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This Video Has 60,399,905 Views

Tom Scott · Youtube · 566 HN points · 9 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Tom Scott's video "This Video Has 60,399,905 Views".
Youtube Summary
The title of this video should change with the times. But nothing lasts forever: here's the story of how I made it work, why it used to be easier to make that work, and how it all ties in to the White Cliffs of Dover and the end of the universe.

Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin

Includes an accelerated section of "Traduction automatique des flux d'information (Yahoo Pipes IV)" by Laurent Moccozet, which is licensed under CC-by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m4oxwPw7bY - the remainder of this video does not fall under that license.

I'm at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Nov 23, 2022 · dpz on Yahoo Pipes
Any mention of Yahoo Pipes always makes me think of Tom Scott's "This video has x views". Feels quite relevant to other comments people have been making here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
Nov 06, 2022 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by ilaa
Jul 03, 2022 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by superasn
Mar 26, 2022 · 4 points, 1 comments · submitted by thunderbong
Hublium
Great video explaining the concept of an API to a layperson. Unfortunately, 90% of the comments are just kids writing "yep, still works!".
Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

Sophira
Is there a particular reason why you copied my comment[0] word-for-word?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30799945

Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

paulmendoza
APIs are more popular than ever. But developers in a weird way aren’t involved. Go look at tools like Tray, Boomi, Zapier, Integromat. They let business users use APIs to connect all their applications without wiring code.
Nov 20, 2021 · 3 points, 0 comments · submitted by _imnothere
Oct 17, 2021 · 5 points, 0 comments · submitted by tosh
Obligatory link to the Tom Scott video on free APIs. There's a lot of common knowledge there, but his discussion on free APIs seems relevant. I've been burned by having hobbyist projects break from free APIs getting turned off.

https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

Aug 15, 2021 · dwrodri on Yahoo Pipes
Check out IFTTT (https://ifttt.com) or Huginn (https://github.com/huginn/huginn). They're similar but not quite.

An underlying assumption with Yahoo Pipes was that interesting places on the Internet would offer APIs which have a developer UX that matches or exceeds the quality of their official UI. A mixture of unprofitability and abuse lead to this no longer being the case. Tom Scott's essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

easrng
See also https://nodered.org/
Aug 18, 2020 · badRNG on Dependency
Where I work, anything that is outside of the standard library and some certain security-approved dependencies requires a miserable approval process where an authorization package has to be submitted to security who will require upgrades anytime a CVE with a high enough assessed criticality is posted for the dependency (or other concerns regarding the source arise.) This approval is revisited on a regular period (or added to the standard list of approved dependencies.)

The net effect is that there isn't dependency creep where any team can just continuously add dependencies to a project without their ongoing justification and visibility.

For personal projects, I'm very liberal with using dependencies that can get something in my mind functioning quickly before my motivation dries up. I think I shared the OP's anxiety regarding at least the longevity of what I write until I came to peace with the fact that my software will not function forever, and likely not for the rest of the decade. Relevant Tom Scott vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

ThrowawayR2
> "Where I work, anything that is outside of the standard library and some certain security-approved dependencies requires a miserable approval process where an authorization package has to be submitted to security who will require upgrades anytime a CVE with a high enough assessed criticality is posted for the dependency (or other concerns regarding the source arise.) This approval is revisited on a regular period (or added to the standard list of approved dependencies.)"

I want to work for a team like that. :)

I actually had an hour long argument recently with other developers that wound up with me dragging in their favorite morbidly obese, CVE riddled frameworks for a 1 KLOC program that wasn't remotely complex enough to warrant their use.

Where to start...

First, nowadays altering the DOM is way more responsive than loading a new page, so no one really wants HATEOAS -- not even users, but especially not the sites we like to visit because they don't want to put out public APIs anymore. For non-browser app APIs (public or private), well, they can be the same, just driven by JS when in-browser. This... is sad. But this is a fact of life now. Just watch Tom Scott explain why the APIs went away, and when the APIs went away, so did HATEOAS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0).

Second, there's a lot of APIs that needn't have anything more than one end-point -- no links to traverse, no HATEOAS. For example, a certification authority can take a CSR and authentication and return you a certificate -- one end-point is all you need, and other than that, the API can be RESTful in every sense. And then there's APIs where links aren't necessarily abundant or interesting.

