Impossible for the HN crowd: Do nothing for 2 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ <comment><USER3> I was just thinking about the fact that much of my work requires me to pause for a short time -- while building my project, or running a query, or launching the huge honkin' java webapp and waiting for 10 billion classes to initialize -- but the pause is too short to make a useful context switch, and too long to simply wait through without getting bored. So typically, I often check e-mail, HN, or whatever, but then end up getting sidetracked. Being able to simply wait through these would be great. Unfortunately, developing this sort of mental discipline, along with exercising, making my bed, and eating out less often, falls on my "Things That Are Good For Me That I'll Probably Never Do" list.

<comment><USER4> I could see that as a good page to redirect to in your hosts file for distracting sites like HN, reddit et al.

<comment><USER5> Or add:

        open "http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/"

(or your OS's equivalent) to the beginning of any compilation that takes a significant amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else catch Sam Harris' response to Edge's 2011 question, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"? I found it quite interesting. <http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_12.html#harriss>

"I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made."

<comment><USER7> I haven't logged in to comment for 37 days and this little essay is such utter garbage. The fact that it takes him just 7 paragraphs to completely dismiss all potential religious truth as "clearly false" should set off anyone's dogma-alert flag.

Being focused in the present is awesome, but the fact that we have the ability to pay attention on things _other than_ reality is not a problem, but in fact essential to the health of the mind (our "spirit" if you will). Imagine if all your circumstances sucked and all your mind could focus on was reality...

Secondly, this essay sounds like he's much more inner-focused, as I know that I rarely have these "flow of thought" and self-conscious moments that he calls being "submerged again by the flow of thought"... If you asked me at any moment what I was thinking, I would tell you "nothing"... Obviously I'm thinking _something_ behind the scenes, but my focus is just not on my thoughts when I'm _doing_. So my own personal thought-life does not confirm this silliness.

Then again, I'm very extroverted and rarely focused on my own thoughts -- maybe it's my "clearly false" Christian religion, or the fact that I've been a runner for 20+ years which is essentially meditating on present experience (pain), but I just have a strong natural tendency to focus on the present experience rather than my own thoughts.

Even if you're looking at this under the domain of science, I would _still_ argue that the ability of humans to cope with present circumstances is directly correlated to their capability to focus upon that which is _not_ the present. (i.e. thinking joyful thoughts, etc.).

That little essay is pitiful, talk to "robg" here on YC if you want to hear from a Neuroscientist who has a better respect for this domain of mind and spirit. The way this guy just starts with a bunch of assumptions and blasts away at all potential truth in less than 1,000 words gives me no respect for his method of thinking.

<comment><USER8> I don't want to get into a flamewar, but potential 'religious truth' generally lacks falsifiability. Certainly there could definitely be true things that the religious say but it doesn't really promote a method of thinking that leads us to knowing things that aren't false about the world.

In the method of 'religious truths' everyone is right and everyone is wrong, there is no way to sort out the true from the false.

<comment><USER9> That's why claiming potential religious truths are "clearly false" is a clear marker of weak thinking.

<comment><USER10> Saying something is "clearly false" doesn't mean you claim to know everything - you just see there is no evidence for their conclusion. Is Scientology clearly false or should we say they have some good points? If the latter, we might as well explore every fairy tale that comes by - or we could follow real evidence to where it leads us.

<comment><USER11> Where I come from, if you say "A is clearly false" means there is evidence to support it. I have never heard of any evidence regarding spiritual or religious beliefs; maybe the OP has some. Until he presents some, I'll dismiss his claims as 'clearly false'.

<comment><USER10> Where I come from, we consider all hypotheses null until significant proof has been shown to back it up. I've seen none of this proof - let alone the scientific method being used. Therefore, it's clearly false - not "100% I can prove it's a duck-false", but it walks, talks and acts like one.

<comment><USER11> Are you arguing, or are you angry-agreeing with me? The end result is the same: the OP's claim is bogus until proven otherwise.

<comment><USER10> No anger at all - I'm merely stating what I'm sure you follow every day: If we're going to be pragmatic about exploring the truth (i.e. not wasting our limited time) we should explore claims with more proof than "I believe this to be true".

When someone says, "clearly false", it should be (and in this case is) referencing the absence of any proof at all for the extraordinary claims. In this case, people who defend religion have a burden of proof here. Perhaps more precise wording would be: "arbitrary and totally unverified".

This is why I brought up fairy tales. They are just as arbitrary and unprovable. Do you think we should seriously explore them as well? If not, why does religion get a pass - because so many believe it? Let's not have science by vote of the masses. After all, the scientific consensus is that religion is false ;-)

<comment><USER9> > Do you think we should seriously explore them as well?

Why not? I find it quite astonishing how often starting with verifiably false assumptions leads to worthwhile results. Your tower of reason is a decent construction. I find it a nice place to visit, but sometimes I prefer the woods. A mind too well-ordered misses the faults in its own assumptions.

<comment><USER10> "Why not?" - because we only have so much time to make use of. If you'd prefer to live as ignorance is bliss ("the woods") - that's a valid choice, but valid doesn't mean it's consistent with the truth (a.k.a. what science is trying to get close to). To find fault with the mind - one must constantly question their assumptions - in this article: religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This used to be impossible for me too. Even on adderall this would have been fairly challenging at times. Recently however my stress level was getting so bad that I started looking for ways to remain calm, even under extreme pressure. Long story short, I came across a book on Amazon called "Zen Meditation and Wisdom for a Better Life: A Gift to Busy People, Regardless of Religion".

I'm a skeptic when it comes to "Religion" type stuff, but meditation is one of those practices that has survived so long that I wondered if there was something practical to it. The main point in that book is that meditation has nothing to do with religion, it's a personal productivity technique. It's fundamentally about training your mind to focus on one thing for a period of time. It seemed interesting and I didn't have to buy anything other than the book I'd already purchased to try it. So I started doing it ten minutes a day, and let me tell you, the results have been impressive for me. It's nothing more mystical than the ability to really intensely focus on something, one thing, without letting your mind wander. If you think that's easy - give it a try, for just ten minutes. It's surprising just how hard it is to contain your mind for that long.

Give it a try, before long, sitting still for two minutes is so easy you won't believe it. As a side benefit you may learn how to relax at an unbelievable rate during those two minutes.

