
This Video Has X Views - sususu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
======
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?

~~~
onli
Not sure about open source and paid hosting, but there is node-red,
[https://nodered.org/](https://nodered.org/), which is open source and easy to
get started with. Combining stuff is something Zapier excels in,
[https://zapier.com/](https://zapier.com/), and the free tier can suffice for
some tasks (not open source). You could also try my attempt at a spiritual
pipes successor, [https://www.pipes.digital/](https://www.pipes.digital/) (but
it's also not open source). If there is something missing there to reproduce
how you used Yahoo Pipes I'd definitely be interested in hearing from you, so
I can restore it :)

~~~
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 :) )

~~~
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](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.

------
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.

~~~
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!

------
akubera
I'm reminded of this little gem:
[https://hookrace.net/time.gif](https://hookrace.net/time.gif)

(Relevant post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715))

But on the topic: is there actually a dearth of APIs "these days" vs peak
Web-2.0, or have the major players just restricted theirs due to abuse, and
thus it seems like the whole world of possibilities have veen restricted? One
can easily find lists of public apis (e.g [https://github.com/n0shake/Public-
APIs](https://github.com/n0shake/Public-APIs)), but perhaps the video was more
about the facilitators, like Yahoo Pipes.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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

~~~
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?

~~~
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.

~~~
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](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!

------
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.

~~~
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?

~~~
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.

~~~
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](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

------
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.

~~~
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](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](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY_2gElt3SA)
"Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes"

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

------
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](https://github.com/jachee/fiveobot)

------
cryptonector
[https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](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](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?

~~~
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](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.

:(

------
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](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.

~~~
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.

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

~~~
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.

