Live data from Hacker News

Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

mturk.com

41–50 of 179 posts

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#41

So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again. Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon. Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had got…

So did the other person just get hosed when you did your 'ipo'?

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#45

So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again. Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon. Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had got…

So did the other person just get hosed when you did your 'ipo'?

I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.

I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?

The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope...

It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.

Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:

`wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'`

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think yes but on different categories. First one I imagine is robotics control and support. "This robot is having trouble folding a tshirt help it out for 1$" Unless they go the waymo route of highly trusted people but I think mass deployed robots are a bit safer than a car for this.

This is what I meant by full stack AI companies. I don't think you could get humans into the loop fast enough if they didn't have some idea of the type of task involved. I don't want people to be asked to fold a tshirt one moment and do a difficult traffic merge the next.

warioware shows it can be fun though but i'd indeed not like to see that applied to safety-critical tasks

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#48
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/

I think it's a satirical website aimed at poking fun at corporate-linkedin-speak

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?

The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope... It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls…

Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.
Post reply on HN