Pipes

Dev tools

visual programming

SHOW HN2017

280points
126comments
#83of 2,242 in 2017
Top 4%of 2017 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

15 positive, 20 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 11 critical, out of 50 comments about the project. Thread score +0.08.

Idea: 9 for, 2 againstDesign: 4 for, 4 againstPerformance: 0 for, 3 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Nostalgia for Yahoo Pipes and welcome revival of the tool

    From 3 comments
    • I really loved Yahoo Pipes - Was ahead of its time if you ask me..Built some very cool automations on top of this. Basically was IFTTT and Zapier well before them.
      scottmcleod on HN
    • Pipes was a handy tool, hope this project keeps up!
      j45 on HN
    • I don't think you remember how the yahoo pipes worked. It was a brilliant mix of graphs for flow control, premade boxes for all common data manipulation and scripting for that…
      LoSboccacc on HN

Objections

  • Node-based visual wiring scales poorly to large programs

    From 2 comments
    • I've some experience in visual programming languages (both professional and in my studies) and I advise against the graph-form where you connect nodes and edges. This does not…
      zeptomu on HN
    • IMO, the reason the wiring model doesn't scale up is that most don't provide a way to create submodules (compounds?). I expect that decomposing a problem into a chain of smaller…
      jldugger on HN
  • Hard to see the output block and link pipeline to output

    From 2 comments
    • Nice. It's not very clear that you need to link the pipeline to the right-hand side. (I can't remember if you had to do that on Yahoo, it's been so long!). It's particularly a…
      insomniacity on HN
    • I used to use yahoo pipes for a few twitter bots I had. There was an rss to twitter webapp that I hooked up and it was fully automated for years before it stopped working. I…
      anonfunction on HN
  • Site was unreachable or slow when first posted

    From 2 comments
    • Dead (could not connect to server)
      rjeli on HN
    • Please try again. It should be up (works for me and http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.pipes.digital supports that). Though I forgot scaling up the droplet it is running on…
      onli on HN

Requests

  • Starter example pipes and code examples

    From 2 comments
    • would like to suggest a couple of "starter pipes" - samples to more easily illustrate some possibilities.
      mgkimsal on HN
    • couple of code examples would be nice
      yownie on HN
  • Support for scraping with CSS selectors or XPath

    From 2 comments
    • Do you plan on supporting scraping content via css selectors/xpath/regex?
      Toast_ on HN
    • I added a block to download a page (instead of a feed), another block for extracting content via css selector or xpath, and a feed builder block to later combine those (but the…
      onli on HN
  • JSON processing like jq

    From 1 comment
    • Neat. Any chance of adding JSON processing where you can pick a key (ala `jq`[0]) and then combine it with RSS or other JSON or what have you? [0] https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
      hehheh on HN

Questions

  • How does it compare to Zapier and IFTTT?

    From 1 comment
    • This is cool, but I feel like Zapier, IFTTT and their open source equivalents have moved far past Yahoo Pipes. How do you see this stacking up?
      michaelbuckbee on HN
  • Does it support sub-pipe inputs and modules?

    From 2 comments
    • IMO, the reason the wiring model doesn't scale up is that most don't provide a way to create submodules (compounds?). I expect that decomposing a problem into a chain of smaller…
      jldugger on HN
    • It only had submodules in the sense that you could embed a pipe, but IIRC, they were always sources -- you couldn't pipe data into them. It had a notion of the 'output' block but…
      jldugger on HN

Alternatives named

  • Node-RED

    From 2 comments
    • I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Node-RED yet: http://nodered.org/ Node.js-based with a Pipes-like visual wiring interface. It's quite popular with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino…
      beardicus on HN
    • I'd love something like this that I can run locally. From looking at the comments, it looks like Node-RED and NoFlo are two possibilities. I was intrigued by Yahoo Pipes a while…
      Mister_Snuggles on HN
  • NoFlo

    From 1 comment
    • Interesting, have to take a proper look tomorrow. We've done similar things with NoFlo (https://noflojs.org)
      bergie on HN
  • Zapier

    From 1 comment
    • This is cool, but I feel like Zapier, IFTTT and their open source equivalents have moved far past Yahoo Pipes. How do you see this stacking up?
      michaelbuckbee on HN
  • IFTTT

    From 1 comment
    • This is cool, but I feel like Zapier, IFTTT and their open source equivalents have moved far past Yahoo Pipes. How do you see this stacking up?
      michaelbuckbee on HN
  • Apache NiFi

    From 1 comment
    • Its interesting and I do applaud your work, but I'll probably just stick to Apache Nifi with its flexibility.
      technologia on HN
  • KNIME and RapidMiner

    From 1 comment
    • Checkout Rapidminer and Knime for great examples of box'n'arrows applied to machine learning pipelines. I've used Rapidminer a fair bit and they really have a great model…
      bayonetz on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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