The accidental genius of Yo | Hacker News Reader

The accidental genius of Yo

capiche.com

82 pointsmaguay91 comments

Back when Yo was initially on the hype curve we created a clone for Switzerland called Hoi (a Swiss German way to say Hi) for a joke - link to some press we got below - one of the guys in the picture wasn’t even really involved we just included him and called him CEO to add to the craziness. Technically we had pretty good native iOS and Android apps, backend running on Parse.com (RIP). We got about 10K downloads until Yo actually tried to come after us via the iOS App Store with a vague claim of copying. We defended it OK, no lawyers required but it seemed kinda uncool. We even got our photos in Schweizer Illustriete, which is a dumb magazine featuring Swiss stars - it was the summer media hole so they were desperate. We also ended up adding features Yo didn’t have like sending a photo with your “Hoi” ... took less than 1 week until random strangers were sending naked parts of their body - freaked me out that anyone would trust a random app with their privacy...

Then the hype blew over, Parse shut down and we lost interest until I actually met the Yo CEO at a mobile event in Berlin, and after initially accosting him we ended up taking a selfie together and made up.

Anyway just a random anecdote of developers with too much time on their hands.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/ap...

AMP is a cancer on the internet [0].

Here's the non-Google-AMP version of your link: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/app-hoi-schweizer-klone...

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_g...

I know but I get paywalled for some reason when I link directly to the article, and not via AMP

The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. It's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit, its a timestamps worth in fact...

/pedant

> The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. t's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit.

It’s still one bit. The time is not part of the transmission.

Time is absolutely part of the transmission. It matters when you say "Hi" to someone. Differently timed "Hi"'s can say different things. Even if you repeat "Hi" many times, it's still just "Hi" but the amount of them also matters and becomes part of the transmission when looking at all of them together.

I feel like many, especially developers, fail to see what is in between the data to matter as well as the data itself. Seems like a common hole to fall into.

If we're in different locations and we run a wire between us, and I send a single pulse down the wire. That's one bit of information.

You as the receiver derive the other relevant information from that. A timestamp was not encoded and transmitted, a single bit (pulse) was transmitted from me to you.

That's the thesis of the article I believe. That single bit can "carry" a lot of additional information due to the context and understanding of the receiver. Information that wasn't actually transmitted in the message, but derived from it.

That’s not one bit of information. If there is only one possible message you can send, there’s zero bits in the message itself. One bit would be if you had two messages to choose from. All the information in Yo is in the timing.

Timing is the context, not the information actually transmitted.

You do have two messages to choose from. One is no message, the other is a message.

In that case you have 1 bit per nanosecond of information, or however frequently you want to model sampling the message, not 1 bit of information.

I mean ultimately you need to somehow map the sequence of Yo messages into "information" in a fairly precise manner. Receiving the message takes you from one probability distribution about the world -- or some particular question about the world -- to a smaller probability distribution. I'd describe the information the message carries based on that. It's contingent on what the question is.

More accurate to say time can be derived from the transmission. It's still not a part of it.

Your latter contribution misses the mark by failing to consider that you all might just be talking past each other, arguing over semantics. That's the most common hole to fall into.

It's a 1 bit transmission with the ever-present time side-channel.

You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit. Someone receiving a PCAP with the data would not get more than 1 bit of information.

However, you're also right that the people sending and receiving the bit can derive more information from it.

> You're arguing past each other. The amount of information transmitted is 1 bit.

I don't understand the argument here.

In order to get up to one bit of information, you need to take account of the fact that "yo" is only sent at particular times. If you ignore that fact, sending "yo" provides exactly zero bits of information, because it is the only possible message. All of the information content comes from the existence of the message; none of it comes from the contents.

So in order to claim that there's any information present at all, you have to admit that time of sending carries information. The amount of information carried then depends on the duration over which messages might have been transmitted, since that possibility is what imbues information into messages that are transmitted. It also imbues information into messages that aren't transmitted, unless you believe that a binary message of 01000110 transmits just 3, and not 8, bits of information.

It's called a side channel.

The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit.

> The amount of information _sent_ really is 1 bit.

I'm not sure how you're calculating this, but it is obviously wrong.

The information conveyed by the contents of a message is the log of the number of possible messages.

Here, there is one possible message. The log of one is zero. There's a big difference between one bit of information and zero.

