Show HN: DeadManHandle | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: DeadManHandle

deadmanhandle.com

56 pointsphrocker52 comments

I should mention that this is a native feature in Gmail / Google.

I get a "Google Inactive Account Manager reminder" email about once a year to see if I want to update my settings. They will notify me 4 months after my last activity. After 6 months, they will set up a auto-response in Gmail, and send an email to some trusted contacts (wife, parents.) I've also chosen to give them access to all of my data in my Google account (including email.)

The nice thing about Google's version is that they already know if you're active (reading emails, searching, etc.) So it's frictionless, apart from the annual reminder to check your settings.

You can set up your inactivity settings here: https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

I think that sending an email every 2 weeks is far too frequent, and it's a really bad idea to send an emergency email after only 3 days. I think 4 months and 6 months is a far more reasonable timeframe.

Not to sound overly pessimistic, but I no longer trust Google to keep features beyond a couple years, let alone for time on the order of a lifespan. I honestly believe that deadmanhandle is more likely to be around longer than this gmail feature.

Google released the Inactive Account Manager in 2013 [1], and it looks like I signed up in 2014. They do discontinue a lot of products [2], but I can't think of any reason for why they would remove this feature. So I would be willing to take that bet!

[1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-set-up-googles-inactive-a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

Sorry, I just checked my inbox and realized that I've been getting the "inactive account reminder" emails once every three months.

It's interesting that I couldn't really tell the difference between once a year and once a quarter, unless I really paid attention to them.

The link points to https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/login/ which is totally uninformative. It ought to point to https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/ to show the signup page.

It's an interesting idea. But I'd worry about failure modes. Say it's a Gmail account that gets nuked. Or there's a long-term failure of power and Internet access. But then, I suppose that the warning could include alternatives.

That's a really good point.

Travel. I don't consistently check my E-mail while traveling. Some paid products allowed changing intervals, but that wouldn't solve that issue.

I don't have a good answer, but will consider some ideas. Perhaps allowing staged responses via different mediums is a good alternative. For me E-mail works but as I've offered this others may have different opinions.

Really appreciate the insight.

Chrome extension or an app. I use my phone, or laptop at some point in any 2 week period.

Asking for a trusted person to confirm could also be useful

I'd be more worried about this site being still operational in 20-50 years from now, when it would start having chances to actually fulfil its purpose.

Yeah if it suddenly just stops sending you emails one day, are you sure you're going to notice?

Chances of that are ~0.

And still, failure would be detectable, because you'd stop getting emails. And arguably that's better than false activation.

But the point is that this is open-source. So you run your own service.

"Dead Man Handle is a kill switch that sends an E-mail when you are incapacitated by using periodic E-mail verification, known as heartbeats. If you don’t respond via E-mail we will send a pre-defined message to your contacts upon your demise. We’ll send you an E-mail every two weeks. If you don’t click the link within three days we’ll send an E-mail to your emergency contacts. Simple as that."

Thanks! It wasn’t clear at all to me where I would have to go to find this information from the home page.

Why do the emails go out every 2 weeks? Why not send an email once per year, and give people a year to respond? Maybe send a second email or a text if the final month approaches and the person hasn’t responded yet.

And 3 days seems a little hasty. What’s the rush, after all? If someone is dead for 3 days they’ll surely be dead for another 300.

Clicking an email link every 2 weeks for the rest of my life is going to feel like a chore after a few months.

Three days is way too little time. Who here has not gone for three days without checking their email?

Clicking the link sounds like a case for automation to me!

Per your feedback ( along with others ). I changed the default to 30 days instead of two weeks and 7 days instead of 3 days. I've also made it configurable in account settings.

Given the pace and lifespans of current internet services I could bet a bit of money that this service, along with other similar ones, are more likely to be dead way before I will be.

IMHO There is a big mismatch between the importance of the service and the brand as shown here.

I can imagine there are real customers who would pay for a service like this who are in their 40s 50s 60s and who would want something to look pretty solid.

You're being vague. Explain the issue?

It looks like it’s built for teenagers, but the market he really sees for this is elderly people, who likely wouldn’t touch this.

So yeah I have something like this on a VPS. I wouldn't touch this in saas unless backed by some form of continuity guarantee, which would make it expansive. Oh and I’m in my 40’s.

Skimming through comments before doing some yardwork I saw this and think that's a very prescient comment. It's of childish since I made it for myself, but I think the feedback here is that without any guarantees. I appreciate that type of feedback and it's why I did a show HN.

Hopefully I can resolve that in some way.

I imagine most will not find this useful, but I've always wanted a service like this. I found some similar products and even tried them out but nothing fit what I needed. All I wanted was a kill switch. I've seen mobile apps, but I wanted something via E-mail. If you don't respond within a certain number of days, we'll send an E-mail to your emergency contacts.

I used the design cues from different open source and paid products and made my own. I'll open source it pretty soon, giving attribution to those which helped guide my design.

There are similar paid products but few allowed me to offer it as a service and few if any were free. I even bought one but it didn't quite offer what I needed, so I'm offering this for free to anyone who needs a similar service.