<comment><USER13> Along with the viewpoint of being skeptic about religious stuff, I can most certainly understand. But of all these religions that exist, there must be some sort of truth between them all, considering the many congruencies. One document I have been treading through is this one: <http://hermetic.com/crowley/book-4/aba1.html>

The premise that is argued is a very strong one, being "Is there any truth at all in the claims of various religions?" It is as academic as one can be, with appropriate cites and books to read and refer to. However, it is a "Howto" manual that does require quite a bit of work.

As an aside, I bet you (and others) have had the problem of itching and scratching and burning and freezing and biting and everything else that could go wrong when you try to meditate. I had it when I first started to practise, and the general feelings of discomfort only seem to multiply. Asana is the Hindu technique used in order to quiet the mind and body. It's in the same document.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps somebody can explain why the downvote...

Meditation, for those that could actually pass the 2:00 timer, is directly relevant as it is all the books referred to by the Amazon link. And I posted an interesting critique and comparison of techniques to possibly use in doing meditation.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps "But of all these religions that exist, there must be some sort of truth between them all, considering the many congruencies." doesn't strike people as a valuable addition to the discussion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1\. The birds aren't moving. This is driving me insane.

2\. I stopped because I became paranoid that with 0:15 seconds, the website was going to rick-roll me.

<comment><USER16> I was getting paranoid that it was going to be one of those sites that flashes a scary face and screams at you.

<comment><USER17> Me too. After about 5 seconds all I could think about was whether it was gonna be a shark jumping out of the water at me, a big fat seagull coming for me, or just some random screaming crazy jumping in from the side of the screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had a lot of fun writing this, and it's great to see it taking off. Waiting 2 minutes was impossible for me, I had to set the counter to 2 seconds while testing it! :)

<comment><USER19> It would be fun to see a graph of how long people last. :)

<comment><USER20> Yup, and especially how it correlates against Referrer.

Though the author would probably need to add <START> button, to minimize the unintentional fails. Also failing could be adjusted for accidental mouse movements, perhaps by ignoring distances of just couple of pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Out of determination I succeeded, even though by my calculations doing nothing for two minutes cost me $1.60 that I could have made writing code. Of course, I stopped the clock anyway when I clicked on the HN popup notification.

Edit: Just looked at the code. The programmer missed a great chance to gather some data. I would have tracked the fail events using Google Analytics so I could see how many fails on average per user from different traffic sources:

        _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Fail', 'Mouse Move', 'dummy', 'dummy']);

<comment><USER18> Great idea, thanks. I'll add it. At the moment we're looking at the average time on site stats.

<comment><USER21> Great! One more thought I had: also track whether the failure was due to the mouse or keyboard. When you have gathered a decent number of results I will be very interested to see a blog post with some nice graphs.

<comment><USER18> Now tracking fails (with the event type), and successes. If the data looks interesting I'll definitely write it up!

<comment><USER22> I'd discard results under say a second or 2, took me a couple of goes to see that you can't move the mouse at all once the page loads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I passed, but it was very hard because I got no waves and so was immediately tempted to view source and find out why not, and also because I kept looking at the horizon of the photo and wondering if it was just me or if it was very slightly tilted down to the right.

For extra difficulty, you should throw in more and more things like the above to make ocd people squirm ;)

<comment><USER24> THat's all I could think about - the horizon not being level. I found myself visualising the iPhoto correction tool overlaid on the photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Failed for unknown reasons three times in a row. Thinking it was noise on my mouse scrollwheel, I took the batteries out of it. I'm gratified to learn this was unintentional.

This said, the site is really, really making me think about moving back to Puerto Rico.

<comment><USER26> Nice idea; made me realise how few "do nothing" breaks I take in a day...0. I'd probably like to use it throughout the day if the problems in Chrome were ironed out.

Failed for me every time before I even did anything (Chrome, Vista). When I changed tab, and then came back without mousing into the viewport, the FAIL message didn't appear...but neither did the clock count down.

Works in Firefox 3.6 though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My thoughts, for 2 minutes:

\- Alright, calm down

\- What if my monitor goes into power saving mode?

\- It's only 2 minutes, I'm sure power save is set for longer than 2 minutes.

\- I wonder what the default setting for power saving _is_ in Windows 7.

\- Concentrate!

\- (looking at the horizon on the right below the clouds) I wonder what it would be like to be a world traveler by way of boat.

\- Hey, what are those birds doing there?

\- Try to remember your thoughts to post on HN after the 2 minutes is up.

\- Look at that swell. I wonder how that works, exactly.

\- (distracting noise in background) Feeling tense again!

\- I think the wife and kid are watching me take this seriously, and have probably lost a sliver of respect for me.

\- (mind drifts into nothing for a bit)

\- Well, that was calming. I like looking at the horizon.

\- I wonder what I get for beating this.

</comment><comment><USER28> I passed.

Because I clicked open a lot of stories from the main HN page in background tabs, and by the time I got to that one, it had told me I had passed.

<comment><USER29> I didn't get to that tab yet, have been wondering where that nice background sound was coming from for an hour or so :)

Just opened a second tab and passed, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I simply can't take the risk that the next 2 minutes is when I'll find my cofounders, build my prototype, and raise an oversubscribed angel round.

</comment><comment><USER31> This was easy, because right after it started I remembered that I needed to go check my pot roast in the slow cooker.

I'm all for adding more peace and quiet reflection to my life, but watching a javascript timer count down for two minutes on a website with a picture of the ocean doesn't count.

<comment><USER32> Why not?

I mean, why does it matter that it's a javascript timer? And that it's a website? Or what the picture is? Why should any of these things affect how seriously you take what it's trying to do?

<comment><USER31> What is it trying to do?

I sit in front of my computer to get shit done. When I want to take a break and do nothing, I hang out with friends, take the dog for a walk, go to the park with my wife. I don't sit motionless at my computer and listen to waves. But that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 0:11 FAIL

I was so close. Trying it for the second time:

* Open in new tab.

* Change to that tab using keyboard, let it activate, be careful not moving your mouse inside the window.

* Change to another tab/window/app, continue work as usual.

* Success!

</comment><comment><USER34> 1:58 FAIL

Kinda like my sex life.

<comment><USER35> Congrats on having one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Workrave[1] and antirsi[2] have helped me take breaks like this regularly. Beyond the wrist relief it's nice to take a short break and refresh my mind before continuing work.

[1]<http://www.workrave.org/> [2]<http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/>

<comment><USER37> I use these: <http://www.scirocco.ca/takeabreak.html> and <http://www.dejal.com/timeout/>

There is a work method based on this as well: <http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Humans have evolved to pay close attention to, and be keenly aware of, their environment. Of course you can't just sit still for two minutes: there may be a snake crawling by. Pay attention or suffer the consequences.

