To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.
I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.
Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just really don't get it.
IF t-shirt is less than <$20 THEN send me a text message.
Instead of signing up for tons of email lists and notification systems you are creating your own. You only get contacted when you WANT to be contacted.
Its actually much broader then that. You can use feeds to bring in info from almost anywhere. If they started to get some Yahoo Pipes functionality you could do some more logic based things.
However, it does have RSS, Gmail, and Date and Time triggers, and actions like send an email or make a phone call that are quite generic.
Gmail isn't exactly a trendy new service anymore, but I think it would be a huge improvement if they allowed you to configure ifttt to trigger or mail from any POP/IMAP compatible account.
Also, a channel for power users like "run this script" or to make a new channel would be awesome.
That's never going to happen. Anything that anyone ever wants to use to trade on in a cost/time sensitive manner will already have event-action (notification/trade) functionality built in.
What I like about this is the potential to become a platform for little useful scripts (recipes). I know there are a hundred ways I could send twitter favorited links to instapaper, but this made it dirt simple and easy enough that my parents could do it. Any single recipe may not be that amazing, but the combination of a bunch of little useful ones could be.
I just used it for the first time for my startup, Bellstrike, and loved it. Here's how I used it. For some reason I Twitter wasn't sending me all of my @mention's by email. So, I used IFTT to send me an email everytime someone @mentioned us as well as everytime someone tweeted with the word Bellstrike. We got a fair amount of coverage the first few days and I was able to respond to every tweet about us in real time. It worked way better than Google Analytics ever has.
This is a straight-forward moan about how HN is going to hell in a handcart. If you don't care about the HN community, or you object to meta, stop reading.
Still here? OK.
When I make a comment on HN I'm about anal about seeing the response it gets. I care about whether things are perceived to be useful. I want to be useful, and helpful, and generally make things better. Really, I do.
I take time to give feedback, and look at the articles before voting on them, and I upvote people who I think are doing good things.
So I noticed that the parent comment to this got a couple of upvotes, and then got a downvote.
Why did it get a downvote? That's something I really don't get. I asked a genuine, pointed and specific question about the service. I asked for a specific improvement to the information being given. I provided a clear example of someone who doesn't get it, so the service providers can make a decision about answering my questions, improving the site so the question doesn't arise, or ignoring me as being in the tail and not worth worrying about. That would be a business decision that I would respect - I'm often the customer that gets ignored, because I'm not normal.
So why the downvote?
I don't care about the karma, except in so far as it's an indication of the cohesion of the "community". What's becoming clear to me is that there really is no longer a proper community here on HN.
It was a comfortable village - it's now an impersonal city.
Whether the quality is going up or down, or whether the general atmosphere is becoming more snarky or not, these are side effects.
I'm signed up recently though I«ve been reading HN for quite a while. I can't tell how the community was before, but this is a fact:
When i signed up a few days ago, there was some "read this first" pages presented to me outlining the proper way to comment and so on. In it, was clearly stated that massive communities will become stupid even if they were once a place where topics were discussed in an intelligent way. A bit further it goes as far as presenting "hacker news approach on online comments" as an effort to provide a community above the average.
But it fails miserably telling what sets HN's comments system from slashdot, redit, dig, etc. which is not much, if anything at all.
So if you wondering why is HN going to hell in a handcart, it's for the same reason that all other online communities go that path too. This is inevitable unless the comments system change radically.
An example of a community that didn't went down the drain: stackoverflow.
Does it really matter? There are people on the Internet. People disagree with each other. Someone disagreed with you. Maybe they were just downvoting everything for fun. Who knows? Who cares?
Because you got a downvote, you make a statement that HN is going to hell. Honestly, I do not know how much more of an overreaction you could have crafted here.
Yes, and once upon a time people here on HN used either to respect that disagreement, or would discuss it. They used not to downvote for simple disagreement. That's part of the change.
> Maybe they were just downvoting everything for fun.
Which again makes my point - you can do that in a city and get away with it, you can't do it in a village.
> Because you got a downvote, you make a statement
> that HN is going to hell.
Do you really think I've said this on the basis of a single downvote? It's a trend I'm seeing.
Sadly the boiled frog allegory is a myth, but using the analogy anyway, I think I can see the temperature rising here on HN, and it's respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled out. I might easily be wrong and I might jut be remembering with advantages how HN was 2 and 3 years ago, but if I'm right, now's the time to start looking for a new place to have thought-provoking conversation with intelligent and knowledgeable people.
I wish we would leave the angry off-topic meta rants for the (frequent) meta threads. I don't think that the occasion of a single downvote requires a big immediate derail. I would personally find that to be a small improvement to what quality discussion and value is present here.