Third, HTTP kinda sucks anyways if you're dealing with databases. There's no nice RESTful way to construct transactions unless you put the RDBMS smarts into the client (JS again), which you can't do if it means trusting the client (it does). So right there, REST is broken anyways. Sure, if you're distributing your database, you need to deconstruct your transactions anyways, but you're not going to trust a user-agent to get that right, and anyways, you can't really do that with a HATEOAS interface.

Put another way: show us how to build a secure application with REST (including HATEOAS) that a) users will enjoy, b) companies want to build, c) with complex transactions. If you do, we might all get our pitchforks out and protest for HATEOAS. Searching for examples of HATEOAS, I don't find much. Sure, for proprietary, corporate apps HATEOAS can be meaningful, but even there, I suspect for devs it's easier to just define APIs and drive all in-browser interaction via JS.

rumanator
None of your points make any sense. It's as if you believe HATEOAS is something entirely different than what it really is.

The DOM is irrelevant wrt HATEOAS. HATEOAS is just a way to decouple clients from servers. You get that by not resorting to hardcoded links, and instead getting your server to supply links to clients in the form of links driven by link relations. HATEOAS is capabilities discovery. HATEOAS is API versioning without explicit versions. HATEOAS is a documented and discoverable API. That's it.

It's also irrelevant to HATEOAS if you have 1 our 9999 links. You set a root document with a link. That's it.

HTTP is completely irrelevant to HATEOAS. HATEOAS is an element of an architecture style. You can do REST with UDP if you'd like. And no, you can easily do transactions with REST over HTTP. No need to mix DB stuff on the API.

Finally, you let it clear that you don't like REST or HATEOAS. That's ok. Yet, your personal preferences don't mean something is broken, specially if they are derived from misconceptions, confusion and ignorance.

cryptonector
I only don't like HATEOAS. The rest of REST is fine, well, except for the transaction problem, but we all make do.

The DOM thing was answered ably by u/gridlockd separately, so I won't say much more about it other than this: in a modern web app you won't necessarily see links in the resources fetched by JS -- you might need to know how to transform that content into links (if there are any), and you might find that embedded as logic in the JS. That's not really HATEOAS unless it's documented and stable.

rumanator
> I only don't like HATEOAS. The rest of REST is fine,

There is no "rest of REST" once you omit HATEOAS. That assertion makes absolutely no sense. HATEOAS is the whole basis of REST. If you take HATEOAS away, all you get is plain old RPC.

> The DOM thing was answered ably by u/gridlockd

That response is packed with errors and misconceptions. Instead of paying attention to echos of your errors you would do better to discover what REST and HATEOAS actually is, because both of you have repeatedly shown that your grasp on the subject needs a lot of work to iron out a lot of basic misconceptions.

> in a modern web app you won't necessarily see links in the resources fetched by JS -- you might need to know how to transform that content into links (if there are any),

That is the sort of comment that makes it quite clear that you have no idea of what you're talking about. Resources and resources representations are not platform-dependent or even format-dependent. REST is not making a fetch(), and HATEOAS is not a HTML document with <a> tags. REST is an architecture style defined by HATEOAS. It doesn't care about HTTP or TCP or even IP. It cares about resources and resources representations, and cares about link relations associated with resources. What you decide to do with JavaScript is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what are your resources and where are the link relations, and HTML or JavaScript plays no role in any of the concepts.

gridlockd
Manipulating the DOM is not irrelevant in the sense that pretty much the only way HATEOAS could be useful is in generating a user interface that an intelligent agent could navigate.

Only an intelligent agent could meaningfully navigate from one state to another, which is roughly equivalent to a clicking on URLs on static sites, which is how most websites work or at least used to work.

When you manipulate the DOM to implement interaction without any "hypermedia links", there is an impedance mismatch here and HATEOAS is not a good choice for user interfaces anymore.

> HATEOAS is capabilities discovery. HATEOAS is API versioning without explicit versions. HATEOAS is a documented and discoverable API. That's it.

