[HN Gopher] Show HN: Human Lambdas - Create Human in the Loop qu...
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Show HN: Human Lambdas - Create Human in the Loop queues and
outsource them
Author : bernatfp
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-04-22 08:59 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (humanlambdas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (humanlambdas.com)
| sam_goody wrote:
| You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that
| doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans.
|
| In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could
| figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers.
|
| That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of
| compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of
| integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot.
| And of making tools to increase these objectives
|
| But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites
| that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will
| work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their
| goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell
| better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies
| and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the
| managers as well.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is the same kind of bs that companies like Uber (and
| professors) pull to glorify low wages with phrases that glorify
| below minimum wage work. I like OPs approach let's be honest
| about what this work is, make sure you pay what they deserve
| and don't try to deceive anyone with fancy accounting.
| fny wrote:
| > If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like
| cogs
|
| Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs,
| and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid
| properly for it.
|
| No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub
| minimum wage compensation.
| prepend wrote:
| > No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub
| minimum wage compensation.
|
| Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants
| who cost money. Money that doesn't go towards higher wages,
| or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc
| raddan wrote:
| Some of our prior work, AutoMan,
| (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928,
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very
| idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the
| issues around exploitative practices. By default the system
| pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit
| more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can
| read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs
| .williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll
| down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in
| Crowdwork Research".
|
| Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web
| service, you can download and use AutoMan now
| (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan
| provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human
| Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not
| scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks
| to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first
| place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is
| basically a non-issue.
|
| I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy
| to talk to people about use cases.
| raddan wrote:
| I should also add that the requester ratings site,
| Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs
| highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably
| because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone
| can figure that out, you should see that workers were
| pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from
| workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a
| good job when using a properly designed system is insane.
| If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie
| content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about
| 45 minutes.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't
| think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if
| they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of
| things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept
| it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are
| doing to people's self image.
|
| People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or
| having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self
| esteem definitely helps productivity.
| ath92 wrote:
| Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic
| motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important
| driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent
| of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular
| job.
|
| I find it hard to believe that this platform will be
| competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll
| have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker
| motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win
| for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
| Closi wrote:
| Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising
| while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read
| receipts.
|
| If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's
| better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this
| work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team,
| look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at
| the same time".
| skinnymuch wrote:
| This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog
| some one is? How much they are being paid.
|
| Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my
| opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to
| manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they
| are what the company and managers truly see them as - just
| that.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I think the name is clever and a bit cute, though perhaps
| easy to misinterpret. But on point of principle:
|
| No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at
| all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and
| dignity.
|
| I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth
| stating anyway.
|
| Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is
| a problem with our society.
|
| Words influence how we feel about others. We should use words
| that affirm the dignity of others, then work to make that a
| reality. Just because most people treat other people like
| cogs doesn't mean that we should throw in the towel and
| accept it; much less start doing it ourselves.
|
| I agree that putting a bow on nastiness is messed up, but the
| root problem is the jerks. If we stop even thinking in terms
| of people having dignity, the jerks have won one more step.
| We should spread kindness and dignity wherever we can, and
| try to get people to name things that imply dignity.
|
| I agree there is a major problem of people with less pay
| being treated poorly. It seems respect is only given to the
| high paid, but that is messed up when you stop to think about
| it. Our real worth isn't determined by our financial status.
| What if we lose the financial status? Would our friends
| desert us, our rights be removed, and we end up forgotten?
|
| I for one want to work against the world becoming more like
| that.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I don't want "respect" or whatever other ways things are
| being framed if I'm being paid a low wage. I always found
| it insulting when done. When I was treated more like a cog
| in line with my pay, I don't remember having any specific
| consistent resentment or annoyance.
|
| This is my own personal life anecdote.
|
| --
|
| It also isn't just pay. Being all cute and "nice" and
| "respectful" but on top of low pay, not being flexible with
| something like taking half a day off or coming in late or
| leaving early because of life stuff, shows how the company
| and higher ups truly feel about you.
|
| Most of the time lower wages correlates with the loss of
| the above flexibility. There are major exceptions like when
| the job is interchangeable and you can swap shifts with
| others.
|
| At that point. The company knows you're a cog. Treats you
| as a cog, but sometimes spins things as if you're a person
| that matters to them.
|
| --
|
| Edit: I do agree jerks suck. I guess I see putting a bow on
| stuff as jerk material as it is generally done with cogs.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| True I agree with that. It can feel like a cynical slap
| if they cover up your low status and try to make you feel
| good about it. I try to coach and mentor my employees and
| see what they value. I totally recognize that isn't
| common in management.