I mean no disrespect and don't wish to rag on you unfairly, especially as your top-level post made a valid point and had a helpful link to prior discussion. You are obviously a long-term user and contributor, and often provide useful links to past discussion, which is very helpful.
So, the downvotes: your original comment could have been interpreted as sarcastic, which might be why it was downvoted. Worth noting that overall it was positively received, who knows, maybe someone just slipped on their iPhone?
Your other comments have two problems. Your tone is somewhat passive-aggressive, for example:
"triumph of evil [that is, comment quality may be getting worse]", "clearly concern for the community is irrelevant", "community is gone, and HN is something else", "respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled out"
Coupled this with the unfortunate fact that I (and presumably other people) also recognise your username for often complaining that HN is getting worse.
That is probably why your meta posts are getting downvoted: you have made your point before, and unless you have something new to say, that makes it noise and the community norms are to downvote noise.
There's a shit-ton of stuff going on in the internet. I want to know ALL OF IT. I love aggregating information, and reading pretty much everything I can. Lots of time I lose track of stuff, or forget about half the things I want to do or read, or people I want to get back in touch with or follow more regularly. This opens up TONS of opportunities with the internet. Especially if they open it up somehow so I can make it (read:write my own stuff) conform with my entire internet world, open up a whole new internet programming language, if you will. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself there, but I see how it can be pretty helpful keeping track of things I intend to do, but may not remember when the time comes. Or even notice (if cheap airfare&&hotel to Rome, then BOOK IT. Impromptu vacation bitches!!!)
***New feature idea, "if I haven't read a bookmarked site in the last 30 days, send me an email" (that may be do-able, I haven't explored the site too much, but I do intend to sign up)
I feel the same way about spreadsheets. Why would I fire up a clunky app like libreoffice to quuery a csv file I can have in a python data structure in seconds. But spreadsheets weren't made for the likes of me, and neither was this.
Thanks for the feedback, agree that the type may be a tad too big, going for something a little different. Will see what we can do about adding more Weather triggers, just scratching the surface!
I actually really like the size of the UI - it's a site that will get used infrequently to set up and change settings, so it needs to be instantly obvious.
If you were to spend all day in it, yes it would drive me insane, but that's not the likely use.
Wow, love love love this idea. It's like Automator for the Mac for the web, but on steriods. Perfect for people using well known apps but for a specific repeatable purpose.
Really cool idea, and nice site design except for one glaring thing- the size of everything! What the hell!? Is this designed for the legally blind? There isn't even an option in the settings to make things normal-sized... Fix it!
While I did start by thinking "am I zoomed in on this site for some reason" the large size has actually grown on me. Overall I really like pretty much every aspect of the design.
On a seperate note: for phone calling, it said US only but it seems to work for international numbers as well. (Was wanting to see if I could set up a nice wake-up call...)
On the contrary, I feel that the large representation of a Recipe conveys a sense of accessibility and simplicity. It says, "this is something you can understand, it will not boggle your mind, stress you out, or confuse you."
Compare this with Yahoo Pipes, which provided a similar service with an interface intimidating to non-technical users.
Glad to hear some folks like it. Was going for an interface that had a feeling physicality, something that might not look out of place on a kitchen appliance. Size was an easy way to accomplish that, but at the expense of getting lots of info on the screen.
Feedback for simplicity: is there a need for the term "Recipes"? Can't they just be called Tasks? Some Tasks can be public/shared, but another term doesn't appear to be needed.
I've been using this for about 6 months in beta and I really like it - I wrote a mini-review on my blog back in March: http://willgrant.org/if-this-then-that/
This is the type of service that really brings the benefit of computing to the masses. Sure, everyone consumes on the internet, but something like this lets everyone experience the joy programmers feel when they make a computer do what they want.
Agreed. This is actually one of those ideas I've had in the past, but came up with something so over complicated (turing complete :) ) it was never going to work for normal people.
I'm impressed with how simple this product seems to be, and hope they can contain any feature creep.
Also, when did chrome stop antialiasing text? If I somehow checked a box labeled "make text look worse", then someone please enlighten me. http://bbot.org/etc/aliasing.png
EDIT: Ha ha, Windows, you card, always with the case-insensitive file systems. Got me again! Link should work now.
The text is aliased on my Windows Firefox and Chrome, but not my Linux Firefox. The font is Helvetica, which is apparently rendered quite poorly on Windows.