You can't discover capabilities without prior knowledge unless you are an intelligent agent. That's why HATEOAS is a really bad choice for APIs. You effectively have to implement the agent "discovering" what you expect to be there, instead of just explicitly asking for what you need. It's not just pointless, it's a waste of time.

cryptonector
Exactly. Thank you for putting it so well.
rumanator
> Manipulating the DOM is not irrelevant in the sense that pretty much the only way HATEOAS could be useful is in generating a user interface that an intelligent agent could navigate.

That's patently wrong, and ignores basic RESTful standards such as HAL. The DOM is irrelevant and meaningless in the context of HATEOAS. There is no DOM at all. There is a resource, and the resource is tagged with link relations. That's it.

Just because the word Hypermedia" pops out this does not mean HATEOAD has anything to do with HTML.

> Only an intelligent agent could meaningfully navigate from one state to another, which is roughly equivalent to a clicking on URLs on static sites, which is how most websites work or at least used to work.

This is where you're objectively showing where you're getting it wrong. REST I'd about resources and resources representations. Your "URL" is just a specific resource, and that resource is tagged with link relations which point to to other resources. It's the resource that is linked, not the content of the resource.

> When you manipulate the DOM to implement interaction without any "hypermedia links",

Again, you're showing where you've been getting it wrong. You do not manipulate any DOM to "implement interactions". You just get the link relations of a resource. That is all. Some HATEOAS formats even pass link relations through HTTP headers. The concept of a DOM is entirely meaningless in REST. There are only resources, resource representations, and link relations. That's it.

Again, just because HATEOAS has "hypermedia" in its name that does not mean it has anything to do with HTML.

cryptonector
The way you debate won't make you friends. When you attack the way you do, the other side just discounts what you have to say. There's a better way to do this.

> This is where you're objectively showing where you're getting it wrong. [...]

The text I elided in that quote says nothing about how GP is wrong. Saying "objectively" doesn't make it so. You have to back up your arguments.

In a way you're quite right: links don't have to be URIs, hypermedia doesn't have to be HTML, and links don't even have to appear in the media when you can construct them algorithmically (in the last case you can argue that even though they are absent in the media, they are notionally still there). However, GP is right that only an intelligent agent will be able to use useful things with links of types they don't already have baked in logic for doing things with, and this is really the key problem with HATEOAS: it's too human-centered, and implicitly so.

Anyways, be kind.

gridlockd
> That's patently wrong, and ignores basic RESTful standards such as HAL.

That's an opinion on the usefulness of HATEOAS. I'm well aware that misguided developers keep inserting HATEAOS where it provides no value. It's just annoying.

Realistically, the only useful thing you could do with HATEOAS-style data and an agnostic client is to generate a (rather crappy) UI for an intelligent agent to navigate.

This is clearly what Roy Fielding had in mind as well, where I quote from his dissertation:

"The name “Representational State Transfer” is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through the application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use."

> Just because the word Hypermedia" pops out this does not mean HATEOAD has anything to do with HTML.

It may in principle be not specifically tied to XML or JSON or HTML or web browsers, however in practice that's the only domain where it is actually used. Therefore, alternative ways of doing things in that domain are relevant when talking about REST.

> You do not manipulate any DOM to "implement interactions".

Here I'm talking about how many modern web applications actually work, not how REST works.

A video by Tom Scott exploring that sentiment https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0
Apr 07, 2020 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by doener
Apr 06, 2020 · 493 points, 174 comments · submitted by sususu
hugs
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.
Mandatum
Introducing 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!

Der_Einzige
Selenium is awesome, but the browser GUI for it in Firefox seemed to... Regress heavily from where it was a few years ago? It used to allow you to export a script as any type of code and now that's no longer possible. The newer gui based tools have maybe a fraction of the features that the selenium GUI used to have

What happened?

joshfraser
I love and use Selenium all the time. Thank you!
Madmallard
Thank you for your work sir. I love Selenium.
hugs
It's a team effort! I'm more of a fan and advocate for the project these days.
thatguyagain
Amazing work!
mav3rick
Thank you for Selenium. I recently used it to parse some hotel data for Covid.
azemetre
I 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.

akubera
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.