| fny wrote:
| You can call people "sanitation engineers", "sandwich
| artists", or whatever (these are _real_ titles by the way)
| and for as long as you treat them as replaceable,
| interchangeable, and cheap, they will be cogs.
|
| Also are "production worker", "factory worker", "shipping
| clerk", or "driver" any better or worse than "human
| lambda"?
| bckr wrote:
| I was a "Dish Machine Operator" for a few months, and it
| actually did make me feel cooler than being a
| "Dishwasher".
|
| "Human Lambda" being the name of the company, perhaps the
| workers are "Lambda Operators".
| pessimizer wrote:
| Horses for courses; my favorite job title ever was as a
| "3602 Clerk." Such an anonymous title for such a crazy
| job.
| prepend wrote:
| My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it
| revealed that there are some people who love compliments,
| just love them. Even if they aren't genuine, they like
| hearing "You're a rock star, I'm so grateful you're here
| today" even if the person is completely unable to evaluate
| rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to
| everyone.
|
| And there are people who hate compliments.
|
| So it's funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs)
| who hate that they aren't recognized and then there's cogs
| who hate when they are recognized.
|
| Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like
| the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing
| other than the complimenter has some process for
| complimenting people.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Haha this is a point I didn't bring up but loosely in my
| opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is
| morally wrong.
|
| The opposing view on here appears to be if you can
| compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that
| way, things are better. This view is self serving and for
| the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog.
|
| Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I've
| added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on
| status quo :)
| text70 wrote:
| At that level, abstract logic becomes more important. Is
| it better to think of a flower in a field as part of a
| larger ecosystem, or characterize your company as a
| machine composed of cogs?
| prepend wrote:
| I've been a cog before and had hippie managers and
| asshole managers. Honestly, I prefer the occasional whip
| from the asshole than the constant stream of bullshit
| from hippies trying to tell me every day how my data
| entry was "awesome." The weird thing is sometimes I think
| they convinced themself that our cog work was awesome.
|
| If I'm a commodity, I'd rather be straight about it and
| have a shared reality since businesses will actually
| treat me like a commodity when it's important.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's just keep maximizing
| income inequality. This way there will always be someone in the
| position to treat humans like the cogs they are!
| rob74 wrote:
| ...and a steady supply of humans willing to be treated like
| cogs, because they desperately need the money.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Spot on. Welcome to the world of problems by design.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Which position are you taking? The OPs comment isn't going to
| make income inequality any better. Does "respecting" people
| by not saying they are a cog when it is not true help or hurt
| income? I'm sure your sarcastic comment is pointing to one of
| these.
|
| I personally don't enjoy giving some one no additional money
| or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying.
| You're treating them like cogs by not paying them much.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| The OPs comment does affect income inequality when
| implemented at scale.
|
| As easy as the implementation is for you and your team,
| those results have relatively little affect in the scheme
| of things. In order to make the suggestion a paradigm
| shift, money would be moved from the top to the bottom in
| an "at scale" implementation.
|
| Edit: paying your workers less per output has essentially
| been the last major management paradigm to drive growth
| over the past 20+ years. The counter examples (Costco) are
| the exception.
| mahesh_rm wrote:
| Pricing?
| monkeydust wrote:
| Bit depressing for humanity. Looking at the task list I would
| hope they could be automated and not require a human cog in the
| not to distant future.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Amazon Mechnical Turk for your own team?
| weeboid wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if this is satire or no; leaning towards
| former
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I don't think it is satire.
|
| I find the comments that want to spin cogs into a good thing by
| changing the name and manipulating the imaging so lowly people
| don't know how you they are really viewed, worse than any thing
| this app is doing, satire or not.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I also assumed it is satire.
|
| I think a lot of devs eventually realize that the whole "gig
| economy", as it is, is essentially an API for humans.
|
| I also agree that, on the off chance this isn't satire, its
| current, honest form is much better than the proposed
| "marketability improvements" would make it.
| xbar wrote:
| Awful.
| dmd wrote:
| This is essentially how the young lady's illustrated primer works
| in The Diamond Age.
| HiroProtagonist wrote:
| I am currently reading this book! :)
| lwansbrough wrote:
| I actually think this is a great idea. If I'm understanding it
| correctly, it's essentially Amazon MechanicalTurk for people in
| your company?
|
| Paired with some capabilities for building custom interfaces (if
| that doesn't already exist), this would allow many less savvy
| companies slowly integrate their human processes into their
| software processes. Of course there's something to be said about
| making human redundancy so interactive and personal for the
| victim, but from a cost savings/business standpoint it's probably
| hard to ignore the potential value.