That's it — Windows comes with a crappy bitmap Helvetica, and most Linux distributions are even worse because X includes an abysmally bad tiny raster one. Macs ship with a good one, and Adobe Creative Suite installers usually bundle one which is how lots of designers never notice the problem on Windows.
Basically, you should never specify 'Helvetica' anywhere in a font declaration. Specify 'Helvetica Neue', the pretty close 'Microsoft Sans Serif', or gasp Arial — it's not actually worse in any way, despite all the wankery.
The URL is unprofessional, and so are the identifiers in the source code. Protip to the devs: Dropping profanities doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like a 19-year-old trying to impress his friends.
Get over it! They're not disrespecting or hurting anyone. They're not affecting the quality of their product. This is purely a style thing. Calling unconventional behavior "unprofessional" is a cop-out!
P.S. - I still upvoted you because I see where you're coming from, and "s//" is always funny to me for some reason.
Thanks for the upvote, but I do see profanity in a professional setting as disrespectful, because there are people who take offense to profanity (that is the point of profanity, right, to offend or to indicate intense anger?) I realize of course in this instance it wasn't meant to offend, but that doesn't mean it's not offensive.
I'd consider the site equally unprofessional if they used the words "retarded" or "Jew" (as in, "our competitors' products are retarded, don't let them Jew you!"), or if they used scatological humor. It's just bad taste.
I see "retarded", "Jew" and other terms (when used pejoratively) as in a separate usage class from "fuck", "shit" and their ilk. The former are invectives; that is, they refer to a specific kind of person. Their usage can only be interpreted as negative judgment of a human being, even if they're not specifically talking about someone. ("Don't let them Jew you" is still negatively judging Jews even if "them" is vague.)
On the other hand, "fuck", "shit" et al. exist in a bit of a vacuum. "What the fuck" is not offensive to fucks, because (hopefully) very few people identify as "fucks".
So, the vector of offense for "Jew" is different from the vector of offense for "fuck". I'm offended when people use racial slurs. But when someone simply swears, I don't see a reason to be offended. It may affect my opinion of them; for example, I am less likely to respect someone for being articulate if they can't express themselves without swearing every couple of words. But getting offended implies some degree of emotional investment in the words or concepts themselves, which I don't really see the basis for.
To put it another way: I feel like any reasonable, compassionate person can't help but be offended to some degree by slurs; and they should be, because slurs are probably not such a great thing. Conversely, I think that we are taught to be offended by swears, and it's within reach of the average person to disconnect their emotional response from them.
There are practical concerns in terms of content filtering. By using profanity you're cutting off some section of the internet. Whether that's a concern or whether it should be that way are secondary discussions.
What an incredible idea! This can become even more valuable if ifttt can open its platform to enable outside developers to create and distribute custom action blocks and triggers for end users (like an app store of ifttt triggers and action blocks).
Furthermore, I can see this transitioning into "phsyical" applications (think "The Internet of Things"). For example, OnStar can connect car sensors to send a text message when your car leaves your garage.
This is very innovative. It really inspires me and pushes me to imagine what other automation/computing one can bring to the masses. I wish you good luck and success.
Really clean and simple design and implementation. Something everyone should aspire towards. I love how intuitive it was to set-up a recipe and make my services work together and for me. Great job!
cool idea. great landing page text/graphics. simple. intuitive. good sign from my perspective whenever something makes me slap my forehead and wish I had done it. :)
Using (input channel, output channel, title) to summarize Recipes makes code search a breeze.
Traditionally, code search is done via fulltext indexing of verbose textual function descriptions. ifttt succeeds in using a channel-signature model, not unlike Hoogle's type-signature search, to provide code search without asking authors to write any description at all. Very nice!
A tip for Kindle owners: you can make an ifttt pipeline that sends RSS entries to Instapaper. Then on Instapaper's end, set up automated Kindle delivery. Presto, new posts from your favorite bloggers are now on your Kindle, entirely automatically.
whoops, my bad, guess you have to be logged in, here's the full quote
Want delivery of full RSS feeds?
Please do not use this feature to automate delivery of bulk content, such as entire feeds.
If you'd like to do that, try Kindlefeeder, a service designed for (and much better for) that purpose.
Thanks for pointing that out. I've only ever used the ifttt -> Instapaper trick for blogs with infrequent, lengthy posts -- the sort that are much more pleasant to read on a Kindle. But it's good to know that using it for large content dumps is discouraged.
This site is super great, been using for a little bit to automatically add anything I tag 'read' on delicious to my instapaper queue.
It would be awesome if there was an output to GET/POST to an arbitrary URL. Although, I suppose it sort of opens up a bigger issue, as to make it really useful for integrating with a lot of other arbitrary APIs, you'd probably need a way to support oauth from arbitrary services as well.