TeMPOraL
What 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.

djhworld
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
All the software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.
Wowfunhappy
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.

diggan
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
Probably left-pad
solarkraft
Like ourselves and the rest of the universe.
flingo
If humans discover a way to defeat entropy, even at a limited scale, whatever device is created to preserve information into the era of a universe solely made of black holes and hawking radiation will be capable of running doom.

I fully expect the last computer to ever be built by humans to still be able to load original .wads.

sneak
I 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.

travisjungroth
You think that being aware of our own inevitable deaths, and the eventual end of the universe, is a coping mechanism to avoid the unbearable reality of closed software platforms? Am I talking to Richard Stallman?
solarkraft
You never know.
None
None
romwell
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_Subprogra...

OwlsParlay
Wow, I'm actually using some of the C++ code based off of MINPACK for one of our current projects at work. It is quite humbling to realise this dates back so far.
dylan604
> 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?

wil421
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?

amatecha
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
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.
aidenn0
Most of my floppies are dead, but most NES games did not have batteries, and it's really easy to replace the batteries in the ones that did (it's usually just a CR2032).
nrdvana
Replacing the battery isn’t hard. There are plenty of youtube instructional videos on it.
makapuf
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.
jachee
I've still got Geometry Wars on my 32-bit iPad. It's my go-to airplane game—if there's a 120v outlet to plug into.

No multiplayer, though.

makapuf
Could you reinstall it if it was uninstalled?(real question)
jachee
I don't think so. It's part of why I haven't.
itzael
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.

deanCommie
Forget kids, I'm an adult that's missing some early adulthood games.

Flash, man.

iOS and Android have been dominating for a decade - i bet there will absolutely be ROMs out there.

The flash games I played as a teenager at the turn of the century are about to be completely gone, like tears in the rain.

* https://www.kongregate.com/games/scarybug/chronotron * https://www.acno.tv/acno/

speps
You might be happy to know about Flashpoint, the Flash games conservation project: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
albertzeyer
The developer of the game has the responsibility for it. It's very simple: He/she can just release the code and game assets. That will make sure that the game lives on forever. Anyone interested in it will pick it up and port it over to new platforms.

Even if the developer does not do this, it's still possible. Some people will get the game assets and reverse engineer the game. There are countless examples for this. Unfortunately sharing the game assets will be illegal (at least for a while, until the copyright ends), so this will make it harder for the game to survive.

Also, there will be emulators at some later point, where you can play the original game binaries.

jldugger
I have a humble bundle set of android APKs I think.
saagarjha
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.
onion2k
Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

Yes. Torrent sites are littered with archives full of apk files already.

def8cefe
It's pretty easy to backup and install Android apps to/from a file.
willis936
You see, that’s not in Apple’s business plan. If they can’t extract money from you while pushing down developers, they don’t care to do it. We don’t own our devices like we used to. The terms of service alone are egregious.
function_seven
> 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.

jeffhuys
GeoDefense! Oh hell yes. I played so much of that. I still have a 4 and a 4s somewhere. Might try it out!
jachee
I still miss Aurora Feint from the dawn of iOS.
function_seven
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

anchpop
Mindustry and Infinitode are both lots of fun
jakear
+1 for Mindustry. Factorio with more tower defense emphasis. And FOSS!
twic
It's not exactly tower defence, although i think it's close, but i am currently recovering from a pretty serious Bad North obsession:

https://www.badnorth.com/

You defend procedurally generated islands from viking hordes, but rather than towers, you use up to four squads of soldiers from an army you grow over dozens of islands. The art and sound design are lovely, and the gameplay is engrossing. Each island takes a few minutes to play, and a campaign lasts a few hours.

It's something like 5 dollars on iOS and Android, and has no ads or IAP.

danbruc
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.

kube-system
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
> 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.

duxup
Same here, they matched.
thomasahle
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
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
My guess is it's more likely some YouTube employees hacked around this as a show of "support" for YouTubers?
hombre_fatal
That's unnecessary. The slower the view count updates (and it's very slow), then the more likely the title is to be correct.
darkstar999
That's what I thought too. He probably got a rate limit lifted.
diggan
More likely they have a cache for the views with a longer expiration time set than the update interval of Scott's script.
Sargos
This "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
Pool Together is sponsored by Maker.
ajayyy
I 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
Yeah, 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.