You can interpret a "yo" message as conveying one bit of information, and the only way to do that is to draw it from the contrast between "sending a yo" and "not sending a yo". If you do that, "sending a yo" sends one bit of information, and "not sending a yo" also sends one bit of information.

Thought experiment: with three bits of information, you can disambiguate between eight possibilities. Try to design a protocol in which, by sending up to three "yo"s, you achieve 8 distinct messages.

Again, what you're talking about is the side channel. Shannon entropy in particular. Of course you can encode information up to the time granularity, but if you're talking about that then you're not talking about the content in transmission anymore--which we are--hence why you and others are confused why we're saying it's still 1 bit.

If you want to get into the topic of Shannon entropy, then that's another conversation.

> then you're not talking about the content in transmission anymore--which we are--hence why you and others are confused why we're saying it's still 1 bit.

You're the one who's confused. Show me how you get more than zero bits out of the content in transmission.

If you actually try to work this out, you will notice immediately that it can't be done.

You're indeed right.

Log base 2 of 1 is 0.

I thought you were continuing OPs line of thought and arguing the message contained even more bits of information.

If you claim that time is a side channel then the information _sent_ is really 0 bits. You cannot change the message.

0 bits is right!

My main point was about the side channel so I just took their word on that.

It is widely believed by neuroscientists that spike timing in animal brains (whether by aggregate rate or by individual spikes) does the majority of information encoding.

I’d argue that choosing the time to send a “yo” constitutes log2(N) bits, where N is the number of times the yo could have been sent (It’s not quite an integer but you might say resolution faster than a minute is irrelevant and call N the number of minutes). Not much, but still more than one.

“now!” would be just a timestamp. Any additional message content adds context, so your assertion is wrong.

That was his point, right? A yo-train is just an array of increasing timestamps tied to the sender and the recipient:

  {
    to: 12,
    from: 15,
    messages: [
      1604885969953,
      1604885969964,
      1604885969973,
      ...
    ]
  }

The message is "factored out" and contains no information since it's the same every time.

>increasing timestamps

Bold assumption :)

You’re talking about the implementation but ignoring that Yo is an extension of people’s communication in a dynamic environment. For instance, I bet more Yos were sent during the election.

Most Yo users are not performing code reviews when sending and receiving Yos.

Guys, I worked it out. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle/Fourier conjugate.

Let's say you send a yo now, and then you're going to send another one in 5 minutes. Then you decide to send a third in between. How much information does it contain? Less than a full timestamp's worth, because the timing is constrained.

Once you are sending yo's at the maximum line rate (certainly at least every nanosecond, it's such a critical piece of infrastructure), sending or not sending an individual yo is down to one bit of information. The time component is basically completely gone.

In other words, you cannot know the precise position of a yo at the same time as knowing the precise momentum.

Author here—this is the best part of HN.

I perhaps took the idea too far. Any iOS push notification can be up to 4kb, and Yo’s API shows that each Yo includes a created time, sender name, avatar, User ID, message status, and more. That’s for traditional Yo’s; newer ones can include a location or link or RSS feed item for a news update, which goes far beyond the core concept.

So on a technical level absolutely, a Yo is far more than bit. Conceptually though a single ping—a single bit—could contain the same information, like a single dot telegram, with you or your local device recording the time received. If you only Yo’d with one other person, the time and the sender and the message they intended to convey would all be data points you would assemble in your head with the ping to get the full information.

Anyhow. That’s perhaps taking the idea too far :)

Years ago, I hooked up my apartment buzzer to Yo with a raspberry pi. https://github.com/sambostock/yoorbell It was super insecure, but if you yo'd it, it would let you in, and if someone buzzed the buzzer, it would yo me. Exactly as much info as needed.

Reminds me of the saying that millenials are killing the doorbell industry by texting “here”

My doorbell broke months ago.

Eventually I decided I like it much better this way.

Tell that to my neighbors, whose guests love to sit out in the parking lot of my apartment building and honk to get their attention. :/

My neighbors used to do that, prompting me to make this comic: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/tmt-comics/buttloads-apps

Lol, this is hilarious.

Ooh I did a similar thing at in college where I used a raspberry pie to hook up the door handle to speakers to play “The Boys are Back in Town” whenever someone opened up our front door at the beginning of the semester.