As three other products used AdminLTE I used the same to guide the design. It was easy and quick. Let me know if you find any issues as you try it. Thanks!

I don't see any info about the service from mobile, just a sign up form. Is that intentional or am I missing something?

What is it?

Greaaaat...The icon addition for mobile wasn't cached. Thanks for letting me know. It's a kill switch that I used to contact people if I don't get around to clicking a link in an E-mail.

The mobile version really sucks, so I will have to fix. that. I write C by day. I promise I do that better.

There was a website that did exactly from like 2003-2010. They shut down unfortunately. I'd like to see a business model that can support this.

I think one day you're gonna get tired of paying the bills or maintaining it.

I think the business model is to charge a decent amount, think $1000(ish), up front.

There needs to be a service that monitors these sites and then emails their users if they go down for more than a month, to warn them.

Instead of clicking some link, it would be better to click a payment link :-) So when the receiver stops paying, the contacts should be informed.

Ha...when I told my wife what I was doing one evening she said, "that's a really stupid idea."

I'll show her that this comment to prove I didn't invent the idea ( which I said I hadn't ) and suddenly it'll become brilliant.

But in all seriousness: the non 'show HN' part of this is that my hope of sticking this up on my github will be that people could maintain it or continue with it if I were to 'perish or give up', which I can guarantee 100 % that one of those will happen. My day job and side gigs are all completely open source which is important to me.

I’m not sure how open source would solve the continuity problem. If people sign up for the service on your site, and then your site goes down before they need the notifications to fire, the fact that other people have the source code doesn’t really seem to help?

Just curious: What are the use-cases for such an service? Anything that can not be covered by a sealed letter in the hand of a trusted friend/family?

Setting it up without their knowledge maybe, being able to update the contents whenever you want. I am guessing.

This idea seems fundamentally flawed to me. It places the burden of proof that I'm "alive" on me, by making me clicking a link every few weeks. Basically, if I am not active on the internet, it will announce my demise to my chosen contacts!!

With so many online services tracking your habits autonomously, it seems like an unnecessary responsibility to place on your self to prove you're conscious...

Home page tells me nothing about the service. I have no idea what it does.

The linked page isn't even the home page, you want https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/about/ for info

A little description of the services provided would be helpful. The name reminds me of the concept of a dead man’s switch. But it’d be cool to know a little more about it before I sign up.

Sorry I updated my comment above and deleted my cache to show the about icon. It is a kill switch, just another name. I liked the name because I plan to update it to eventually have it trigger on certain events, like an E-mail or phone app event. Some apps already do this portion of it, but I honestly never trusted them, hence why my goal is to make the code eventually all ALv2

I imagined something similar few weeks ago, a simple html form with a big button in center; hosted on Gitlab Pages, with a xmlhttp ajax submit event to Google Apps Script, which logs the current heartbeat to Google Sheet. A simple Google Calender notification reminds me to click this link once every x days/weeks. Same sheet has another time based auto run function which checks if last heartbeat more than x days ago, sends email if true.

Now that's serverless!

Doesn't stavrosk already have a thing like this? https://www.deadmansswitch.net

yeah and there were a few others but I wanted to completely open source this ( and offer for free ) and finish integrating some IFTT capabilities I've built for my phone that perform actions and send messages in certain cases.

But yeah..by no means novel. The Show HN part of it was to get some solid feedback before open sourcing it.

This does the same thing as deadmanswitch.net

BTW there is one feature that I requested from dms and they told me no. So here is your chance to differentiate your product.

Instead of every x weeks of time, I'd like it if the are-you-alive check would trigger on news events. For example a major industrial accident / terrorist attack / war breaks out in the general region of the world I happen to be in.

Seems like it would require constant upkeep in multiple countries?

I envision some sort of news skimming bot that just looks for key words in the article feed from a handful of major sources.

And who would pay for that... for life?

Plenty of people. Skimming the news for "[x] people dead" and "[city name]" is not computationally expensive and the script only needs to run maybe twice a day. The infrastructure costs associated with running the service should be pocket change. All the users in the same city would be triggered by the same event. The service per user actually gets cheaper with the number of users.

In fact nothing in the dead man switch is computationally expensive and all of it is event driven. Its basically just a database of (email, location, last_checked_in). Thousands of users would take up mere kilobytes of storage. You could run the entire thing severless and it would take years before it would even be worth billing you.

I would totally pay $1 a year for this. Maybe more but probably not much more. With just a few hundred users, you'd be well into respectable side project money.

This seems like a recipe for many false positives and negatives.

One example: I live on the west coast but ran the Boston Marathon the year of the bombings. People closest to me knew I was there and we were able to get in touch eventually. Would this app know to alert my friends and family who didn't know I was in Boston?

Alternatively, we had a 6.something level earthquake near my home at a time I was traveling overseas. My grandparents eventually got in contact but they were needlessly worried since I was thousands of miles away from the event.

This is on to something - but this isn’t quite it, and I don’t know what is.

Maybe the women's edition of the t-shirt should have a dead woman on it...?

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