|
| Good luck! I may pitch this to my team next time we need
| something semi-automated (btw you're kind of competing with Slack
| bots, that's what we use now.)
| prepend wrote:
| I find these cognitive surplus [0] really promising. If not for
| identifying the people for whom a task is easy. It's always neat
| to me how some things are easy or hard for people and the time is
| spent trying to match this effectively.
|
| I have a friend who is a regex expert and can answer in seconds
| what takes me hours. But I'd never want a thousand people to ask
| vim each arcane question in case ve also knows the answer for
| that topic.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus
| Closi wrote:
| This is great - I could use something like this (without having
| to face into Mechanical Turk), and definitely would use this if
| the pricing was right.
|
| What's the pricing structure?
| ngvrnd wrote:
| who said "Insort Geront"?
| wildermuthn wrote:
| A quick look over their docs, and I think this is a terrific
| product that needs a better landing page. They make it easy to
| build a custom task with a UI builder, and more importantly, they
| also automatically exposes programmatic means of adding tasks and
| receiving task completion data. This makes "do things that don't
| scale" somewhat more scalable. Looking forward to trying it out!
| motohagiography wrote:
| Impressive, we could instrument a lot of municipal licensing and
| public service form filling with these templates. It's like kiosk
| applications as a service.
|
| I'm interpreting that it's like taking the features of a PowerBI
| app, but something with less overhead, and more accessible to
| smaller orgs.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| What next, human Kubernetes? (No no no it's a Joke, Deliveroo and
| Uber staff, don't you dare paste that into Slack)
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Some shops that manually manage docker containers on VMs call
| it "meat scheduling".
| mring33621 wrote:
| Will Job X run on Node Y?
|
| [] yes
|
| [] no
| namelosw wrote:
| Human Kubernetes == System Admin. It's already there.
|
| But yeah, it could be a fancy new word for VC haha.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Google keeps saying that Kubernetes is a real world,
| kubernetes, Greek for "helmsman" or "pilot" or
| "governor"[0][1], but its predecessor was called _Borg_ , so in
| my mind, the true meaning of "Kubernetes" was always "a network
| of (Borg) cubes".
|
| This way, I've already seen on TV what "Human Kubernetes" looks
| like. Resistance is futile.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History.
|
| [1] - Curiously, it's also the etymological root of
| cybernetics; cybernetics -> cyborg -> the Borg.
| lsb wrote:
| Interesting launch!
|
| 0) Why is this better than MTurk's predefined workflows?
|
| 1) How much does it cost?? MTurk charges min(0.005, 10%) for each
| Human Intelligence Task.
|
| 2) How is quality checked???
|
| 3) People doing tasks generally report greater satisfaction and
| generally produce greater accuracy with a smaller topic shift
| (instead of doing NLP classification about everything at all
| times, first do topic A, then topic B). I bet you could train a
| simple classifier to group topics together
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| You're getting a lot of comments on the naming/presentation that
| I think are worth considering, but I want to say that the tool
| itself looks great. There are so many workflows that we twist
| into pretzels, and over-engineer one interface point or another,
| because we don't have a way to trivially put a human interface in
| the right spot. I will 100% try this.
|
| With that said, I see a big blocker to many use cases. One of the
| main reasons you add humans to workflows is to deal with
| unstructured data, which can often be sensitive. Have you
| considered offering a managed service or self-hosted option so
| that orgs can control their own data flow?
| edoceo wrote:
| isnt this what Amazon Mechanical Turk does?
| dekhn wrote:
| IBM used to call this "BPEL"
| tgv wrote:
| I thought they were called Epsilons.
| iR5ugfXGAE wrote:
| "They are happy to be where they are, and would not be happy to
| be where we are."
| newsbinator wrote:
| "Every one works for every one else. We can't do without any
| one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without
| Epsilons."
| jdub wrote:
| "Human Lambdas"... "Mechanical Turk"... you're fully aware these
| are horrible names for horrible ideas, right?
| prepend wrote:
| Mechanical Turk is on of the best product names I've ever seen.
| It's accurate. It has a clever story behind it that almost no
| one knew beforehand.
|
| I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when
| people learn. As opposed to other "quirky" names that aren't
| clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.
| Closi wrote:
| This is how the sausage get's made.
|
| If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals
| get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the
| "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and
| it's better to call a spade a spade.
| thraxil wrote:
| That might not be a great example. The meat industry is
| pretty notorious for euphemisms. They're usually called "meat
| processing plants" rather than "slaughterhouses". When
| farmers need to conduct a mass extermination (more officially
| referred to as "depopulation"), one common technique is to
| shut off the air supply to the barn which causes the heat to
| rise so the animals suffocate and roast to death. The
| technical term for that technique is "ventilation shutdown".