diggan
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
> 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!

stickfigure
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!
jinushaun
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.
smcl
I 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
atomwaffel
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.
TomMckenny
>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.

weinzierl
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.

redisman
The 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
Pretty sure only hn admins can edit a title.
weinzierl
Users can too, at least I can, but probably there is a karma threshold.
None
None
0xcde4c3db
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.
flingo
Or, 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

LilBytes
In 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. :)
Dicey84
This was brilliant, and being in the trending youtube list, a majority of viewers will never have found that.
LilBytes
I can't take credit, I found this same comment on Reddit. :)
enjoyyourlife
Reminds me of the CGP Grey video that shows how much the video made in ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo)
nayuki
Speaking 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 "Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes"

And here's a video from Computerphile about overflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0Rl6Ne5C8 "How Gangnam Style Broke YouTube"

jachee
My 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

cryptonector
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
stursby
If 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)
in9
Does anyone know of some reading material on "entropy will get us all" perspective? What does entropy mean in this sense?
flingo
heat death of the universe.
0xcde4c3db
If 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

Paraesthetic
I love Tom Scott's videos. He does a fantastic job of explaining complex things in a simple way.
tonydiv
I want to make an Instagram that will only ever have 42 followers ;)
diggan
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.
kuu
You could automate something in their m.instagram.com site with selenium :)
diggan
Guessing 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
Sorry 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.
HugoDaniel
Web 2.0 was a big heart of love.

:(

prakashmahi
blogger seo settings|advanced seo|advanced seo blogging https://youtu.be/GBeHzmk_Ls4
prakashmahi
coolie no 1 movie 2020 cast and crew box office collection budget full story https://tezmovieswebsite.blogspot.com/2020/04/coolie-no-1-mo...
mav3rick
Wtf. Didn't expect to see Govinda on HN
bparsons
The title was exactly correct
ggambetta
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

dom96
> This would be noteworthy if the counter was included in the video

Pretty sure that would be impossible, unless I am missing something.

aasasd
Similar things were done by generating a live video. Heck, you could just show the page for the video in the live video.

The problem would be in keeping the transmission live for a long time.

baddox
It would start out working fine at zero.
ggambetta
I agree, but when someone does something we consider to be impossible, that's interesting and noteworthy. This, not so much.
dheera
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
If such a feature existed, it would be used for abuse 99% of the time
dheera
Vimeo does have such a feature. The ability to do such could be based on karma on YouTube.
dheera
Another downvote? Really? For factual information?

https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000817648-Rep...

Geez, HN has become worse than reddit.

icebraining
Maybe they aren't downvoting for the fact, but they disagree with you that tying to karma solves the problem.
tialaramex
Yup. A lot of Youtube abuse starts with hijacking.

Lots of popular Youtube channels are by people who aren't very technically savvy. You can easily have 10 000 subscribers while only barely following how to make a video and upload it if there are 10 000 people out there who want that particular niche content. 100 000 is less common but not rare.

That's a juicy target for a hijacker. The hijacker tricks the channel owner into giving them control. "Hi, YouTube Services here, great to see you're so successful. Can you go fill out this form and we'll upgrade you to Elite status". A day later, locked out of their account and unsure what's happening, the channel owner is frantic. If they're lucky they know other Youtubers and can get control back. Otherwise... they may just walk away.

Meanwhile their subscribers are surprised to find that they're now subscribed to "Crypto investor update" or "Apple Genuis Bar" or whatever and it's bombarding them with videos they don't want.

Every feature you give the channel is a feature hijackers will try to use to maximise their profitability. If they can replace old videos, they will, if they can edit them, they will. They can change titles and hide stuff so they do that immediately.

If you're a channel owner: Buy two FIDO Security Keys. Use them to secure any accounts related to the channel then put one somewhere safe (maybe literally a safe if you have one) and keep the other like your house keys. Unlike other 2FA technologies, FIDO keys can't be phished. So short of you being dumb enough to literally Fedex your key to a bad guy (Do I need to say not to do that? Do not do that) there's no way to get tricked into letting them control your channel.

