I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens
burla-cloud.github.ioAm I missing something other commenters are seeing about this not being an ad? The domain is on Burla, which hosted the compute needed for this. There's a giant airbnb x burla logo at the top. People are saying there's a lawsuit pending, it's against guidelines, what's the point, etc..
It's content marketing plain and simple for Burla towards people that view this site. It was highly likely done by employees at both Burla and AirBNB together as a joint project.
One of the Burla founders here. Not a joint project with Airbnb. I’ve been experimenting with giving agents access to Burla clusters and letting them run with analysis ideas I find interesting. This was one of the results.
The branding is a bit much, fair call, but the intent here was just to explore what these agents can actually build when you give them access to large amounts of compute.
How many accounts do you have spamming your projects here?
Looks like just 2 accounts with 11 total submissions in the last year, both with disclosures in the comments and/or profile https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This post is a bit lighter on that disclosure than I'd like (and isn't as obvious as a Show HN would be) but I feel I missing some big portion of the backstory to this comment?
I'm struggling a bit with how the 'funniest' ranked reviews are genuine descriptions of people's miserable (and sometimes unsafe) experiences. Where's the funny?
As an experitisement, I guess it gets the name out there but not in any way I'd want for my business.
personally I find those experiences really funny especially in my life. looking back I think most people find humor in it, i could be wrong? I don't think so though
Sure but it's not your life, right? This is other people's misfortunes, and these reviews weren't written to convey their entertainment at an old story.
The author makes some pretty insane leaps in logic for classification, and it’s apparent in the photos.
“Drug-Den vibes” apparently means the owner is poor or a photo is obscured or badly lit.
yeah, theres a lot of trash assumptions going on here.
"Looking at every public Airbnb listing in Inside Airbnb's open data dump, all at once, on Burla"
This Inside Airbnb?
Community Guidelines
Please:
Only take the data you need. Do not scrape data from the site, if you would like to subscribe to the data directly, please email data@insideairbnb.com
>Everything was parallelized on Burla, on a single dynamic cluster that scaled to ~1.7K CPU workers for photo download and CLIP, with 20 A100 GPUs running embedding clusters in parallel on the same cluster.
That's a lot of budget - would have been nice if they'd made an actual donation to the project, instead of pounding the project's servers and bandwidth when there are much better ways to interact with the data.
Totally fair callout. I should’ve been more careful here and leaned on the provided datasets / bulk access instead of pulling things at scale. That’s on me.
I’ll make a donation to support the project regardless. Appreciate you raising it.
... so you'd only end up making a donation if you ended up "stressing the project's infra more than expected"?!
This thing is ripe for a lawsuit and has terrible methodology as far as I can tell.
On what grounds is there a lawsuit? Hasn't scraping been classified as legal?
Calling someone’s apartment an opium den is potentially libel, and if it results in a material financial impact, you’ve got a lawsuit.
Is it someone's apartment or Airbnb's apartment?
classifying people's businesses as an "opium den" using a shitty LLM prompt seems like a pretty good way to piss some people off.
I don't necessarily agree with labeling them drug dens. But certainly the hosts showed zero or negative effort in keeping the room clean and suitable to rent. They do deserve some shaming.
“Drug den vibes” and they’re mostly just small rooms?
I found one in Istanbul [0] (which now 404s) that somewhat fits the label and looks like it could have been a set on The Wire, but most of the "drug den" ones are just cramped, taken by someone who doesn't know how to take pictures and doesn't care to learn (blurry, bad lighting, noisy, poor staging), or both.
Most of the bad TV placement ones are also boring because they're just over a fireplace. Technically correct, but not noteworthy. However, I did find one that was truly spectacular [1] (still live for now) and left me with more questions than answers.
[0]: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/988178752120341661 / https://archive.is/xnvC5
[1]: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/41725492 / https://archive.is/IyMvT
yeah that ceiling TV is all time haha
some are more psychedelic drug vibes and others are just insanely messy.
I've had shitty and small apartments many times and that doesn't prevent me from cleaning it. especially if I'm going to rent it out
I feel like floor mattresses, trash, and peeling paint were also at play. They're all sort of unsafe rooms people wouldn't want to go to unless they felt like they had to (i.e. doing drugs)
Apparently if your resting place lacks a headboard, you abuse chemicals.
This seems like an advertisement for an open source package
>Scale Python across 1,000 CPUs or GPUs in 1 second. Burla is a high-performance parallel processing library with an extremely fast developer experience. Scale batch processing, vector embeddings, inference, or build pipelines with dynamic hardware.
Edit: Author comment was flagged dead. They work at burla which is a managed cloud service for parallelizing python
Looks like it was hit by some sort of automated ChatGPT detector.
Airbnb was actually started by two guys who created an opium den for Obama's convention so this doesn't surprise me.
In some sense airbnb would be better if there was more opium dens and less influencer dens
an opium den can be fun
These are amazing! Some are probably offensive, because I saw a cozy, if kitschy, British den labeled as "did-someone-just-leave" vibes which... unfair.
do you know the listing number? will remove that one haha
Ah yes, let's price the world out of the real estate market and then use insanely powerful AI models to systematically mock the living conditions of the poors.
This is pretty great, the reviews at the bottom are the best part. I'm impressed they were able to scrape so much data
What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point.
As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value.
I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.
The pet detection part isn’t the point, that’s just a visible output. The actual goal was to stress test agents + distributed compute on something non-trivial.
I dunno there are literally 100s of millions (billions?) of people who spend more than an hour per day just scrolling through social media feeds.
How much does it cost to send a billion people an hour of video every day? Almost all of the resources tech uses is for pointless or even negative things.
What % of compute/bandwidth do you think is used for "real value"? I would guess it is well below 1%.
This vanity scraping is fucking up the internet for everyone else.
It's hardly the only thing, but it's part of the problem.
Fair feedback. Definitely more backlash than I expected. The intent was to experiment with large-scale analysis, not add noise or put strain on shared resources. I’ll be more thoughtful about this kind of thing going forward.
Man you are so disconnected from reality. It’s actually insane. I’m convinced many like you don’t go outside.
created less than an hour ago, I'm convinced you're not a human
I'm human and I think this site is objectively terrible.