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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
It reminds me of zapier, which reminds me of Yahoo pipes.
Unfortunately, it looks like it's not open-source, their Github repo is only for bug reports: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Even if you had to pay 1 satoshi for 10 queries, it would go a long way towards making APIs viable long-term.
Your work has had a huge impact in my career and life.
Thank you!
What happened?
(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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?)...
Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple’s discontinuation of 32bit apps.
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/
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.
Yes. Torrent sites are littered with archives full of apk files already.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
It will be very cool for viewers to stumble across this video when it doesn't work, effectively proving his point.
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.
But then neither will the actual view counter.
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.
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.
Can't tell if you're referring to clever hacks or upvote farming, but I agree!
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.
"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.
Like how this video will always have 301 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI
No way! He said it would be a miracle!
And here's a video from Computerphile about overflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0Rl6Ne5C8 "How Gangnam Style Broke YouTube"
:(
Pretty sure that would be impossible, unless I am missing something.
But 10 hours of video with 1s timestamp parameter resolution would only get you up to 36000
The problem would be in keeping the transmission live for a long time.
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.
