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Comment by cperry | Hacker News Reader

Impressive work.

Just came here to note that we read all of our in-product feedback submissions as well as GitHub issues: https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues

If you've got feature requests or encounter bugs we appreciate you filing!

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Do you have a plan to expose some high-level API endpoints? I have been dreaming about something like `run.colab.research.google.com/<notebook_url>?runtime=gpu` which executes a Colab notebook without human interference. This can be extremely helpful in CI/CD environments when you have a lot of notebooks to test, e.g. for https://github.com/probml/pyprobml.

Colab by design is made to be interactive. They even introduced CAPTCHA to make sure you don't train long models and go do something else.

No plans at this time; we try to prioritize interactive compute features. But this would be really cool to do! Maybe in the future.

Hey, just wanted say thanks for PM'ing colab. Great toolbox.

Thank you!!

Question: Why does Google not allow children to use Colab?

I can imagine plenty of teenagers interested in programming would like to tinker on Colab. However, Google restricts the service to people 18 and above.

Where are you seeing 18+ restrictions? I went through a lot last year to get us approved for 13+ so we'd be good at least down to middle school ish.

Sorry, yes, it's 13+. That's still unreasonable, in my opinion. Lots of kids program before the age of 13.

Makes sense. I won't get to it soon, but try to bump that age limit down when I get a chance.

Huh. As someone completely naive about the exact specifics of what goes into these sorts of considerations, what needed to be taken into account?

I can think of the "players interact" element of game ratings (and the fundamentally open-ended nature of that) but not much else. Perhaps it's mostly just moderation/policy?

Without going into detail, at a high level it's making sure we're abiding by Google's ToS commitments, then allowing adult controllers of <18 accts (in this case it was edu accounts) disable access to Colab if they don't want kids to access it. The eng work was trivial, most of the misery is in reviews and x-org navigation.

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