As the Zen enthusiasts already implicitly acknowledged, the ability to concentrate on a single thing may well be valuable, but _concentrating on a single thing_ , especially on a single thing of your own choosing at the time of your choosing, is vastly different from _doing nothing_ , on a moment chosen by someone else, while actually concentrating on something you don't consider interesting.

</comment><comment><USER39> I probably could pass this easily, because I used to frequent a Buddhist group, and could easily meditate for 50 minutes or more. Unfortunately I'm also a parent, and kiddo came over and read the screen, and moved the mouse to amuse us both. Fail.

</comment><comment><USER40> After a long day of studying and answering e-mails, coming home to this was amazing. I knew that I needed to take a break: That's why I logged on my computer and checked Hacker News.

But relaxing like this was much more soothing than reading about programming languages or hacker-essays. I've heard a lot of times that taking a break for 10-15 minutes where you just close your eyes and relax is good for you, but I've never _really_ tried it. Maybe I will do this more often after this.

Also, would it be possible to make one for 10 or 15 minutes as well? Sometimes, 2 minutes isn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER41> I of course left the page before long, but if you put an advert on there to appear after the countdown, I guarantee it will get much higher click through than normal. Why? Because when people have invested time in something, they're strangely more positive about things and more willing to go along with the program (perhaps to get the payoff that's been missing so far, but even if there's none they will rationalise that it was still a good use of time). Might help if you make the advert slightly more interesting/mysterious than usual though.

</comment><comment><USER42> I made it the full two minutes, it was easy. I just loaded the page, listened to a podcast on my iPhone and read a couple HN articles on my iPad while I was waiting.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm not sure if I succeeded or not.

I closed my eyes and focused intently on the sound of the waves. I imagined myself on a beach, waves rolling in and out. I wondered what kind of material the beach was constructed from. Sand and a few larger rocks, it sounded like. There's a distinctive wash, but it seems just as clear there's a break in the rhythm of the crashing wave.

I then started to wonder just what shapes of wave was giving rise to the really bad compression artifacting in the wave sound on that page. Some of the sounds are remarkably clear for all the artifacts in other portions.

Unfortunately, I didn't really get anywhere with that lien of thought before my CFO interrupted me. At which point I saw the site had determined that I 'succeeded'.

I'm not entirely convinced I failed though. Sure, I thought about sand, rocks and compression -- but I was concentrating on the sounds of the waves that whole time.

What meaning could there be in "do nothing but listen to this" if truly _listening_ to the sounds and internalizing them and analyzing them was ruled out as being "something"?

If staring like a zombie with your mind empty was the goal, surely there wouldn't be an audio track and full-window image on that page.

</comment><comment><USER44> Wouldn't it be fun if this actually extended the seconds progressively towards the end?

<comment><USER45> It already feels like it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I passed, but had to resist the temptation to nab the background image, straighten the horizon, and email it off to the dev.

</comment><comment><USER47> I clicked this link, and then I got a phone call.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish it had video interaction. Record a video of me "doing nothing" for 2 minutes, and let people watch them at watchpeopledonothingfor2minutes.com

I wonder how many people cheat.

</comment><comment><USER49> This would be a lot more difficult if it weren't for the sound and image - <USER2> occupied parts of my mind that would go crazy without any stimulation for that long.

<comment><USER50> I turned the sound off, and noticed that I have several species of birds singing in the background here.

Also the clock on my wall is really loud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Passed it on my first try. In fact, I didn't realize it was a pass/fail kind of thing until I came here, I just assumed it was a self test.

I found that the time seemed to pass more slowly when I closed me eyes. I had my eyes closed for the first minute, and I opened them when I thought it should have been about two minutes, only to discover that I still had a minute left.

Nice job, bookmarked for future relaxation.

</comment><comment><USER52> Perhaps a minor UI tweak, instead of counting down (which creates a slight sense of panic), you should count up? It'll help with the calm.

<comment><USER53> interesting idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)>

</comment><comment><USER55> Studies show simple meditation (focus on nothing, or one thing - doesn't really matter - just train your mind on a single, simple thing) for something like just a minute or two a day in the morning can have an almost immediate and lasting (if you keep it up) effect on your ability to concentrate.

Concentration is a skill that requires practice, like anything else.

</comment><comment><USER56> I find relaxation with a countdown decidedly un-zen.

It's a well-meant attempt of bringing some calamity into our lives, though, thanks for that!

</comment><comment><USER57> Timer also doesn't restart counting down if my mouse isn't on the page. (In other words, it will only start counting down if my mouse cursor is on top of the page - focus doesn't seem to matter). It's also failing immediately, probably because I have a ton of windows already open and two IM clients.

FWIW, I'm running Chrome on Win7.

</comment><comment><USER58> What makes it hard is just that annoying countdown. Nothing else.

(And I had no waves, because I don't have Flash plugin enabled, meh.)

</comment><comment><USER59> Ticking the clock every single f'ing second is a bit much. I sat it out, but "2 minutes...1...0" would be better than an update every second along the way (or fifteen-second intervals). When I sit zazen, I just set a timer for 20 minutes and stick it out of view. The timer itself is a distraction.

</comment><comment><USER60> Not billable. Can't be on the page.

</comment><comment><USER61> Strangely "Fails" for me every 3 seconds (Chrome stable, Windows Vista, Vimium installed).

<comment><USER62> Mine does the same (Chrome+WinXP). Makes it incredibly hard to sit through when it's yelling Fail at me every time the counter gets to 1:57 regardless of me not actually doing anything. I only think I could sit through about 30 seconds of it flashing Fail until I left (tempted to debug, but too busy with work). I also briefly wondered if that _was_ the test -- to sit through the buggy countdown clock without trying to troubleshoot why it's broken, if that's the test, I failed.

<comment><USER62> FYI, if I open the page in Chrome with cursor outside of the screen it counts down to 0, if my mouse is within the screen, it says Fail at about 1:57 continuously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was half expecting this website to rick-roll me. But I can see how it would be viral. Of course, that would mean that a total of 2933894 hours every day will be spent as this website commands. And THEN you can unleash a rickroll!

</comment><comment><USER64> Whenever I see these kind of things I always expect it to be some prank. Watch this nice sunset, listen to the calming sounds, and then just as it gets to calm down, have something jump out to scare the crap out of you.

</comment><comment><USER65> Anyone else notice that it kinda looks like you are staring over the ocean at a nuclear blast?