Really like this - huge range of possible applications.
One question though: what, if anything, does ifttt do to detect/prevent infinite loops? If I create a task to copy new photos added to flickr to instragram, and another task to copy new photos added to instagram to flickr, what happens?
Hi, obviously infinite loops will become an issue we will have to deal with as the service grows. Especially if we start running tasks at a much faster clip and not just every 15 minutes.
It's probably not too hard to solve the problem. You could create a directed graph where the nodes are triggers and the edges are actions and make sure there are no cycles created whenever a user turns on or creates a task.
Caveats to the above are that you'd need to make sure that accounts in the channels are tied to single users (or join together the graphs of multiple users where they share channel accounts). You'd also need to handle odd edge cases with trigger fields and addins - such as a user @mentioning themselves and triggering an action to reply to the user who mentioned them.
Or if there were a way to leave the site and come back again - say a similar service starts up with any compatible inverse pair of inputs and outputs.
I have to admit, I look at stuff like this and my first reaction is "hmm, what could possibly go wrong... could we somehow use this to calculate prime numbers perhaps?"
158 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604921
To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.
I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.
Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just really don't get it.
Instead of signing up for tons of email lists and notification systems you are creating your own. You only get contacted when you WANT to be contacted.
Love it.
(old fart here, sorry)
However, it does have RSS, Gmail, and Date and Time triggers, and actions like send an email or make a phone call that are quite generic.
Gmail isn't exactly a trendy new service anymore, but I think it would be a huge improvement if they allowed you to configure ifttt to trigger or mail from any POP/IMAP compatible account.
Also, a channel for power users like "run this script" or to make a new channel would be awesome.
Still here? OK.
When I make a comment on HN I'm about anal about seeing the response it gets. I care about whether things are perceived to be useful. I want to be useful, and helpful, and generally make things better. Really, I do.
I take time to give feedback, and look at the articles before voting on them, and I upvote people who I think are doing good things.
So I noticed that the parent comment to this got a couple of upvotes, and then got a downvote.
Why did it get a downvote? That's something I really don't get. I asked a genuine, pointed and specific question about the service. I asked for a specific improvement to the information being given. I provided a clear example of someone who doesn't get it, so the service providers can make a decision about answering my questions, improving the site so the question doesn't arise, or ignoring me as being in the tail and not worth worrying about. That would be a business decision that I would respect - I'm often the customer that gets ignored, because I'm not normal.
So why the downvote?
I don't care about the karma, except in so far as it's an indication of the cohesion of the "community". What's becoming clear to me is that there really is no longer a proper community here on HN.
It was a comfortable village - it's now an impersonal city.
Whether the quality is going up or down, or whether the general atmosphere is becoming more snarky or not, these are side effects.
The community is gone, and HN is something else.
And that's a shame.
When i signed up a few days ago, there was some "read this first" pages presented to me outlining the proper way to comment and so on. In it, was clearly stated that massive communities will become stupid even if they were once a place where topics were discussed in an intelligent way. A bit further it goes as far as presenting "hacker news approach on online comments" as an effort to provide a community above the average. But it fails miserably telling what sets HN's comments system from slashdot, redit, dig, etc. which is not much, if anything at all. So if you wondering why is HN going to hell in a handcart, it's for the same reason that all other online communities go that path too. This is inevitable unless the comments system change radically.
An example of a community that didn't went down the drain: stackoverflow.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Because you got a downvote, you make a statement that HN is going to hell. Honestly, I do not know how much more of an overreaction you could have crafted here.
Sadly the boiled frog allegory is a myth, but using the analogy anyway, I think I can see the temperature rising here on HN, and it's respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled out. I might easily be wrong and I might jut be remembering with advantages how HN was 2 and 3 years ago, but if I'm right, now's the time to start looking for a new place to have thought-provoking conversation with intelligent and knowledgeable people.
-- Edmund Burke (disputed - see http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html and http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote2.html for in-depth discussion)
Even PG is concerned that HN is declining - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 - so it's not just me.
But clearly concern for the community is irrelevant and regarded as off-topic, so I'll stop now.
So, the downvotes: your original comment could have been interpreted as sarcastic, which might be why it was downvoted. Worth noting that overall it was positively received, who knows, maybe someone just slipped on their iPhone?
Your other comments have two problems. Your tone is somewhat passive-aggressive, for example:
"triumph of evil [that is, comment quality may be getting worse]", "clearly concern for the community is irrelevant", "community is gone, and HN is something else", "respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled out"
Coupled this with the unfortunate fact that I (and presumably other people) also recognise your username for often complaining that HN is getting worse.