I noticed the gradual reduction of message length too when Yo came out (email -> tweet -> yo), and wondered what it would mean to transmit less than a single bit of information.

I came to the conclusion that it would be a messaging system, somewhat like yo where sometimes it would send a notification even when I hadn't told it to. If you configured it so it sent an extra notification randomly for every notification you sent, then you're conveying approximately half a bit of information.

Strangely enough, I think this could be quite useful, as a way of initiating conversations with people you would otherwise lose contact with.

Author here, agreed, and using something like that to stay lightly in touch with people ideally would have potential. Strangely I think it could have possibly worked in Facebook better if they hadn't named their "notify someone without a message" feature _Poke_.

Years ago calling and immediately hanging up was immensely popular among teenagers/young adults as a way to ping someone. Used as a way of flirting, telling something was ready, arrived at home.

If you had enough credit to make a phone call, but didn’t want to waste your credits on a text, calling and hanging up is the rational thing to do as it costs nothing (provided you hang up before the other party answers). The price of a text for a teenager was significant back then. The other party might be a parent who could use a landline to call you back for cheaper, or a friend who called back using their parent’s landline.

Of course this tactic wouldn’t work in places where the receiver of phone call has to pay a portion of the price.

In my country if you had no credit at all, for some reason you could still dial for long enough that the person recieved a brief blip and a missed call. That was invaluable as a teenager as if I was stuck I could blip my parents and they could call back properly.

This context is helpful. They hacked the system to take advantage of free notifications.

Years and years ago (like the 1970's) way before mobile phones, and phonecalls weren't particularly cheap it was common to give someone "three rings" to let them know you had arrived home safely after leaving them.

Growing up, My dad wasn’t allowed to make personal calls at work.

Calling and hanging up didn’t count, so that is what we would do. We would know to call back.

Years later I ran reports for call centers. I would run data every which way.

Found an agent that would dial a disconnect number hundreds of times a day.

Went to big boss, as I couldn’t figure out the rational.

He took one look at it, and cursed “well know we know how he has top numbers.

Found so many ways agents would mess with metrics

I remember reading that people used to do this with letters in early days of mail, when postage used to be too high for common people

My middle school had a pay phone in the lobby. After-school activities had a variable end time so when I needed my mom to pick me up I’d call her collect. She never accepted the charges, but knew it was time to head over to the school.

Yup, call “collect” from a pay phone.

For the unfamiliar, the collect call recording asked for your name and played it back to the call recipient. You had a a small window whereby you could get info across.

“You have a collect call from ‘555 4784’, would you like to accept the charges?”

Then whoever could just call you back.

The real power was unlocked with a Blue Box - a phone phreaking device that played the same tones as if money was entered into the pay phone. You could trick the phone and make your call. I remember looping the tone on a cassette tape and calling some random number in Japan for several dollars worth of tones. Good times.

Thanks for the throwback. We LOVED the collect call thing as teenagers too cheap to drop a quarter into the phone:

- "You have a collect call from AtTheStationMyBusLeavesIn18Minutes. Do you wish to accept the charges?"

- "No"

I remember this! We used to call it “giving a dodgy” as in “dodgy (prank) phone call”! It’s hilarious thinking back to the sentence “dodgy is when ye get in and al come roond” 20 years later!

My shortcut to text my partner is called “Yo” and sends a “Yo”. Use it all the time. She knows when I’m leaving a store, or swinging by the house to pick her up, or when we’re in a store and ready to meet at the checkout lanes.

I think frequently that the app could’ve survived and have been useful. The iterations they went through took it in less useful directions, but the idea itself didn’t need to die. Feels like a lost opportunity.

But how could they’ve monetized? Would you still use it with ads inserted?

Merch. Get your Yo baseball cap and coffee mug.

Enjoying this line from the post: "At some level of abstraction, it’s Yo all the way down."

Sell it for the minimum prize?

What would be the cost of running it? How much would it take to make it profitable?

As you enter a bar your phone buzzes. "I just got a Yo from Heineken!" If you're not disgusted at that point by an app tracking your location to sell you things, you will probably be more likely to order a Heineken.

When you say monetized do you mean buy a car or buy an island type money.

You could definitely market it well enough to sell some merchandise or similar, it's just not going to make you a billionaire.

