Show HN: Booleans as a Service (BaaS)

Good practice would recommend adding /v1/ to your API url. The state of the boolean ecosystem is moving so fast that we have no idea what booleans will look like in 5 years!

A classic from 2005 http://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

Good call. We're already struggling to keep up with this rapidly evolving data type.

I would like to see the API extended to support DELETE requests, and 404 not found when not existing. Additionally, I've been led to believe that some truths are truer than others, hence some method of ranking this truthiness is a must.

> Good practice would recommend adding /v1/ to your API url. The state of the boolean ecosystem is moving so fast that we have no idea what booleans will look like in 5 years!

Nah; need to move fast and break things.

Not necessarily. He should be using the HTTP Accepts header to negotiate content type including version. Using the version in the URL is considered an anti-pattern by a good many API evangelists.

Ironically, the idea is more useful than intended. One could, for example, store on/off user's preferences in the cloud without the hassle of local storage, survey responses, or even control IoT devices remotely with just the switch of a boolean.

Would also be a cool way to arrange clandestine meetings (similar to the x in the window, only with as many windows as there are atoms in the universe)

It would need authentication and authorization for this. At least for the delete operation

If this had authentication you could even expand its usage.

A boolean might indicate if it's snowing in NY, for example (Read-Only for most people)

Sure saving the 128 bit (even longer when encoded) UUID for one value is so much better then saving 1 bit!

Now seriously how is this any good since you can only save one bit. MongoDB as a service is probably what you're looking for...

Sure but what if you want that boolean backed up somewhere?

And where would you suggest backing up the UUID for that bool?

It only makes sense to back bools up this way if len(n) > backup key.

If you could backup 129 bools it would make sense because you'd only have to remember the key, 128 bit, to access the backup. If there are equal or less, just remember the bools directly.

To be real for a second...yeah there might be something there.

But then you'd still have to store their id somewhere.

unless you have some way of generating a key on the fly. Like a hash of some human readable id.

> the idea is more useful than intended

This is useless for anything serious.

What are your gross margins? What is the monthly churn rate for active users (active to inactive)? How much revenue (in USD) have you have booked each month for the last 6 months?

We're focused on changing the world for now, and will think about making money later.

Pre revenue BaaS model....I like it

Can it send an email or POST to a webhook whenever a boolean is changed? I'd like to know whenever our is_production flag is changed.

Could you add an XML endpoint for your API, with an XSD describing it? All our systems are built to use XML, and adding JSON support to our infrastructure is still 6-9 months away.

Do you offer HIPAA-compliance, in case we'd like to store booleans from medical records on your servers?

Yes HIPAA-compliance is at the top of our backlog.

Someone should build and EXTREMELY slow CPU with this as it's register.

And use a caching proxy as a level 1 cache.

Now we know why that iPad app is so expensive. http://youtu.be/P_KmFJ2gGzw

I'm concerned about the lack of authentication on this API. What's to prevent an attacker from modifying my booleans? just his ability to guess the guid?

For mission critical booleans we may add authentication in the future.

Yes.

I'm just glad this was ranked higher than the SpaceX landing for a minute. Priorities are in order.

What will you do when someone builds Byte as a service on top of your product ?

It's ok, we could use more competition in the BaaS space.

I'd like to take that one step further! Strings as a service (SaaS, a nice and unique acronym). You can post strings on the internet publicly and refer to them by Id, and... no, that's Twitter.

In order to be compatible with corporate IT services we might require the requests and responses to be in XML format with a corresponding XSD file

<value>True</value> should be acceptable

We'll definitely look into that.

I tried to do a Schrödinger's version of this concept but our A/B testing was ahhh... inconclusive.

Guys, make /v2/ with namespaces. Global is good, but your clients have to think about uniqueness. Make namespaces for clients, this will help a lot.

This API seems woefully incomplete. It really should include operations on booleans, not just storage and retrieval. I'd much rather use a tested, well written, and efficient AND operation on your server than risk writing my own and potentially screw it up.

We think this API is world-class, built on military grade encryption and a robust distributed cloud infrastructure.

I hope you had monetization strategy before launching?

We've heard from various famous people that if you build great products, the money will follow.

HTTP 500 error on sending qubits

This wouldn't have happened if they had used React

You should try sending using jQuery. It's great for all things.

Uhoh, that means somebody is MITM-ing you. They've observed your qubits in transit and broken quantum entanglement. Now the BaaS server can't store them.

Do you provide a SLA? I'd really like to get an uptime guarantee before migrating my booleans to your platform.

We will provide a detailed migration path from legacy boolean systems.

I thought this was such an important contribution to the world that I made a NodeJS API so people can use it more easily.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/booleans.io

This is incredible. Thank you.

"Apply HN" would have been more appropriate

What's the market size in boollians dollars ?

Nice.

Could you add groups of booleans? Like “POST https://api.booleans.io/groups/” to create a group, then one can use all the other operations: “POST https://api.booleans.io/groups/:gid/:id” to create one with an arbitrary name, “PUT https://api.booleans.io/groups/:gid/:id” to update, etc.

Sure. The possibilities are endless when it comes to CRUDing booleans.