Love the site though. It really is relaxing and a neat simple idea. Hard to sit through after a 16oz red bull, but i did it!

<comment><USER66> The sun is a nuclear blast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I was doing really well until my curiosity got the better of me and I viewed the source to see why there was no sound (no flash installed).

Although it seems in Safari I can succeed by loading it in a background tab :).

</comment><comment><USER68> I lasted two seconds. Opened the page while eating breakfast. It said do nothing for two minutes. I instantly thought "Great, I can eat breakfast while I wait" and picked up the bowl at the 1:58 mark.

</comment><comment><USER69> Depends on the context. When I am sitting in front of a computer with lots of stuff to read or do, I'm not going to stare at waves for two minutes. If I'm on the bus, though, then I can easily do it.

</comment><comment><USER70> Difficulty-wise, doesn't even compare to 30 minutes of sitting zazen.

It worked its magic, I felt better when it was over. Goes in the bookmarks. Wonder how I could make it activate automatically once or twice a day...

</comment><comment><USER71> Well that was easy - since I happened along this thread while sitting in my daughter's darkened room, surfing iPad just to pass time, making sure she doesn't get out of bed for the 6th time.

</comment><comment><USER72> That was fun. My screen dimmed after 30sec and shut off right at the 2min mark. I even resisted clicking the FlashBlock icon so I had no sound. Would this work with the <audio> tag?

</comment><comment><USER73> I starred at the page for like 5 minutes and was wondering why it wouldn't start to count down - not realizing that I was always moving the mouse around a bit. Damn you base-nervousness.

</comment><comment><USER74> My Tweetdeck notifications kept popping up. I looked at them, wanted to Retweet but god knows how badly I wanted to win this game.

Ironically, came before 20 seconds elapsed to post this comment :)

</comment><comment><USER75> I decided to let the ocean sounds run in the back ground cause I really couldn't get myself to spend 2 minutes idle. 2 minutes later, I found it to be annoying the heck out of me.

</comment><comment><USER76> What I'd suggest would be to remove the timer (or make it very difficult to read). Most people don't realize just how long 2 minutes can be, so it would be a reality check.

</comment><comment><USER77> In my current situation (alone with no one to physically force me), it's impossible for me to "relax" for 2 minutes, because I am actively willing myself to not do so.

</comment><comment> shock-value For added difficulty, try _thinking_ nothing for two minutes. For experienced meditators, this shouldn't be hard, but for the rest of us it's a real challenge.

</comment><comment><USER78> I'll sit on this page.. while I write code in 3 different SSH terms, run wireshark, listen to DI.fm, use firebug, while talking to a person in a neighboring cube.

</comment><comment><USER79> Doesn't work in Chrome 10.0.642.0: timer never starts counting down.

Also, this is the second site I've seen this week that adds background sound via an invisible youtube embed.

</comment><comment><USER80> I got through it easily. I closed my eyes, counted the seconds elapsed in my head and opened my eyes every 10-15 seconds to see how close I ended up.

</comment><comment><USER81> in two secs I sent it off (enhhhh, you have failed this test!) to my committed lover (sometimes can be taken as meaning the manicomio committed, but we'll leave it at that..The King of Hearts was a favourite movie after all...) THEN i took the 2 minutes. May he take his... and left the sounds on my computer all day in the background. The sea is far behind me, the c however is all before me..

</comment><comment><USER82> At the end there's a link to an Amazon page with related book titles, but unfortunately the page is down. Lots of missed affiliate revenue.

</comment><comment><USER83> Must say....was harder than I thought it would be. Sounds simple at first...then all of a sudden, 2 mins feel like an eternity.

</comment><comment><USER84> Nice. I have my little fan blowing, so this greatly reminded me of sitting down at Kits beach, playing guitar in the evening.

</comment><comment><USER85> After 6 seconds I couldn't help but check the source to see if it was playing sound using <video> or Flash.....

</comment><comment><USER86> I think it would have been easier if the website had a better quality recording of waves. It was all I could focus on.

</comment><comment><USER87> I opened the page in a tab in the background, and when I got around to viewing it I had already won. That was easy.

</comment><comment><USER88> I tried checking the source but it made me fail. So I picked up my ps3 controller and started playing an emulator.

</comment><comment><USER89> Great site, you should make it fail on window resize events too... at least that is one more thing you can detect.

</comment><comment><USER90> Succeeds easily on ipad. No sound though..

<comment><USER18> That's cheating! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> This site has me laughing out loud often. O what fools we mortals be! and it also takes one to know one.... eh.

</comment><comment><USER91> .. yeah right and let you use my optimized javascript engine as a node in your distributed machine. Nice try!

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm sad that it said I failed when I pressed the "Volume Up" key on my keyboard.. I couldn't hear the waves!

<comment><USER93> Seems like it should just reset in that case.

Honestly, didn't find it too difficult; just dropped into chair-zazen for a couple minutes.

<comment><USER61> *chairzen

Fixed that for you.

<comment><USER93> Ah, I like it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> you can save two minutes by typing this: javascript:foo=setTimeout; setTimeout = function(x,y){ foo(x,2); }

</comment><comment><USER95> Not counting down using Opera (Linux, 11.00 build 1156), that said, very nice timeout this(Using Chromium).

<comment><USER96> works fine in 11.01 1164.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Crap, I immediately opened Chromium's Developer Tools to view the source. Stupid web developer habits.

</comment><comment><USER53> thx for the feedback guys, i'm particularly liking the tracking of fails in GA (cc coderholic!)

</comment><comment><USER98> I was paranoid that a photo of a zombie with a loud scream would appear suddently

</comment><comment><USER59> I passed, because I _stopped doing shit_.

workrave/xwrits are better, if it actually matters.

</comment><comment><USER99> Or just take a walk outside.

</comment><comment><USER100> pretty cool idea, though I don't think I could have passed just listening to the waves, without my music collection I don't think I'd be able to muster the patience for this, well. maybe.

</comment><comment><USER101> If you have two monitors just have Tweetdeck open on the other! Easy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why would I waste two minutes of my short-enough-as-it-is life?

</comment><comment><USER102> I know its tough for me, so i opened it and left for coffee...

</comment><comment><USER103> I could only do this after writing some enterprise Java code.

</comment><comment><USER104> That was easy, I just used my other computer for 2 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER105> reminds me of zenmoo.. .

 _your typing detracts from your enlightenment_

</comment><comment><USER106> That clock runs slower than the usual one. Damn its hard!

