BPEL"
- xbar 5y agoAwful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kjrose 5y agoSo, from what I can tell it's essentially a Mechanical Turk for someone's personal team. However, I'm trying to figure out if it offers Mechanical Turk style offerings as well, where you can just pay for some random person to do the job?
- wildermuthn 5y agoA quick look over their docs, and I think this is a terrific product that needs a better landing page. They make it easy to build a custom task with a UI builder, and more importantly, they also automatically exposes programmatic means of adding tasks and receiving task completion data. This makes “do things that don’t scale” somewhat more scalable. Looking forward to trying it out!
- edoceo 5y agoisnt this what Amazon Mechanical Turk does?
- monkeydust 5y agoBit depressing for humanity. Looking at the task list I would hope they could be automated and not require a human cog in the not to distant future.
- ngvrnd 5y agowho said "Insort Geront"?
- kazinator 5y ago"Okay, now do you see a note labeled X in your immediate scope? Let me know the value ..."