But until we get to a world where this sort of defence is ubiquitous, every Youtube API feature has to be considered as to how you'll unwind it if the channel was hijacked.

dheera
Uh, why the downvote? Can HN institute a policy that a reply is required if you downvote?
gpm
> 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

ianferrel
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.
jshevek
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.
NoodleIncident
-1
hombre_fatal
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.

iso947
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.
ganstyles
Like Reddit comments with a thousand edits after they become popular.
a3r0
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

xwdv
That would be spooky, we would hire an engineer like that on the spot due to the cross-domain knowledge required.
grecy
I imagine it's possible to update the counter as closed captions for the video....
danpalmer
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
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
Who said it has to be impressive? It's simply something fun that relates to the deeper dive he takes in the video.
danpalmer
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.
donatj
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.

diggan
> 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?

routerl
I haven't used it but https://n8n.io/

It reminds me of zapier, which reminds me of Yahoo pipes.

ivanfon
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

egfx
Yeah as I mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21641615

A Yahoo pipes! clone really needs some open source love. Too bad the maintainer is more interested in making it a one man SaaS.

The video is interesting because I thought he was talking specifically to me about the http://2fb.me product. But anyway I think this is a reminder that even though API’s have gotten more restrictive that more creative ways of using them bubble to the surface. :)

onli
> A Yahoo pipes! clone really needs some open source love. Too bad the maintainer is more interested in making it a one man SaaS.

I guess that's fair.

I want(ed) to run Pipes as an SaaS because I think that model would be highly advantageous to me, and that would be very advantageous for Pipes. But that with the predecessors history as background this approach is a critical concern is something I do understand. I will now try to have my cake and eat it too: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes contains a new FOSS version that is meant to exist in parallel with pipes.digital, as long as that model works out. So worst case now is this FOSS approach fails, and then only the SaaS would die, not the software.

reubano
Check out my project, riko. https://github.com/nerevu/riko Open source, but no hosted plan.
erikig
For a self hosted Yahoo Pipes alternative I’d recommend checking out Huginn - it’s been featured on HN a couple of times and the creator is tectonic@HN

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

zwily
I don’t, but Node Red is giving me the same fun feeling I had with Yahoo Pipes, but for Home Automation.
hundchenkatze
Dark is similar. I think they're still in private beta, but I got my invite pretty quickly.

https://darklang.github.io/docs/introduction

akavel
I believe https://luna-lang.org has plans like this, though they're kinda definitely not hurrying things...
onli
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
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 :) )

toomuchtodo
Have you seen n8n?

https://n8n.io/

r-w
I don’t think those requirements will be met until people like us who miss it put our money where our mouth is ;)
diggan
I think people like us (at least me) miss a lot of things, some more important than others, and we have to carefully choose what we spend out time on :)
onli
I'm about to open source it now. Which means I just did, but haven't announced it yet. https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes now contains a very new version you could run locally.

r-w is right though: More users paying for pipes would allow me to invest more time into it and have more requirements covered.

anonytrary
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.
banana_giraffe
This reminds me of an endpoint that Google used to run. It was a never ending stream of RSS feeds. Anyone could subscribe (it was just a never ending HTTP GET, if I remember right), and be told which blogs had updated in near real time.

Nowadays you'd need to sign up for an API key, probably pay some amount of money, and provide twenty different forms of contact to use something like that. That's assuming it was allowed to exist in the first place, since it might take views away from google.com.

sneak
Twitter wants to capitalize on the fact that tweets are massively public, and they also want to capitalize on the fact that they are not.

Researchers are passing around lists of tweet IDs ("dehydrated", they call them) that can be "rehydrated" (that is, turned back into full tweets) if you have the right permission from twitter to do so.

The whole setup is really shameful.

It would be de-facto illegal to build a "Google for Twitter" today. I settled on doing it for ActivityPub/Mastodon because it's less likely I'll get sued into oblivion for creating a search engine that way.

snisarenko
Hi sneak,

I am working on some fediverse aggregator projects. Let me know if you want to talk.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

sneak
You have no standard contact methods available on any of your sites that do not require registration. Consider publishing your email address; I am happy to chat. My email is in my profile and on my website.
snisarenko
Sent you an email
Lammy
> 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.