That is probably why your meta posts are getting downvoted: you have made your point before, and unless you have something new to say, that makes it noise and the community norms are to downvote noise.
I composed a much longer reply, but it's probably jsut going to be regarded as noise, so I'll leave it at that.
2. Once you vote, you cannot unvote.
3. Many read HN on touch devices that make it easy to miss a target.
Result: expect at least a down vote or two by accident from people who wanted to up vote.
If you were to spend all day in it, yes it would drive me insane, but that's not the likely use.
On a seperate note: for phone calling, it said US only but it seems to work for international numbers as well. (Was wanting to see if I could set up a nice wake-up call...)
Compare this with Yahoo Pipes, which provided a similar service with an interface intimidating to non-technical users.
http://tarpipe.com/ is a similar tool that's been around for a while; I think the HN crowd will like the fine-grain detail of it more.
And it works with a much larger number of services.
I'm impressed with how simple this product seems to be, and hope they can contain any feature creep.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/75
Also, when did chrome stop antialiasing text? If I somehow checked a box labeled "make text look worse", then someone please enlighten me. http://bbot.org/etc/aliasing.png
EDIT: Ha ha, Windows, you card, always with the case-insensitive file systems. Got me again! Link should work now.
Basically, you should never specify 'Helvetica' anywhere in a font declaration. Specify 'Helvetica Neue', the pretty close 'Microsoft Sans Serif', or gasp Arial — it's not actually worse in any way, despite all the wankery.
The URL is unprofessional, and so are the identifiers in the source code. Protip to the devs: Dropping profanities doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like a 19-year-old trying to impress his friends.
P.S. - I still upvoted you because I see where you're coming from, and "s//" is always funny to me for some reason.
I'd consider the site equally unprofessional if they used the words "retarded" or "Jew" (as in, "our competitors' products are retarded, don't let them Jew you!"), or if they used scatological humor. It's just bad taste.
On the other hand, "fuck", "shit" et al. exist in a bit of a vacuum. "What the fuck" is not offensive to fucks, because (hopefully) very few people identify as "fucks".
So, the vector of offense for "Jew" is different from the vector of offense for "fuck". I'm offended when people use racial slurs. But when someone simply swears, I don't see a reason to be offended. It may affect my opinion of them; for example, I am less likely to respect someone for being articulate if they can't express themselves without swearing every couple of words. But getting offended implies some degree of emotional investment in the words or concepts themselves, which I don't really see the basis for.
To put it another way: I feel like any reasonable, compassionate person can't help but be offended to some degree by slurs; and they should be, because slurs are probably not such a great thing. Conversely, I think that we are taught to be offended by swears, and it's within reach of the average person to disconnect their emotional response from them.
Furthermore, I can see this transitioning into "phsyical" applications (think "The Internet of Things"). For example, OnStar can connect car sensors to send a text message when your car leaves your garage.
- as I abandoned RSS readers a long time ago, new posts on my _very favorite_ (read: top 5) blogs send me a notification email with a link to the post
- new tweets by my _very favorite_ (read: top 3) twitter accounts get SMS'd to me
Pretty limited usage so far I'll admit, but I'm excited to see what new inputs and outputs they come up with in the future.
Specifically: the way the UI swipes things away when you make selections feels very fresh. I might grow to hate it, but I enjoy it today.
Traditionally, code search is done via fulltext indexing of verbose textual function descriptions. ifttt succeeds in using a channel-signature model, not unlike Hoogle's type-signature search, to provide code search without asking authors to write any description at all. Very nice!
http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%28a+-%3E+b%29+-%3E+a+...
See http://www.instapaper.com/user/kindle
It would be awesome if there was an output to GET/POST to an arbitrary URL. Although, I suppose it sort of opens up a bigger issue, as to make it really useful for integrating with a lot of other arbitrary APIs, you'd probably need a way to support oauth from arbitrary services as well.
One question though: what, if anything, does ifttt do to detect/prevent infinite loops? If I create a task to copy new photos added to flickr to instragram, and another task to copy new photos added to instagram to flickr, what happens?
Caveats to the above are that you'd need to make sure that accounts in the channels are tied to single users (or join together the graphs of multiple users where they share channel accounts). You'd also need to handle odd edge cases with trigger fields and addins - such as a user @mentioning themselves and triggering an action to reply to the user who mentioned them.
I have to admit, I look at stuff like this and my first reaction is "hmm, what could possibly go wrong... could we somehow use this to calculate prime numbers perhaps?"