| And that's all without getting into whether terms like
| "meat", "sausage", "beef", "pork", etc. are just polite ways
| of saying "parts of animal corpses" and "livestock" as
| "animals that we feel are acceptable to kill."
| Closi wrote:
| I think that is a difference between _internal_ and
| _external_ communication.
|
| Within the industry in the UK at least, meat processing
| plants can be both 'kill-facilities' and 'no-kill
| facilities' which is specifying if they have a
| slaughterhouse in them or not, but the term meat processing
| plant includes both. The site operators will not shy away
| from what is happening - you can't when you are in the room
| when it happens, and it's actually worse for workers if you
| de-associate from it.
|
| That doesn't mean when you write a press release you use
| these terms. External communication gets fluffed-up for the
| rest of the world, and you don't write 'kill facility' on
| your address in Google Maps because you don't want to get
| splattered in red paint.
| clarkevans wrote:
| We don't have to make sausage.
| Closi wrote:
| As long as people are buying sausage, people will make and
| sell it.
|
| And to extend the metaphor beyond where it should probably
| go, products taste better when sausage is added and people
| don't always need to know the ingredients.
|
| Your data will have gone through something very similar to
| this a million times - it might have been validating your
| photo on a dating site or transcribing your receipt for
| expenses, but these sort of use-cases would not be done as
| cleanly if it wasn't for human in the loop.
| musingsole wrote:
| > it's better to call a spade a spade.
|
| There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but
| even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there
| that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of
| humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they
| often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of
| productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a
| different name and not encouraging your butchers to see
| themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple
| Grandin's books provide this insight)
| nathancahill wrote:
| > it's better to call a spade a spade
|
| Speaking of political correctness..
| intergalplan wrote:
| It's fine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade
|
| Any concern over it is very recent and ahistorical. Like
| the false etymologies of "rule of thumb", but far less
| well-established (and hopefully it remains poorly-
| established--there's plenty of justified language-policing,
| we don't need to make up reasons to do more of it)
| Closi wrote:
| > Speaking of political correctness.
|
| Ironically your statement is an example of "political
| correctness gone mad" for me at least.
|
| It's a metaphor about shovels, there isn't anything
| politically incorrect about it. Someone has just dreamed up
| an alternative meaning to be offended about.
| the_local_host wrote:
| Applying "human" as an adjective to something else seems almost
| guaranteed to sound unkind to humans.
|
| No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".
| xwdv wrote:
| Maybe a better term would be "micro freelancing".
| aequitas wrote:
| We had something like this for a project which would allow you to
| create multiple CDN accounts using a single interface. Where some
| CDN's could not be automated by API or we didn't have the time
| (yet) to implement. So the default API implementation was the
| FrankAPI (named after the guy handling the manual requests). It
| would create a pending database record and Frank would get an
| email with details and the instructions along with a link to a
| Django page to fill the record with details when the CDN was
| created. It was so simple and efficient. We loved the solution,
| he loved the solution. It was great. Though we where all more
| tech minded people, so talking with computers was natural to us.
| I don't know how these kind of interfaces would pan out for other
| kinds of people, if they would miss the human aspect in the
| interaction?
| vincnetas wrote:
| At my previous position (bank) we called this concept "baba
| layer". Baba in most slavic languages means "old woman". And
| when used this term "baba layer" was as an indicator that your
| system sucks (a bit) that you cant really automate some things
| away. Or as and easy "solution" to difficult problems. "Well,
| we just let baba layer solve this"
| mushishi wrote:
| Thanks, now then name of the (great) puzzle game "Baba is
| You" makes sense to me.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| This looks like a great piece of tooling for when you don't need
| a full workflow system.
|
| What other similar solution are in this space?
| kjrose wrote:
| So, from what I can tell it's essentially a Mechanical Turk for
| someone's personal team. However, I'm trying to figure out if it
| offers Mechanical Turk style offerings as well, where you can
| just pay for some random person to do the job?
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| > Outsource tedious, repetitive and boring work to our workforce
| in just a couple of clicks.
|
| This is exactly how you create an environment that is just asking
| for regulation and rightly so if you show such disregard for
| other people.
|
| Explicitly treating human laborers in more-or-less the same way
| you treat a machine is unethical design as well as being an ugly
| and harmful philosophy. You are literally building a system that
| enables dehumanizing labor. Is this the kind of future you're
| happy being a part of building?
| weatherlight wrote:
| Heres an idea. It's not novel or revolutionary.
|
| Maybe the the abject alienation from the product of one's labor
| is a bad idea...
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(page generated 2021-04-22 23:02 UTC)