For a while it was common to find SEO-spam sites composed entirely of posts generated this way. They would translate from a source language back to it in a roundabout way and end up with an article that was "different enough" to count as unique content to Google.

smcl
A British MP (I cannot for the life of me remember who) came under fire for owning a company made its money doing this - take existing content, shuffle the language round a bit and publish it with loads of ads.
matthewheath
Likely to be Grant Shapps

> In 2012, Google blacklisted 19 of the Shapps's business websites for violating rules on copyright infringement related to the web scraping-based TrafficPayMaster software sold by them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps#Business_ventures

smcl
Yes! That's him. I only knew about that one, but this other one mentioned afterwards is hella shady too:

> It cost $497 and promised customers earnings of $20,000 in 20 days. Upon purchase,

> the "toolkit" was revealed to be an ebook, advising the user to create their own

> toolkit and recruit 100 "Joint Venture Partners" to resell it for a share of the

> profits

Sort of like a pyramid scheme, really. Incredibly this appears to have scarcely affected him, he is still an MP :-O

pevezzac
I also remember vividly those optimistic times. You should show this video to your friend as proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
giantrobot
There was a lot of interesting promise in Web 2.0 that was completely wasted and then died. I think a big part of the problem was even things like Yahoo Pipes were too complicated for a lot of people and anyone trying to use third party APIs for commercial purposes ran afoul of EULAs or just plain old rent seeking. Once privacy invading advertising became the norm APIs were further restricted or discontinued because the user wasn't running a bunch of client side code tracking and scraping all their behavior on a web page.

It didn't help that a lot of Web 2.0 darlings sold out to on-the-way-out Web 1.0 companies \cough\Yahoo\cough\. Yahoo's management couldn't even monetize money, let alone Web 2.0 properties. So instead we got social media silos. You can put stuff in but good luck ever getting it out. You can share it with whomever so long as they also join the same silo.

cjhopman
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).

ericflo
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.
bryanrasmussen
I think what you said, yes, but also bad actors. Basically they disappeared because what business purpose did they serve, they were a cost center not a profit center - bad actors just increase the cost.
cortesoft
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.

johannes1234321
Also the API forms a committed interface you are stuck with. Whatever way you want to "improve" your offering you have to make sure it's compatible with the old API, at least for a while. Especially as you can't reach your consumers.
rplst8
Couldn't this all be solved with a p2p network that hosts restful services?
Nextgrid
Is it actually expensive, or is it just a result of everyone moving to cloud providers that charge an arm and a leg for performance equivalent to a cheap laptop (when you account for "CPU credits" and all that) and try to nickel & dime you on everything, including bandwidth (despite bare-metal providers somehow being able to stay in business by offering unmetered 1Gbps bandwidth)?
marcocampana
Those times were absolutely great. It's only human to look at the past with a feeling of melancholy and forget how great is the present and the long way we came. Today you can actually build your own APIs with very little knowledge and effort: easy to get started frameworks, free or inexpensive hosting in the cloud, lots of freely available data. That's pretty awesome too.
amatecha
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
redwall_hp
Even Google Search had this. I read an old O'Reilly book back then that was centered around API mashup projects (remember that term?) using the many Google APIs, which have mostly been shut down.
joshspankit
It surprises me that we don’t have crypto-based API micro-transactions yet.

Even if you had to pay 1 satoshi for 10 queries, it would go a long way towards making APIs viable long-term.

adrianN
What's the transaction rate for bitcoin these days? Is it still a handful of transactions per hour? What are the transaction costs?
ric2b
There's a layer 2 technology called Lightning Network that lets you transfer Bitcoin almost for free and in seconds, no transaction number limit. The biggest issue is liquidity, it's not easy to move large sums in a single transaction, but that shouldn't matter much for micro-payments.

There's even ongoing work on making paid API's work seamlessly by adding some middleware, using the HTTP 402 (payment required) status code, no usernames/e-mails/passwords involved: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/

(And yes, LN is open source, non-custodial and moves real Bitcoin, not IOU's or other tokens. It's actually an open spec with at least 3 major implementations in 3 different languages.)

None
None
dylan604
"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.