</comment><comment><USER107> You should switch it, and see how long it takes to fail?

</comment><comment><USER108> I'm going to need a reason "why" I should do this.

</comment><comment><USER109> It wasn't impossible but it was indeed difficult.

</comment><comment><USER110> Well done, the waves are actually quite relaxing.

</comment><comment><USER111> Thanks for this. Will use it every day.

</comment><comment><USER112> Was just enough for my bathroom break.

</comment><comment><USER113> Odd; keeps failing despite no input.

</comment><comment><USER114> having gone through this, it actually makes me feel like the longest 2 minutes of my life

</comment><comment><USER115> I like the seagull at 0:38

</comment><comment><USER116> That is such a long time.

</comment><comment><USER117> I like this one better:

<http://jesusswimming.com>

He has been swimming

</comment><comment><USER118> Wow.. that was hard.

Well done !

</comment><comment><USER119> I did it!!!

</comment><comment><USER120> I closed the tab with 4 seconds. I got stuff to read, homework to do and code to write. Plus I'd like a nap this afternoon. Roll my two minutes into nap time, then we can discuss it.

<comment><USER44> Sounds like you're exactly the type of person this was written for then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> This would be much harder to do if you did not have the timer on the screen.

<comment><USER122> I was just thinking it would be better if the timer wasn't there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> I was fine until a (1) popped up in my email tab...</comment>


Ask HN: How to ace my FAANG interview - <AUTHOR> I have an interview with Amazon for a Business Intelligence Engineer Internship position. It requires to be proficient with SQL. What is the best way to prepare? Would appreciate if you could recommend any resource or question banks! <comment><USER2> I think it will prove hard to get proficient with SQL quickly, because you need to understand the relational model. I've interviewed people who tried to B.S. on relational/SQL questions, it was very obvious.

Chris (C. J.) Date's books are good, depending on your programming and data management background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your help! I know a little bit of SQL and I'm doing a course online on Udemy to improve my skills before the interview. I have 2 weeks to prepare.</comment></comment>


Is There a Human Blueprint? - <AUTHOR> https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/c-brandon-ogbunu-c-malik-boykin-christakis-plomin-blueprint <comment><USER2> Haven't heard of these folks. Interesting review!</comment>


PicoEVB – Artix-7 FPGA board with M.2 interface - <AUTHOR> https://picoevb.com/ <comment><USER2> Please let's kill off Vivado once and for all. Awful, massive, unintuitive proprietary software.

There are open source tools for programming FPGAs, and they are really great too: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with- picorv32-...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with-picorv32-on- the-ice40-hx8k-fpga-breakout-board-part-1/)

The Virtex 7 series has been reverse engineered, but we're not quite in the situation where you can use the open source tools yet: [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray)

<comment><USER3> I hate to rain on the open source FPGA parade, but I do a lot of hobby FPGA stuff using both closed (Quartus, ISE) and open (yosys, arachne) source, and when I have the choice, I go closed source every time I have the chance.

It's not the the open source doesn't work, it usually does, and the small size of it is really nice, it's that it doesn't come close in terms of debugging functionality when things go wrong.

My current workflow is to always develop using Quartus first, and only when things work perfectly I move it over to ICE40.

But even then I sometimes have an identical mid sized RTL design that works perfectly on my small Altera and Xilinx boards, and it just doesn't work on my ICE40 board.

How do I debug this?

There is no easy signaltap or chipscope route. I just have to guess and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, what also doesn't help is that all those cheaper Lattice FPGAs are woefully outdated. And their newer ones aren't supported by open source tools yet.

I hope things improve fast, but for now, I'd advise hobbyists who are getting their toes in the water to use closed sourced tools.

<comment><USER2> > How do I debug this?

We (or more likely, Clifford Wolf) writes the code to do it. Maybe not today, but proprietary software wasn't replaced by open source software in a day.

I'm not saying that yosys is a replacement for Vivado, it's obviously not, but here we have a nice Artix-based board and with not too much effort we could also offer a completely free, easy to use toolchain for it, perhaps not one which does everything, but definitely enough to download designs, compile a bitstream and program it onto the board.

Instead we have this huge barrier to entry - download 40GB [sic] of proprietary crap and register for a time-limited account which is tied to the particular chip you're using.

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm not saying that yosys is a replacement for Vivado_

Actually, you kinda did:

>>> _Please let 's kill off Vivado once and for all. [...] There are open source tools for programming FPGAs, and they are really great too: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with- picorv32-...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with- picorv32-...*)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a Virtex-II on a dev board that's the size of a desktop PC's motherboard. I found it in the trash several years ago, and couldn't let it go to waste! I didn't want to buy a programmer for it, so I decided to use guzuntyPi instead.

I'm familiar with how FPGAs work, and I did a project writing Verilog and using Xilinx chips to make a basic CPU while at university. I still think the technology is really cool.

The problem is, after 4 years, I still haven't found a good use for my Virtex- II dev board. I'll give it away for free to anyone in Taiwan, or if you pay shipping to elsewhere. You could also try to suggest fun projects (e.g. I really want HDMI input to my laptop), but the physical size of the board is just too cumbersome for my itinerant needs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice. Adding this to my watch list. Another project I've been looking into is the snickerdoodle.

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle](https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle)

<comment><USER7> It's been taking quite a long time to deliver many of the parts, unfortunately. I was watching it for a time but a lot of newer boards seem to be coming out and at this point unless you need the extended addons, you may be able to get more for less.

The snickerdoodle is probably better if you want to do _a lot_ of electronic breakout. Otherwise, for straight FPGA work, at this rate, the new Avnet Ultra96 simply looks like a superior base platform in most respects, and will be shipping in volume quite soon.

<comment><USER8> The Snickerdoodle got a lot of attention for its price point (which turned out to be unrealistically low... I commend them for following through though). It's an odd platform. They were going for an ecosystem of carrier boards, but ended up with 0.050" pitch connectors. Which are good if you've got flying leads, but I can't see myself using a Zynq for that kind of work. The mating connectors are ~$7 in small quantities which is comparable to the smaller, tighter pitch connectors other dev boards use, so there isn't really a cost savings if you build your own plug-in boards. It might even cost more for wide I/O in terms of connectors and board space.

