Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Bash, too!

> One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

— Marc Hedlund (2007)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070329031201/http://radar.orei...

Funny that he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, since that was sort of the same idea behind Zapier, et al., though (I guess) too far ahead of its time.

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> Funny that he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, since that was sort of the same idea behind Zapier, et al., though (I guess) too far ahead of its time.

An alternate business model is to look at Yahoo product launches from 5-10 years ago, and build what they did but shut down, its time may have come. Google did this pretty well for a while. You can probably do it for Google now, too.

You mean the time is right for a Google Reader alternative?

Maybe. Might not specifically be RSS-based, though, there's a lot of good RSS clients out there (I use https://bazqux.com/ - it's great).

Google Reader I remember sold itself as being an "inbox for the web". I think Reddit and Facebook are the big competitors for that idea… not RSS clients. But maybe the time is right for a new take on that idea, one that works more closely like Reader.

Didn't Feedly already meet this demand? Seems like almost everybody I know who used Google Reader back in the day switched over to Feedly.

I don't think this is about a replacement for those who miss google reader; rather, a reinvention of it, whose time maybe has come.

7 years ago maybe.

Start here --> killedbygoogle.com

I liked the post.

Yahoo! Pipes a strong argument for building your own tool/buying a paid product, in that if one relies too heavily on a service and it went away, then that [business] process went away as well. The demise of Pipes! caused us a bit of anxiety and made us hustle to find other solutions in a compressed time frame.

The rather quick demise of Yahoo! Groups was also disruptive. Heck, even Hacker News could have worked as a Yahoo! Group. Fortunately, it is not. When Groups went away, so did a lot of discussion groups and even when those groups moved, they lost many members. Groups.io is a nice alternative, but there too much of their platform is free.

There is always a danger when you build critical things on someone else's land, particularly if they allow you on their property for free. Even if they charge you but are not profitable, there is a risk of waking up to read that the service is closing.

We use Zapier in our small business, but work to build out tools for those Zaps! that become mission critical.

Didn't yahoo pipes also give the ability to type sql for apis like "select * from facebook.posts" or "select * from reddit.posts where subreddit='askreddit'"

Yes it did.

Here is a sample: https://benward.uk/blog/using-yahoo-pipes-to-feed-facebook

rm became low orbit ion cannon?

LOIC is almost certainly `yes`

Eh, 'yes' stops talking as soon as the recipient stops listening.

The trick is to make sure the recipient's always "listening":

    nohup yes >/dev/null

With that, 'yes' is still pegging one of my cores even though I've closed the terminal.

Hmm makes me think...there might be some cool usecases for replacing filesystem related tools/commands with webapps using the native file system API in browsers, when/if it gets released

I’ve never read that quotation, that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing it.

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