How they clean the balls in a ball pit | Hacker News Reader

How they clean the balls in a ball pit

core77.com

26 pointssurprisetalk31 comments

Guess what? Actual title is "Here's how they ...". As usual, HN automunges it to make it mean something different and if anything more clickbaity than the original title. Can't we stop doing this?

Yes this is a deeply annoying “feature” of HN

Which is amusing given the otherwise fairly strict doctrine of not modifying the source headline even when it would clarify what you're posting to give people a better context of what the link is about.

I'd rather these articles weren't posted at all

I’d rather read something like this occasionally instead of yet another submission focused on AI

How does this even happen? I assumed it was bad metadata in the article (which is usually the cause of this problem on social media in general) but everything there looks fine.

HN basically has some regexes it automatically applies to titles. Then sometimes it gets adjusted afterwards when the result turns out to be nonsense.

I've wondered this as well, I'd love to hear from the mods as to how many false positives vs true positives this generates. Us, the lowly users, only spot it when it mangles a title, but does it actually provide some tangible benefit?

I don't want to judge this 'feature' too harshly without that data, but couldn't 80% of the value of this be achieved by putting the text 'please don't editorialize titles of submissions except to de-clickbaitify them' in the submission form?

Or just use the <title> of the page verbatim? If it's clickbaity, it'll get downvoted, as it should.

Isn't it more likely the submitter chose the title? HN doesn't even auto-recommend a title for submitted content, and instead it's up to the submitter. In rare cases after the fact a mod like dang changes the title to remove editorialization.

So unsure what this whole thread of people complaining about HN supposedly mangling titles.

HN does remove some prefixes from titles automatically

Can you elaborate on how the two titles mean something different? To my reading, "Here's how they ..." and "How they ..." mean the same thing. "Here's" is unnecessary. (Not saying I agree with HN removing it automatically, just that in this case I don't think it changes the meaning.)

I don't think I follow. What is HN doing to the title? Deleting the word "Here's"?

The ball pits are an inevitable fixture at Ikea's "Småland" playgrounds, but I didn't know they actually invented them. TIL...

They show it going through a machine that seems to at best maybe vacuum off dust and maybe get a part of the ball with UV? Am I missing something? Seems more like the illusion of cleaning. The description of Chucky cheese running them through an industrial dishwasher seems more like actual cleaning.

In the description it calls it a "deep clean", which seems suspect.

>They show it going through a machine that seems to at best maybe vacuum off dust and maybe get a part of the ball with UV? Am I missing something?

It gets washed off with soap and water inside the machine, you can tell because in the video you can see soap suds, shortly after it shows the UV step.

They're foamy in the middle after ingestion and before being sucked in the tube it seems

There's supposed to be a video at the bottom of the article but it's not visible in the UK due to Imgur blocking UK users.

As annoying as Google's monopoly of the web is, I wish sites would just stick with YouTube for video content.

> I wish sites would just stick with YouTube for video content.

Or host them directly as an .mp4 file would work fine in most cases.

Thanks. It would be slightly less of a kick-in-the-balls if the page told you there was a video that was blocked, rather than just leaving a big empty space.

Unfortunately ... this is probably only how they clean the balls in a VERY small minority of ball pits. The majority are probably still germ superspreaders.

Good for your kids if you believe in the hygiene hypothesis though

This needs a [video] tag, as the entirety of the content referenced in the title is in the video.

I'm honestly surprised to learn they DO clean the balls; I somewhat assumed they would just throw the fouled ones away, and every once in awhile replace them all.

Those balls are pretty expensive when you consider the volume needed. When my brother made his ball pit it ended up being more expensive than a nice couch. I think the price for the crush-resistant type at the time (~2007-2008) was around $0.20-0.25 per ball.

The more central to the business the more likely it is they have the dedicated cleaning equipment. It takes a fair amount of space so places like fast food restaurants are less likely to have one (but might use a service that comes by with one too).

How disappointing. From the perspective of a blind, screen-reading software user, this article just... ends.

If it's any consolation, from the perspective of a visual browser user who scrolls to the bottom, this article just... keeps on going forever. And it really fucks with your browser history if you do so!

(Oh, and it also just ends abruptly after "Here's what the machines do:")

iOS user with clear eyesight here, the article just ends for me too - other users have suggested there’s an imgur video embedded somewhere but I can’t see where, just some awkward photos of a ball pit vacuum washer.

How do they clean the blocks in a foam pit?

Specially trained ball-licking chihuahuas.

Given breath mints.

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