You're right that technology has continued to march along. $250 for a Zynq Ultrascale is very tempting, but I have enough dev boards collecting dust...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is by far the cheapest board to test out a PCIe FPGA design BTW. It's so much cheaper than other PCIe boards it's worth it to buy a used laptop on ebay with M.2 and you'd still save money :o

</comment><comment><USER10> With how often laptops have a single wireless m.2 slot (always?) I've always thought it odd they chose that as the m.2 slot to use.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, why not attach it to the internal USB bus? Maybe it's a sourcing / business deal thing. I'm theorizing most laptop manufacturers have made a deal with m.2 pcie wifi producers and not the usb WiFi producers.

<comment><USER12> > Agreed, why not attach it to the internal USB bus?

The FPGA has a PCIe endpoint peripheral. Making that available opens up a lot of possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like this would be better suited to those with NUCs or other small PC dev workstations, rather than laptops. Otherwise, wouldn't you have IO cables hanging out of your lappy?

<comment><USER14> The digital I/O allows to implement custom wireless signaling (SDR). To avoid crappy cables hanging out of the notebook, what about a custom jack connector as a frontend shield? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How useful would this be for a total beginner who wants to start messing around with and learning FPGAs? Looks super skookum.

<comment><USER16> It would be pretty great, but I've actually never been able to get Vivado to work, despite having a license for the given board, I activate it and install everything, and sometimes it seems like it activates for some other system in the family instead of what I have, and I'm left with the cutest little silicon brick.

I got a couple iCE40 boards and fired up yosys/icestorm (never touched the [more feature complete, I'm sure] proprietary toolchain for these), instant satisfaction, and I was able to do exactly what I wanted (and on any host CPU architecture or operating system I wanted). The only limitations were a lack of big IO, rather small memory, limited system size.

Frankly I think Lattice should just hire a couple people endorsed by Clifford Wolf (since I know Clifford is a very busy dude) to package up his brilliant toolchain with a bow, fill in the desired analytical features, and ship it as the official iCE40 toolchain. Maybe they could try to get something similar going for their larger FPGAs (which are unrelated to the iCE40, which they got as part of an acquisition) as well.

<comment><USER15> Do they make any iCE40 boards like the PicoEVB? I wouldn't mind something that didn't sit inside an M.2 slot inside a laptop for my tinkering, but I do think it is an intriguing form factor. I know zero about any of these toolchains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would it be fast enough for mining?

</comment><comment><USER18> >Artix-7

Prepare to have fun with setting up drivers for it on Linux.

Oh yeah, Artix 7 is not programmable by anything other than vevado...

<comment><USER19> Vivado actually works a bit better on Linux than windows FWIW</comment></comment>


Credo: A Code Linter for Elixir - <AUTHOR> http://trivelop.de/2015/11/16/introducing-credo-code-linter-for-elixir <comment><USER2> FWIW, that yellow highlighting really makes it hard to read. Just bolding the text instead makes it way easier to read.

But, yes, I'm glad that a lot of the newer languages seem to take much stronger lines on how their community should act. A language is also a community, and it's nice to see that getting first-class attention.</comment>


Ask HN: What's a hacker to do in Buenos Aires? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in Buenos Aires for a couple of days, laid over by volcanic ash.  What's especially interesting for a hacker in this impressive city? <comment><USER2> meet another hacker! email/skype me</comment>


Hemisphere Project Summary: Office of National Drug Control Policy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/files/2014/09/12/7-3-14_mr6608_res.pdf <comment><USER3> It's chilling that they explicitly mention parallel construction on page 12:

 _When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier 's records, thus "walling off" the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers._

<comment><USER4> Here's the deal.

If you work for an agency like the NSA or ONDCP as either a contractor or a full-time employee, and you're aware of a program like this, and you do _not_ act to disclose it to the press and/or subvert it, then...

Hell, I'm not even going to finish that thought. If I do, it will seem redundant to someone with a conscience, and legally actionable otherwise.

<comment><USER5> ... you're not upholding the Constitution of the United States, which you took and oath to defend.

The oath to protect the constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic should take precedence over any oaths to individual institutions that derive their raison d'etre from the Constitution itself. Without the Constitution, there is no United States of America. Without the United States of America, there is no Department of Defense. Without the DoD, there is no NSA or ONDCP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a story NYT broke in 2013:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast- ph...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove- eclipsing-nsas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

Obviously, this is deeply fucked up.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, this seems to be a different (newer?) version of the same slide deck the NYTimes published.

<comment><USER6> The NYT seems to describe the slide deck, down to the case studies at the end.

<comment><USER7> It's buried in a tiny link, but they actually published the deck with the article: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/02/us/hemisphere-...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/02/us/hemisphere- project.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The simple truth is this: Anyone who supports the war on drugs as it is currently being run has abandoned what the US stood for at its founding regarding liberty, freedom, and the rule of law.

<comment><USER9> I agree with the main thrust of your comment but perpetuating the 'immaculate conception' myth of the US as a government of, for, and by the people is counterproductive. In particular the war on drugs absolutely goes against the ideas 'espoused' at that time. But that still holds. Ask any senator what America stands for and they will say something like "liberty, freedom, and justice for all". That doesn't mean it is what they work for in the background.

Even while framing the constitution the controlling landowners of the US, i.e. the "US", were aware of the internal enemy that needed to be controlled.

"The framers of the constitution made the determination that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent"

[http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19970303.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19970303.htm)

Where the "opulent" are the class from which the framers originated.

This is not a new development.

<comment><USER8> > makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so > as to insure that the government will, in his words "protect the minority of > the opulent against the majority" and bar the way to anything like agrarian > reform

My point wasn't that this didn't happen or the US was some magical egalitarian wonderland (though the foundational period of the US had a surprisingly level of wealth equality compared to some other periods).

Rather, my point was the manner in which they did this was to construct a system of law that protected the private individual from the instruments of government, and that we're slowly undoing that precise social contract - <USER2> stealing their wealth in exchange for restraint on government powers.

It's hard to argue even though the founding of the US wasn't perfect, and that these instruments largely came about as a protection for the wealthy, that it didn't significantly raise the profile of the citizen-as-having-rights-to-be- protected form of government or that the US doesn't have a long history of viewing such policies as important, even if there have been historic violations.

I think you'd even have trouble finding periods similar to the 50-70 year long ratcheting we've seen meant to undermine those exact same rights, or that their infringement has crept so far up the social ladder.

<comment><USER9> OK. Yes the framers of the constitution did create protections from the government for themselves, and shared that with the rest of the population. As you imply it is hard to know if the general case was a side-effect or original intent.

At the same time they purposefully sought to disenfranchise the majority so that they might change the rules at any time.

So the constitution within the constitution is that the government will protect the wealthy, and that makes sense given who was writing it.

