This doesn't square with several team's assertions that, according to their analytics, their videos had never been viewed by the judges. I wish they (saleforce) had addressed this issue in their response.
Can you point me in a direction where I can find contestants that are claiming this? I work at Salesforce and I would like to investigate this further.
I already commented on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784782), and so far I can find only one person that is claiming that their video was not shown (@colabi). While every complaint deserves to be investigated, I think colabi's has been heard multiple times already and I'd like to see if there is some other cause for concern.
They do address it, they lie by asserting that every apps was viewed twice when it's clear that was not the case unless there are dozens of developers lying about something random which I'm pretty sure isn't the case.
@zaguis, can you point me to anyone else besides @colabi that is claiming that their video has not been viewed? I genuinely want to investigate this, but after searching for a week I can't find anything concrete.
Since you are confidentially asserting that you believe that salesforce employees are lying, it would help everyone if you could identify just a couple of the dozens of developers that you reference.
If you do so, I will investigate their specific situation directly.
What comprised a submission? Is it possible that an app was legitimately reviewed and dismissed before the reviewer made it to the video?
Put another way, I look at a lot of resumes that have personal links/CVs on them. 90% of the time I've decided no before I get to them, making their inclusion irrelevant. Could this not have happened?
> I quickly checked Testflight and our app data to see if it had been run.
So, the assumption is that judges' computers don't block phone-home and other tracking/analytics services? That'd be a very poor and dangerous assumption to make.
Our app created a record in salesforce the first time it's run on any device. No new records. They confirm in their press release that the final 5 were chosen on video/description alone.
"We instructed both our first and second round judges to evaluate the submissions using the apps’ description, screen shots and the demo video using the same four criteria"
I remember reading (some time ago, and I can't find the article now) that YouTube view counters are designed to be probabilistic and "good enough" to give a general idea of the number of views. I don't believe YouTube is providing any particular guarantee on the accuracy of their view counters.
Lock-step global counters, even when you play games like sharding and summing to reduce contention, can still introduce latency and SPOF. But then again, I would have expected any probabilistic counter to only kick in after a certain popularity threshold.
I would hesitate to make any claim that something definitely was not viewed based on anything less than the full HTTP access logs of a self-hosted video.