But that's the problem because vc money got involved, at which point it essentially had to go big or go home

Not ads, but I'd pay not to have ads. I don't mind paying for apps.

I also want a one-recipient-only chat app. I don't want to open Messages and 1) have to choose the recipient, 2) risk sending something to the wrong recipient.

I'd pay for that. (Anyone want to work on a feature-opt-in [no images unless both parties opt-in to images], explicit/fixed recipient chat app?)

The idea didn't die, the app did survive. You can still use it.

Hah! I am basically like that with mine, but with “;)”. It goes through successive waves of being funny, useful and tiresome, which in itself is funny to me.

This reminds me of feature I liked about Google's Duo app (like Facetime): send a heart.

It's pretty clear what the heart means in the context of a video call app: "I am currently thinking about you and wouldn't mind a video call, if you want to." It solves the problem of instant-anxiety of getting an impromptu video call when you weren't expecting one.

Unfortunately now you can send one of 10 different emoji instead of just the heart, complicating the feature unnecessarily by adding more bits.

That would be a great feature—random video calls are absolutely worse than random phone calls since the former requires you look presentable.

Anyone heard about the re-tooling of Yo by the Israeli Missle Notification Service?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28247504

Ah, Yo hackathon was my first hackathon event after I graduated from a bootcamp 6 years ago. That was fun.

This brings back memories.

So what happened to the $1.2 million?

Same question here. I guess it was used up. But: There was a hype, why didn't more money come in? Was this a flopped startup?

Tangential, but I would be curious to know if "capiche" refers to the Italian "capisci?", which is Neapolitan dialect meaning "do you understand?".

My impression is that the word was popularized from mafia movies depicting Italian mafia guys saying it, and that it means like "understand?" or "get it?"

We're hip hop sharecroppers

Used to wear flip flops, now rare gear coppers

He's in it for the quiche

You might as well not ask him for no free s___, capiche?

Google tells me it’s “from Italian capisce third person singular present tense of capire ‘understand’”

The madvillainy is unnecessary, but appreciated.

Madvillainy is life tho.

Yes. The last vowel is often dropped (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocope) esp by Italian Americans. This also makes it work for nearly every conjugation so it can be the question (do you understand) as well as the answer (I understand).

Author here—yup, it’s based on the Italian word.

Is that the standard way to write the word in english? It'd be pronounced "kapikay" (ch=k) rather than capisce (sce=shhe) if read in italian.

just like "Yo"

It's not really Neapolitan, it's Italian plain and simple.

Not really. The soft "sc" with a mute "e" at the end is typical of souther Italian dialects, including neapolitan and sicilian.

When you say "capisc?", instead of "capisce?" (written: capisci?), Italians mostly feel that the word is said following a southern Italian dialect.

Does the app still exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) says the company has shut down but the app still works (not too surprisingly given its simplicity) with occasional minimal maintenance by the founder.

It’s still around, saved by crowdfunding, though its apps haven’t been optimized for newer phone screen sizes.

I haven’t used it regularly for years now though, but the idea’s always stuck with me.

There's got to be a similar market for "push notification as a service". I wouldn't mind giving a company $20 for credits for 500 push notifications. I hit their API, they push to my phone with whatever text I give them.

I've been using Pushcut on iOS for this purpose, there's a lot of customizability offered including replying with actions. Add in using IFTTT to call the Pushcut notification webhook and then automation gets a lot easier than doing it by hand.

SMS (twilio) and most chat apps (slack, discord, Facebook messenger, Telegram,GroupMe, etc.) offer this functionality. Is there something you want that using one of these would not satisfy?

The Pushbullet service was for this. But you could possibly use the Zapier free tier and Twilio SMS and build something even cheaper.

I think pushover is what you're looking for

Lol I remember playing with it, it was fun! There was also a similar app where you sended beer!

Actually those genius level applications are not really innovative as people were spamming pokes on Facebook far before their advent

Why does it say "accidental" genius? Did the creator not create the app on purpose to be a "ping" for humans?

Showmanship and lure.

In the same spirit as the titles like “unreasonably effective”, and a few others gems.

It turns me off from the content immediately, but ‘m likely the exception.

Is there an alternative yo app that automatically send yo on your fb messenger friend?

so it's "poke" without facebook

This article is like four years late.

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