It appears that the ruling elites now value control of the population over privacy. I see two possible explanations but perhaps there are others.

* They see the incredible growth of poverty in the US and there is no vast neighboring region in which to exterminate existing inhabitants and settle. Hence wealth protection from the masses is a higher priority than the privacy protections.

* Mass media has distorted the scale of the disenfranchising effects of our system (rich have more control and poor even less) and the wealthy realise they can use their control of the government to make huge fortunes. For example the profits of the banks are derived by transfer of wealth from taxpayers through implicit insurance since insurance allows highly profitable high risk strategies. They then choose short term profits over privacy / human rights.

In any case they choose to exercise their rights under the constitution within the constitution to change the laws to bring about repression and control.

I'm not really rebutting your point here. Instead I want to highlight that what is happening now IS consistent with the ideals of governance around during the formation of the US and what has changed is likely a lower level 'priority'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. We actually have secret police in America. I didn't really put together what that means until now.

There are 'law enforcement' agencies that operate outside the law, and they fight to keep their very existence from being exposed in court. Thats crazy.

<comment><USER11> Not very unlike the times of J.E Hoover. Just with more technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Our country is full of police departments that fund themselves through seizures of drug money, that they know about by using data our intelligence services collected on us.

I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.

<comment><USER13> There are easier ways for the government to make money. There is a strong belief the CIA was selling drugs to citizens in the 80s to fund themselves [1]

[1][http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/9712/ch01p1.htm](http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/9712/ch01p1.htm)

<comment><USER14> Why the downvotes? French article, one among many that mention Drug smuggling by some agencies (CIA?) [http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/la-vie-abracadabrante-d- un-pilot...](http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/la-vie-abracadabrante-d-un-pilote-d- avion-trafiquant-de-drogue-11-03-2013-1638589_24.php)

<comment><USER11> Some people are always surprised by well established facts half the world knows about.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sidebar: for all the ranting that deserves to be done here, it's also interesting to note that this was an internal IT program, like many other programs I suspect HN readers may have participated in. There was a help desk, a POC, a procedure to follow, and so on.

They didn't want the average Law Enforcement schmuck calling operations! Instead you had to contact your POC. They were probably afraid of being overwhelemed by call volume. Turnaround looks like a couple of hours on a good day. In addition, they were doing one of those "train the trainer" things where they were looking at using the POCS to create "super users" to work the system and work with the local folks. Must have been a real concern about volume and support. Gad, how many people were (are) using this thing, anyway?

Email was the preferred medium of response, so no online app, at least as far as end-users go. In addition, there was a section about "deconfliction" which was a bit confusing to me, but I never took the training. Was there training? I wonder if, along with this deck, there wasn't a 1-day or 2-day class? If so, who was sent to take it?

It always surprises me that when you see something really bad, how normal it all looks and acts. I can just see a conference room at some Holiday Inn full of regular-looking middle-aged folks, slurping up bad coffee and stale donuts, wondering if they were going to be let out early while some other guy putzes around with a MacBook and a projector and an assistant hands out TS/SCI forms.

<comment><USER16> Yes, they met at a Holiday Inn, drank shitty coffee, ate stale donuts, some guy complained about video adapters, and then they spent the day discussing how to completely subvert the fourth amendment of the constitution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let me commend them on the clarity of their writing. When the audiences is themselves it's brisk, vigorous, candid, and refreshingly to the point.

Now contrast that with monstrosities like the Affordable Health Care Act, thousands of pages long, nearly impenetrable, and executed without any of the legislators involved actually reading or understanding it.

Or the tax code, which is incapable of returning idempotent values when the same functions are applied to identical inputs.

<comment><USER18> They should rewrite the tax code in Haskell. Not only would that simplify it greatly, it'd also lead to a significant increase in the number of MonadFactoryFactories in Enterprise tax-handling code, which might ultimately motivate Oracle to add higher kinded polymorphism to Java. One can always dream...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It chills me to the core when the legal system needs to shield itself from the citizenry.

</comment><comment><USER20> Writing my representative and senators now.

To hell with these people.

<comment><USER21> >Writing my representative and senators now.

That will accomplish absolutely nothing, except to legitimize those who have overseen this reprehensible development, and all the other political and social catastrophes of the past 30-40 years.

Our...political...system...is...fundamentally...broken.

Voting, writing your congressman, and helping elect another corrupt politician are all activities that do nothing to improve the status quo. Voting in particular helps maintain the facade that America is a functioning democracy, when in fact our only choices are two sides of the same coin.

The sooner the citizenry understand that, the better we'll all be.

Instead, work toward educating your fellow citizens about these problems, and why they're happening.

Refrain from spending your money on companies that back up the status quo. It's a hard task, but there are some major offenders (defense industry and banking industry are two big ones).

If you're entrepreneurial or technical, consider developing technical solutions to these political problems, that work around the problems or help solve them. This recent ycombinator company offering "justice-as-a-service" is a good example of this approach:

[http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app- parking-...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking- tickets/)

They're starting small (parking tickets), but you have to start somewhere.

And there's lots of room for growth in the injustice sector.

<comment><USER22> Got it. Don't vote, don't attempt to hold elected officials accountable or even let them know in tangible communications about what I feel. Give up and disengage completely, educate other citizens on why they should give up and disengage completely, put my money into my mattress (or a credit union, I guess), and start a garden so I can feed myself. But where do I buy the seeds!?

I say get more engaged, but be pragmatic and protect yourself emotionally. I do believe that many, but not all, representatives would respond to increased personal communication. All of my conversation with former DC staffers has done nothing by reinforce this view for me.

But don't leave it there. Support causes you believe in, and if you can use technology or commerce to enact change positive change then that's even better.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary, he advocates a proactive approach to 'engage and inform other citizens' and start having people stop relying on a broken system, instead of taking responsibility for their actions and effectuating real change.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that his analysis is weak: the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice.

Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.

That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.

The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.

All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.

<comment><USER23> > the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him > disengaging and not supporting a third choice

I think this is untrue, or at least not the major factor. First-past-the-post voting seems to result inevitably in the situation the US finds itself in, with two main parties with no significant differences on most major issues, where voting for a third party candidate causes a spoiler effect.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone pleas provide further context for this doc?

<comment><USER25> Here's some more information: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/new- amicus-brief-urges...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/new-amicus-brief- urges-court-order-criminal-discovery-surveillance-programs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a database of call detail records ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record)) and the numbers they have called, and numbers that have called them. It does _not_ contain subscriber data (names, account information) - just metadata about calls.

