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Comment by github-cat | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with this. Some people may say we need to cover every possible situation in a system, but this is true in theory, but practically we need some trade offs when designing a system. We have to calculate the gains and costs while considering fixing the complexities.

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The catch tends to be if you're able to detect when you're in a more complicated situation and bail out accordingly. One very useful thing is auto-labeling, which turns out, getting it wrong is more problematic than one would expect.

Take for example the 'Gorilla' issue that Google encountered.

http://nyti.ms/1JlTBab [www.nytimes.com]

Then there was the issue with the bookmarks and suicide categories

http://bit.ly/1JFkmCr [productforums.google.com]

(This one isn't as big of a problem, as the frustration was probably more due to the compulsory usage of the new bookmarks, but it still shows some hazards of auto-categorization).

With social things, it can sometimes be very hard to solve a problem that works for 95% of the population, but doesn't piss off the remaining 5% (often with good justification). Unfortunately, detecting when you're in that situation in the first place is sometimes equivalent to the problem you're trying to solve.

I don't understand why a big company like Google can put some feature online if it's not thoroughly tested or thought. It is because it is a web product and it wants the users to be the testers?

What would the testing plan look like?

Simple procedure: take a large sample (1M pictures or so), tag them with the system and then show each picture with the label to a person (using Mechanical Turk or similar) and ask "is this label offensive?"

Use simple statistics to identify trouble spots.

Please don't use link shorteners. They just obfuscate the link target.

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