I want my money back:

  curl -X PUT https://api.booleans.io/46ddb646-c74b-47c4-ba30-d82d11cae3c8 -d val=asdf

"asdf" is truthy in JS but response from server is "Unprocessible entity" :(

Strict equal yo ===

I feel like the rule of three in comedy applies universally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

What are the previous two instances?

The left-pad debacle was ages ago in Internet time. Comedy is partially rule of three, part timing.

Can we get a self-hosting version? I don't trust my booleans in the cloud.

All booleans are salted and hashed.

And not with MD5 either, I'm sure.

Of course not...

Amazing technology, but we are finding it a little limiting in production. True and False values are good, but we're finding that often the data value is in an in between state. We believe that a quinary operator would give significant advantages over the current binary booleans (TRUE/FALSE). Is it possible to implement a quinary boolean along the lines of TRUE/FALSE/MAYBE/MOSTLY/KINDA.

for example earth_harmless:FALSE is not quite true, whereas earth_harmless:MOSTLY is exactly what we need.

Is this a joke ?

Do you want a yes/no answer?

And now we have a scalable way of updating the answer in the future.

I just want to make sure this BaSS is serious and scalable enough to handle massive boolean CRUD operations from my production product.

You're optimizing prematurely. Have you got no faith in your dependencies?

I, too, would like to know the answer to this. If this solution scales, I have a wonderful idea for a service that can store arbitrary data using 8 boolean values per byte.

Imagine all the power that this booleans service has brought to the boolean data type being available for arbitrary data types as well!

How will such a solution store the adress of the byte?

Using an additional byte for the size of the address and the specified number of bytes for the address itself. Then you will only need a few identifiers stored locally to access all the bits.

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To view this post's joke status, make a GET request to a specially-created boolean at https://api.booleans.io/3f80621b-3fa5-4d09-aeda-bc9c742190dc

So this isn't a joke?

Probably someone changed?

I got a value = true so definitely not a joke

What are you going to do if the NSA requests data from your service? Are you going to stand up for the consumer and protect our data?

We will resist all intrusions of our users' privacy and/or booleans.

How long is it before someone makes a FUSE filesystem that uses this for saving the data and just stores the IDs?

Completely free Dropbox alternative!

As a starting point, I've written a library for storing strings: https://gist.github.com/andreparames/c19f87fbe48ee8819f9ef09...

Usage:

  >>> ids = storestr('Hello, world!')
  >>> print getstr(ids)
  'Hello, world!'

In my tests, the compression rate is approximately -36x.

Finally a way to scale booleans in the cloud!

Thanks for the good times everyone. If anyone's interested in making this a real thing (IoT, state manager, web hooks, auth, labels, analytics, GUI, etc) reach out at hello@booleans.io. I'd love to build it out but have a day job so it's tricky. The BaaS future is one of endless opportunity.

Big Booleans is the future, really nice.

We're making a big bet on it. I've personally emptied my savings and 401k into this business.

My company is willing to invest $2 Million, series A. But We want full control on the booleans.

Or at least full control of the false ones, with an option to buy the true ones at a discounted prices.

I'm listening...

Feature request: I really want some named booleans! Maybe this could be your revenue model?

We agree this would be handy. A "label" field.

The Uber of data.

The latency is too high for an enterprise application. I'd suggest a supervised classification algorithm for those who need in-house booleans.

We have our best and brightest working around the clock to deliver <50ms latency at peak load.

BaaS-O-Matic.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/19046

Can you share your stack.

Also as an innovative idea, how are you planning to deal with the surge of clones to follow, any patents in the works?

We spent years waiting for our BaaS patents to clear (the patent office was confused) and now we're ready to take on the world.

Also the stack is Node/Express and MySQL.

Wow, not using a document store? I think we disagree about how predictably structured a boolean is.

Mongo didn't meet our strict security and performance requirements.

I guess you mean MariaDB when saying MySQL.

Needs more Erlang. And cowbell.

Year or two ago I'd be surprised to see something like this on HN, now it's just "sigh...".

Do you guys plan on rate-limiting?

Yeah that would be a good idea.

I just need to store that 128-bit id to reach my 1-bit value. Well...

What hardware is used for memory in your servers?

I am clearly hoping for DRAM and BaaS

EC2 c4 8xl boxes, load balanced across multiple regions. Jk it's a micro instance.

Perhaps somebody can build a filesystem on top of this.

When can we expect Optionals as a Service to be added?

How does this protect itself from DDoS attack?

We're about to find out

So, how is it going?

You guys have been nice enough to not bring it down, so all is good so far. Peak load was 600 concurrent. Not sure on DB queries.

Who do I contact for enterprise sales?

Reach out to hello@booleans.io.

All you have to do is boolean the axi.

1 billion dollar valuation in 3..2..

..true..false

Do you plan to add a GUI editor?

Sure, once there's authentication.

You guys win the internet.

I do not get it! Was the launch delayed by about 8 days...

love it:)

left-pad.io was funny, this is not.

This actually shows how awesome the web is because left-pad.io has no https support but BaaS does.

Let's Encrypt, everyone!

curl https://api.booleans.io/50741f52-9b64-4ee1-a2d6-67ee1a60807c

Haha never considered using it for that.