bryanh

24 ms·

211.
by bryanh 13y ago
You beat me by a minute!
212.
by bryanh 13y ago
> Dropbox was a “feature, not a product,” Jobs said. In other words, they didn’t really have a business. [0] Not that I disagree about Snapchat's possibly ephemeral value, but dismissing it is a bit premature. I doubt many would say
213.
by bryanh 13y ago
I think it is a question of efficiency, right? If some external middleware can provide more value in some columns than it offsets in other columns, it is usually a good bet. We're all just raising the bar for abstraction: first it was
214.
by bryanh 13y ago
We thought this one was particularly novel, so I disagree (though as a Zapier co-founder I am a bit biased!). We rarely submit API additions to HN unless it seems particularly suited for hackers, others in the community might though...
215.
by bryanh 13y ago
Happy to answer any questions about this, it is particularly cool because you really can run a SaaS service with "no servers" and still get to use your pick of providers (Sendgrid, Mailchimp, Twilio, etc.). It seems like a lot of
216.
by bryanh 13y ago
Zapier co-founder here, we started it during the weekend and just kept it alive! ;-) It is helpful to work with people you know and are comfortable with (because if you do keep it alive, you'll basically be married to them). Plus, it h
217.
by bryanh 13y ago
This assumes pricing is the primary thing that consumers chose by. Which isn't true. Also, as storage costs decrease (and they will, of course), owning your own datacenter isn't as big of an advantage in the long term.
218.
by bryanh 13y ago
We saw them having issues for about ~20 minutes via https://zapier.com/status/ .
219.
by bryanh 13y ago
Wonderful, thank you for releasing this! I hope you guys continue to release good bits for handling email, it really is a bear. The ongoing joke in Zapier is a small library that I made called simple_imap. Well, as the story goes, it quickl
220.
by bryanh 13y ago
Zapier co-founder here, we've heard this question a lot and TBH, it is a fairly difficult thing to do. In addition to lots of users using Zapier to dump important data into Google Spreadsheets for safe keeping, I've heard of users
221.
by bryanh 13y ago
Sure! Basically, reuse a lot of signing functions that you might find in a library (IE: Django's https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/signing/ ), don't roll your own. Then, keep track of
222.
by bryanh 13y ago
At Zapier, we jumped through a lot of extra hoops to make sure that emails are categorized and you can easily opt-out with a single click (no matter if you are logged in or not). Some emails cannot be opted out of (the only two right now ar
223.
by bryanh 13y ago
Who cares if they are the top 5% if they don't jive with the way you do things. That just causes extra stress and trouble later on, so it is better for both sides. Besides, the top 5% of what? Raw coding ability? I bet you the people t
224.
by bryanh 13y ago
No mention of Hulu here or in the article? Hulu has done several of these cheap shows and none of them seem to have caught on in any meaningful way, whereas Netflix's obvious "swing-for-the-fences" attempts seem to have every
225.
by bryanh 13y ago
Very cool! Any chance to open source it? I've been running HN alerts via Zapier (my startup) + a webhook polling trigger with a URL like http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?&q=yo... (wh
226.
by bryanh 13y ago
Let's hope they don't got the route of Android, which is perhaps the most successful consumerization of Linux to date, wherein they allow hardware vendors bog it down with crapware...
227.
by bryanh 13y ago
> Being proud of how well you did at fundraising is like being proud of your college grades. What a great line.
228.
by bryanh 13y ago
Thanks! We'll try to work that into the next round of edits!
229.
by bryanh 13y ago
This is a very good summary.
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by bryanh 13y ago
That is the case! It's actually a hard concept to get across in words (we've found). If you have or see an example that really resonates with you, do let us know (and we're open to pull requests https://github.com&
231.
by bryanh 13y ago
There is no middle intermediary, its just two servers. For example, Facebook & your app. Instead of polling `facebook.com/api/posts` every 2/5/15/60 minutes, you'd set up a subscription for Facebook to ping
232.
by bryanh 13y ago
This is a great point, is there a better way to do local dev with webhooks? I always used localtunnel which is great it not perfect.
233.
by bryanh 13y ago
Websockets are still your best bet here.
234.
by bryanh 13y ago
That is a good point. What kills us the most is the latency on network IO when polling.
235.
by bryanh 13y ago
The server itself will just POST a payload to a defined URL. I'm not wildly familiar with the internals of that app or Rails in general, otherwise I'd give more detail!
236.
by bryanh 13y ago
Bingo!
237.
by bryanh 13y ago
Hey Steve! > See the confusion in this thread. If it were a link to a spec, nobody would be confused. We definitely had a little confusion in the thread, I think that was mostly because we put too much marketing on the homepage for this
238.
by bryanh 13y ago
Good point. For us (Zapier), we just waste a lot of time and resources polling. We talked to some of the SaaS services we integrate with and it is the same on their side as well. That is our motivation.
239.
by bryanh 13y ago
We are pushing some copy updates to the homepage, most of the technical details were in docs. TL;DR coming to the homepage soon, but the gist is: REST Hooks itself is not a specification, it is a collection of patterns that treat
240.
by bryanh 13y ago
Great call, we're adding it to the homepage now!

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