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Comment by benhamner | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback. This is likely a "not quite yet" vs. "never".

Definitely understand the motivations from a user standpoint for not needing to login to download.

There's some non-obvious benefits we get as a small team by requiring login, in addition to new user growth. Bandwidth for hosting data can be large, and it's easier to reason about and prevent abuse in the context of authenticated users.

We do enable previewing the dataset while logged out, and the preview functionality will become more full-featured.

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Thanks for your response. I spoke slightly evocatively because this has caused issues for me and hence I didn’t like to see it advertised as “public”.

The biggest issue is that I cannot share my work with others (easily) if I use a dataset from Kaggle. For example, ideally I just want to have a notebook online somewhere which can be instantly downloaded and run by anyone. Having to (automatically) download a dataset is a hinderance, and having to create a kaggle account first is an outright blocker.

On the other hand using, for example, IPFS or a torrent would be better, because you can reference the dataset using a global identifier and anyone can easily get access to it.

A torrent option would go a long way to offsetting hosting costs on more popular items. Also I appreciate the preview option, it's good to see what is in a dataset before committing to downloading and extracting hundreds of gigabytes.

Part of the best practices of public data involve unrestricted downlod - https://project-open-data.cio.gov/principles/

There are certainly benefits to you as a host if you restrict access to as a host. But if you have bandwidth concerns, perhaps just link to the source.

As it is now, I may be confused that you are using open data as a way to drive user growth.

I disagree with the parent. You've taken the time to organize and host these datasets. The least we can do is create an account to download them.

Sure, but then maybe don't call it "public" as people will think it can be downloaded without creating an account. Calling something public but require account creation is misleading.

I'm not sure I'd agree- the data is accessible to anyone who wants it for free. There's no restrictions on creating the account.

Radio is free, but you hear advertisements. Probably better to create an account than to have product placement in the actual data.

The restriction I'm talking about is creating the account. "Public" (at least for me) does not mean that I need to agree to some lengthy "terms of service", "privacy policy" and create an account. Public means it's public and can be accessed from curl or my browser of choice without signing a contract.

Not sure were you are from, but where I'm from (Sweden), public radio (not free but public) and public TV is free of advertisement and does not require me to sign up for an account to be able to listen to/watch it. That's what I call public.

- https://www.kaggle.com/terms

- https://www.kaggle.com/about/privacy

When Kaggle is saying "public" dataset, they're implying the origin of the dataset is public. Meaning, the datasets were created by various groups/companies/institutions and made available for the general public. Kaggle is simply hosting them again. They're doing us a service by organizing them all into one location and eating the bandwidth costs. My argument is that in return for that service to us, the least we can do is create an account with them.

I have no problem with them offering datasets to the public and just requiring to sign up for an account. But call then Kaggle-Public, Semi-Public or anything else, public data has a meaning that is not what they are doing.

For example, the government where I live (Catalunya) has public data. So I can go to the website and click download, no account required. If that data was distributed via Kaggle and requires account signup to get, I would not consider what they are providing public.

AFAIK, Kaggle is a part of Google, therefore is not operated independently by a "small team". You just actively try not to be associated with the behemoth.

Kaggle has been a part of Google for about a year. https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/google-is-acquiring-data-s... I do wonder why they're only giving it a "small team" when they could give them lots of resources and advanced abuse protection - though this could just be an allocation issue, it seems like a wasted PR opportunity.

> new user growth

That sounds like you are inflating your user counts with garbage accounts.

As a company that deals with data analysis, Kaggle can surely tell between different levels of user participation.

I interpret it charitably as "some fraction of users forced to register in order to download data go on to become active users of the platform".

I’m sure they can. But they can also choose not to distinguish a high quality user from a low quality one when promoting their site.

For example, this post - http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/06/06/weve-passed-1-million-memb... - talks about a million users. But does not say how many are low quality, inactive ones. Or even describe how they filtered out low quality users from their analysis.

Welcome to marketing?

> As a company that deals with data analysis, Kaggle can surely tell between different levels of user participation.

Kaggle outsources data analysis to bright students willing to work for a tiny fraction of their actual worth. Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent.

> Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent

I recall — some years ago — when they were advertising for Jobs, some of the criteria for potential technical fitness was a high placement in some of the competitions. Plus, I have engaged in a few of the competitions and you have to have a team of capable data scientists to design them. They are not clueless people.

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