Cool write up; thank you!
Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
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Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#12I found this article pretty interesting because ultimately it didn't cover a lot of ground, but instead examined the ground with a microscope. From the title, I was expecting it to be some really complex system youtube was using—and an even more complex attempt to r/e—but really it was mostly intuitive solutions. YET with that being said it was a really enjoyable read because of how in depth everything was covered. I…
Not sure whether such "criticism" is welcome here, since it is ultimately subjective, but I will just be blunt and say: I disagree. I like this style of writing as well, but I think this article overdoes it, to the point that it became somewhat irritating to read. The part where I particularly feel this way is when the author spends two whole paragraphs discussing why YouTube (or its developers) chose to sample by "1…
> Not sure whether such "criticism" is welcome here, since it is ultimately subjective, but I will just be blunt and say: I disagree.
If this was my post I'd certainly appreciate criticism.
> but I think this article overdoes it
Perhaps its overdone in places, to your credit the question about if 100 was an arbitrary number was a bit much. But, as a counterpoint, I found the related pondering of "might it make sense to have variable time duration windows" to be interesting. The interpolation YouTube ultimately selected is deceiving and variable density could be a way to mitigate that.
There's definitely a healthy balance and perhaps the author teeters on the verbose end, but I mostly just wanted to voice that I was surprised about the type of article it was, but not in an unpleasant way.
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#13I found this article pretty interesting because ultimately it didn't cover a lot of ground, but instead examined the ground with a microscope. From the title, I was expecting it to be some really complex system youtube was using—and an even more complex attempt to r/e—but really it was mostly intuitive solutions. YET with that being said it was a really enjoyable read because of how in depth everything was covered. I…
Not sure whether such "criticism" is welcome here, since it is ultimately subjective, but I will just be blunt and say: I disagree. I like this style of writing as well, but I think this article overdoes it, to the point that it became somewhat irritating to read. The part where I particularly feel this way is when the author spends two whole paragraphs discussing why YouTube (or its developers) chose to sample by "1…
Criticism is definitely welcome!
You are likely right that I over-rotated on the "storytelling" aspect there. My curiosity about the "100 segments" stemmed from wondering if there was a deeper statistical reason for that specific granularity (e.g., optimal binning relative to average video length) versus it just being a "nice round number."
That said, I can see how dedicating two paragraphs to it felt like over-dramatizing a constant. I will try to tighten the pacing on the next one. Thanks for reading despite the irritation!
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#14Makes me want to write an extension to fix this annoying YouTube bug that's been around since Windows 10 came out:
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40853564 (while Microsoft has filed it as a bug in Chromium, I hazard it is actually just a bug in the way YouTube handles events on their text fields)
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#15Cool write up; thank you!
You're welcome. Glad you liked it!
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#16So it's a histogram of 100 bars, forced into a spline in SVG to make it look like it has more detail than it does.
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#17So it's a histogram of 100 bars, forced into a spline in SVG to make it look like it has more detail than it does.
That's the big picture idea.
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#18> Documenting it, however, was a marathon that spanned many weeks of focused work.
I like how detailed they were in their writing (even though I was suspecting the graph function to be the culprit all along) ! Big Kudos though to get to the ground of it and writing it all down for others to learn ! Also, indeed this would make a great template for LLM problem-decomposition / solving.
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#19> Documenting it, however, was a marathon that spanned many weeks of focused work. I like how detailed they were in their writing (even though I was suspecting the graph function to be the culprit all along) ! Big Kudos though to get to the ground of it and writing it all down for others to learn ! Also, indeed this would make a great template for LLM problem-decomposition / solving.
Glad you liked it. I’m just doing my part to ensure our future AI overlords have high-quality training data.
Re: Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
#20Congratulations: from a simple intuition about something that many wouldn’t have noticed, you wrote a beautiful article.