Show HN: Hurl.it is back – Make HTTP Requests | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hurl.it is back – Make HTTP Requests

hurlit.com

73 pointstodsacerdoti15 comments

Hurl.it was originally created by Chris Wanstrath and Leah Culver for the 2009 Rails Rumble.

Hurl.it was acquired and maintained by https://twilio.com for awhile.

Hurl.it was acquired and relaunched by https://runscope.com in 2013.

Hurl.it was acquired and relaunched by https://pipedream.com in 2021.

That's really cool. But I wonder, why is a service like this so useful that it gets acquired so many times? I mean it seems like this should be fairly easy to build, unless I'm missing something here.

I can give some context on that. Go back to 2011, visual HTTP clients weren't that popular. Postman, Insomnia, etc. weren't around yet. Working at Twilio, we regularly needed to show people how the API worked. Hurl.it was perfect for it. It was notoriously unreliable though so I pestered Chris Wanstrath and Leah Culver until they sold it to me for $1,000 (I expensed it, asked for forgiveness and jokingly call it Twilio's first acquisition). We kept it running for awhile. I left.

Then I started Runscope and we made a much better version of Hurl.it and RequestBin, but those two sites were by then linked in tons of API docs and we couldn't get those links switched to Runscope, so we acquired the links. Twilio was happy to get rid of it since they had actual infosec policies in place by that point and Hurl.it was regularly abused as an open proxy. Those two sites were the meat and bones of our marketing for most of pre-acquisition life of Runscope. We had direct links to Runscope for people who needed more features, and would tag visitors and retarget them later. Those audiences being shown an ad for a free, brilliantly-designed 'Everything is going to be 200 OK' t-shirt drove A LOT of sign ups[0].

Then we sold the company and I lost control of the domains to our acquirer.

Edit: Since Tod linked to hurlit.com instead of hurl.it, I assumed they had just cloned it but they also have the original domain hurl.it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVjhGa-wt9A

That's really interesting. Thanks for posting this.

Yes, we own both URLs. The point of the post was to show that we got https://hurl.it back online and I inadvertently put https://hurlit.com as the link.

Amazing. I still have one of those t-shirts in the wardrobe came into it’s own on endless zoom calls talking about site availability.

Man that's funny. I saw those t-shirts EVERYWHERE for a couple of years. I think it got copycatted around quite a bit. Was yours the OG?

Yeah we were the original and trademarked the slogan and had to regularly send takedown notices over it.

I used to use Hurl.it a lot before it had been bought by Runscope. Nowadays I see no reason for use it, since we have tools like Insomnia and Postman.

I was a huge user of Hurl.it between 2014-2016. Pipedream is awesome and it's great to see them relaunch this super-useful tool.

It's better in some ways than Postman (cleaner) and Insomnia (simpler) but I think https://hoppscotch.io has this beat in every way.

Still, hurl is the original and it's nice that it's back up.

But why not simply use curl? Am I missing something here?

Why curl and not simply use /dev/tcp?

I used to use this all the time years ago. Fun to see it's back!

Now do yourapihere.com ;)

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