{"slug": "amazon-mechanical-turk", "name": "Amazon Mechanical Turk", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 8, "warners": 0, "score": 3.685, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-02", "latest": "2026-08-27", "why": "MTurk was pure magic if you knew how to use it to its full potential.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 5, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "MTurk was pure magic if you knew how to use it to its full potential.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.mturk.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Mechanical Turk", "Amazon Mechanical Turk"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 732720368, "item_id": 45795023, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795023", "by": "dmd", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used it to have transcribed our 2 kids x 5 years of daycare x 180 days a year worth of extensive wonderful daily reports from daycare.", "excerpt": "I used it to have transcribed our 2 kids x 5 years of daycare x 180 days a year worth of extensive wonderful daily reports from daycare.", "context": "", "use_case": "transcribing daycare reports", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732707616, "item_id": 45794226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794226", "by": "pvankessel", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MTurk was pure magic if you knew how to use it to its full potential.", "excerpt": "I used MTurk heavily in its hey-day for data annotation - it was an invaluable tool for collecting training data for large-scale research projects, I honestly have to credit it with enabling most of my early career triumphs. We labeled and classified hundreds of thousands of tweets, Facebook posts, news articles, YouTube videos - you name it. Sure, there were bad actors who gave us fake data, but with the right quali", "context": "social science researcher", "use_case": "data annotation for research", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732693824, "item_id": 45793364, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793364", "by": "comrade1234", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed.", "excerpt": "My wife had dozens, well probably over 100, handwritten recipes from a dead relative. They were pretty difficult to read. I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed. Most of the work was done by one person - i think she was a woman in the Midwest, it's been like 15-years so the details are hazy. A few recipes were transcribed by people overseas but they didn't stick at it. I had to reject only one transcr", "context": "", "use_case": "transcribing handwritten recipes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "pvankessel", "context": "social science researcher", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794226", "date": "2025-11-02"}, {"by": "stevejb", "context": "finance research project", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793712", "date": "2025-11-02"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["extracting data from pdfs via crowdsourcing", "transcribing handwritten letters", "paying humans per task", "transcribing daycare reports", "ux surveys", "data annotation for research"], "compared": [], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45792951", "title": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49457545", "title": "Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456400", "title": "Ask HN: When do we expose \"Humans as Tools\" so LLM agents can call us on demand?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 2}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 791441120, "item_id": 49465070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49465070", "by": "ealready_value", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Overall, I still have fondness to mturk, but it was really bare-bones experience that needed a lot of work to get working effectively.", "excerpt": "About 8 years ago, we used mturk for reading data out of public PDFs generated by a huge range of producers. I am not sure that LLMs would have been able to consistently extract this data until recently as a good number of these PDFs were scans, sometimes a scan of scan. We had pretty good luck in the end, but getting there produced a somewhat large app on our side that would manage the whole process, including but n", "context": "", "use_case": "extracting data from PDFs via crowdsourcing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30"}, {"id": 791332944, "item_id": 49458309, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458309", "by": "wanderingstan", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used it to have people transcribe my dad\u2019s handwritten letters and journals.", "excerpt": "I used it to have people transcribe my dad\u2019s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a \u201cTurk\u201d saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!", "context": "", "use_case": "transcribing handwritten letters", "switched_from": "", "story": "Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30"}, {"id": 743338928, "item_id": 46458683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458683", "by": "bobbiechen", "date": "2026-01-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the infra already exists through MTurk", "excerpt": "My thought as well - the infra already exists through MTurk, as well as the ethical and societal questions. You can already pay people pennies per task to do an arbitrary thing, chain that into some kind of consensus if you want to make it harder for individuals to fudge the results, offer more to get your tasks picked up faster, etc.", "context": "", "use_case": "paying humans per task", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: When do we expose \"Humans as Tools\" so LLM agents can call us on demand?"}, {"id": 732720368, "item_id": 45795023, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795023", "by": "dmd", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used it to have transcribed our 2 kids x 5 years of daycare x 180 days a year worth of extensive wonderful daily reports from daycare.", "excerpt": "I used it to have transcribed our 2 kids x 5 years of daycare x 180 days a year worth of extensive wonderful daily reports from daycare.", "context": "", "use_case": "transcribing daycare reports", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732710352, "item_id": 45794397, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794397", "by": "firefax", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used to to run UX surveys", "excerpt": "I used to to run UX surveys https://web.archive.org/web/20170809155252id_/http://kittur.org/files/drafts/Submissions/Kittur+2008_CrowdsourcingMechanicalTurk.pdf", "context": "", "use_case": "UX surveys", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732707616, "item_id": 45794226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794226", "by": "pvankessel", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MTurk was pure magic if you knew how to use it to its full potential.", "excerpt": "I used MTurk heavily in its hey-day for data annotation - it was an invaluable tool for collecting training data for large-scale research projects, I honestly have to credit it with enabling most of my early career triumphs. We labeled and classified hundreds of thousands of tweets, Facebook posts, news articles, YouTube videos - you name it. Sure, there were bad actors who gave us fake data, but with the right quali", "context": "social science researcher", "use_case": "data annotation for research", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732699392, "item_id": 45793712, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793712", "by": "stevejb", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used MTurk to analyze the images of people applying for a loan.", "excerpt": "Using the Propser.com data set (a peer-to-peer lending market), I used MTurk to analyze the images of people applying for a loan. This was used in a finance research project with 3 University of Washington professors of Finance. The idea was that the Prosper data set contained all of the information that a lending officer would have, but they also had user-submitted pictures. We wanted to see if there was value in th", "context": "finance research project", "use_case": "image labeling for research", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}, {"id": 732693824, "item_id": 45793364, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793364", "by": "comrade1234", "date": "2025-11-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed.", "excerpt": "My wife had dozens, well probably over 100, handwritten recipes from a dead relative. They were pretty difficult to read. I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed. Most of the work was done by one person - i think she was a woman in the Midwest, it's been like 15-years so the details are hazy. A few recipes were transcribed by people overseas but they didn't stick at it. I had to reject only one transcr", "context": "", "use_case": "transcribing handwritten recipes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today"}]}