EGreg
Actually it’s MORE valuable if you add up everyone using it

Just less money to be made by those with the power to restrict it

Private property is just a monopoly right to exclude others from the use of something. If they could have used it, it would have been another instance of adding to the value. But someone has to pop up and demand rents and restrict them from doing so. Doesn’t that overall reduce the value of the information?

duxup
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."

mattl
I used to beg people I met online to host pages for me, give me shell access, etc. I was a child in the very early 90s with basically no money.
mauricedenassau
It's not very common, but I had people begging my friends for this kind of services.
flingo
raspberrry pi in home-network DMZ, with fail2ban, unattended-upgrades, and a free dynamic DNS service gets you most of this. (plus, you're root, so you can run things more complicated than web-services)
wastedhours
The same, in fact my life would be very different if a random guy from (I think Kansas, given I'm from the UK) on a forum bought me a domain and gave me a slice of his dedicated hosting when I was mid-teens.

I've always wanted to pay it forward in the same way, but lots of things on the web seem overly complicated now that'd make that hard to do, and I've lost attachment to most communities.

wlll
> It reminds me distantly of an earlier time when just the web was sort of owned ... by the web folk.

I remember those times, I miss them. I had a modem back in the late 1990s and used to buy .net magazine (in the UK, back before there was a framework of the same name) on my way home from school and it had the number of people estimated to be on the Internet printed on the spine. It all seemed too good to be true, we were worried it might get shut down by governments. There was the TV program "the net" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)) that used to give you an "info dump" at the end that you were meant to record on your VCR and play back frame by frame.

In Jan 2000 I got my first proper job at a web hosting company and used to read Wired magazine before it became (as far as I recall) fascinated by the stock market.

I miss the optimism and simplicity of those times.

streb-lo
> I miss the optimism and simplicity of those times.

It seems like every generation (minus those who came of age in WWI/II) think this is true for them.

Is it really true, or are we just all reflecting back to when we were younger and the world was simpler because we understood less.

wlll
To be clear I was speaking specifically about the Internet/Web and not the world in general. I would say that there was a lot of optimism for the web back then, and it was definitely simpler.
Causality1
Back when I had three hundred bookmarks instead of, like, six. God I'd kill to still have that list.
time0ut
I remember these days fondly. Surfing the web on 486 at 28.8kbps. it felt slow, but worth it. Most information to be found existed because someone thought it was worth sharing. A golden age to be sure.
GrumpyNl
Thats the web we love.
asudosandwich
>> a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic.

Or a “links” page. I haven’t seen that in a long while. No affiliate garbage or anything just a page linking to other sites that the webmaster liked or whatever. It’s hard to remember when that fell out of fashion but it did seem to add a personal touch as well.

Apr 06, 2020 · 24 points, 5 comments · submitted by tambourine_man
nojvek
Wow. That was very poetic. I do implore everyone to watch the video than just read the comments.

He is right, the internet is a lot less open than it was back in the day. Big corporate islands filled with ads that don’t operate well together.

ffcccp
There is a YouTube video with its own url in the video. It was done with partial uploads. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D6L__oR1O9A
projomni
It's gone up since you posted it. Amazing how they have the number in synch with the title.
Ayesh
That's the whole point of the video. He talks about APIs, how fragile they can be, some of his earlier work, and how he uses a script to update the video title.
Cactus2018
Tom Scott has a lot of great videos, including: Why Snow and Confetti Ruin YouTube Video Quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI
Apr 06, 2020 · 3 points, 0 comments · submitted by gck1
Apr 06, 2020 · 5 points, 0 comments · submitted by notRobot
Apr 06, 2020 · 7 points, 2 comments · submitted by loayxz
ummwhat
Inaccurate submission title. Can one of the mods please change it?
emsign
lmao (that's the whole point of the video)
Apr 06, 2020 · 12 points, 1 comments · submitted by HariSeldonMath
dang
Can you please email [email protected]? I'd like to ask you something related to story re-upping as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380.
dang
Can you please put an email address in your profile so we can occasionally send you repost invites? This system is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380. When a submission is old enough, we can't simply roll back the timestamp to re-up it, so we email the submitter a link to resubmit it, which will add it to the same pool. We can't do that if you don't have an email address in your profile!
HN Theater is an independent project and is not operated by Y Combinator or any of the video hosting platforms linked to on this site.
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