They use this database to find cycled phone numbers that have similar calling patterns. (Phone number 1 tends to make and receive calls from number 2, 4, 9 and 13. in geographic area X) Phone number 1 stops making calls, and phone number 50 starts making/receiving calls to 2, 4, 9, and 13 in area Y. So they can assume that whomever owns 50 is the same person that used to own 1 and now they're in area Y.

Maybe Im just being clueless today, but can anybody explain to me what is so chilling about this system? I don't see where it can really be abused unless you've got some stalker that works for LA's DEA and they're trying to find out their estranged ex-wife's new phone number?

<comment><USER27> When you have the entire call graph, it's almost trivial to match it up to names. And then you know who everyone calls and who calls them, which I would argue is almost as fundamental an affront to privacy as knowing the actual content.

<comment><USER26> Law enforcement doesn't have the entire call graph. They have a service, that they can request specific data from, that takes 2-5 days to return the requested information, which is pretty much only "additional phones, and switched phones", and they have to have a subpoena to get that data in the first place. This isnt some google search they can mine for whatever. The 2-5 day lag is almost certainly paperwork bureaucracy verifying that they have a legal reason to search the database.

I suppose the folks at the "Hemisphere Regional Data Center" could theoretically match up the names to the phone numbers (not _AT ALL_ trivial - I used to work with credit header data and telco record data - the data quality is an absolute shitshow), but that power certainly is not in the hands of any local law enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't surprise me at all. I've been subject to 'random physical search' in very unexpected situation, twice. Both of those cases were when I had been in (phone) contact in previous days with guys which phones were highly likely to be monitored by law enforcement. - Random isn't nearly as random, as you might think.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone help me with this most emphasized sentence, "Hemisphere is law enforcement sensitive!"... what is it supposed to mean?

<comment><USER30> Wikipedia has: "Limited Distribution, Proprietary, Originator Controlled, Law Enforcement Sensitive were designations the Pentagon attempted in 2011 to exempt from President Obama's Executive Order 13556"

Executive Order 13556 "Controlled Unclassified Information" required a public registry of such information and that the registry and implementing directives would be available to the public.

<comment><USER31> woah, I hadn't even considered that the term has an explicit legal definition. Scary stuff. Protect and serve the people but do it behind closed doors because the people can't handle the truth, right? Problem is the people can't make an informed vote on something they don't know about. The line between democracy and fascism is a fine one and I feel more like our government's mission is creeping in a definite direction every time one of these stories comes to light. I thank the god I don't believe that there are real patriots in this world like Snowden and the EFF who are trying to put the power of the truth in the hands of the people.

<comment><USER30> My impression was Obama had issued the executive order to make public "controlled unclassified information" so the guys used a euphemism so if taken to court they could they had no undeclared controlled unclassified information. Sensitive information maybe but not controlled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not sure if this will be helpful or considered blogspam, but I tried to summarize and analyze the slide deck here. [http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/97508750503/how-the- de...](http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/97508750503/how-the-dea-covers- up-illegal-evidence-gathering)

</comment><comment><USER33> End the War on Drugs

</comment><comment><USER34> Do I really need to download this massive PDF to find out what the useless title of this submission means? Mods, please edit.

<comment><USER7> I believe HN guidelines are to use the title from the source document. In this case, "Hemisphere Synopsis." Don't think that's much better.

<comment><USER35> When the document has more than one title, it makes sense to use the most informative one.

The submitted title was "DO Not mention Hemisphere in any official reports or court documents". That broke the guidelines, certainly by being baity and arguably by editorializing as well.

<comment><USER36> The original title was a quote from page 13. A very interesting quote, but with very little context information.

<comment><USER35> I know, but picking an arbitrary sentence to emphasize one tendentious point is a form of spin, and thus arguably editorializing.

In the absence of any good title, subtitle, or caption, it's ok to pick the sentence from the article that best and most neutrally represents it as a whole. But that is not the same thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


October surprise - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise <comment><USER2> How can we avoid the disproportionate influence of late information?

What if we allowed people to voluntarily "lock in" their votes anytime after the party candidates are chosen? These early votes could only be changed at some cost, which would rise the closer to election day. No idea what that "cost" would be, as it would be preferable to have it affect everyone evenly.</comment>


Show HN: Axiom – No-code Browser Automation - <AUTHOR> https://axiom.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

We built a way for non-technical people to automate work in their browser. It's in beta, and we've just made it public: [https://axiom.ai/](https://axiom.ai/).

After running a consultancy, we noticed lots of small tasks that never got automated. The cost was too high with existing consultancy-focused solutions. So lots of small repetitive tasks built up.

Recently though, RPA has become a popular technology for automating big, repetitive processes.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a way to automate using the user interface of applications, rather than APIs. If you've ever used an Excel or Emacs macro, it's the same principle. Companies like UiPath and Automation anywhere have had great success deploying RPA for enterprise use-cases (e.g. processing 1000s of invoices for a multinational)

But we believe RPA also has potential as a no-code paradigm for smaller use- cases (e.g a customer support person doing data-entry).

That's because most people intuitively understand UIs, but not APIs.

So we thought, what would happen if you took RPA technology and packaged it up in a no-code Zapier-like SaaS? This way, all the small tasks too small for developer time can get automated.

Our current users are mostly non-technical and in roles like sales or e-commerce administration. They have repetitive extract, transform, load (ETL) tasks, like:

-Gathering data for sales enrichment, then inputting into their CRM

-Connecting and exporting data from e-commerce systems like Amazon and Shopify, where APIs are limited.

UI-based automation is not just a way to fill gaps in APIs. We've found it is a more intuitive and faster way for many non-technical people to automate.

Along the way, we've also discovered many new niches (like sports betting funds) that we didn't know existed.

Axiom is not built for large-scale data-scraping or automated testing, though. These require specific features we do not yet support (e.g. IP switching, or assertion logic).

We don't touch your data. All data-processing and execution occurs client- side, on your machine. We only store the code for execution. For data storage, we use your Google drive account.

Our beta only supports Google Chrome (this is just an MVP. We want to expand support to FireFox and other browsers with time and resources).

I'm sure the HN audience has seen how challenging browser automation can be, particularly with the complexity of modern JS-heavy web-apps. We'd love your feedback, experience and thoughts!

For example:

Some users have said the permissions being requested by our app are off- putting. We're listening and adapting. We're removing permissions + improving communication. To reiterate, we do not store any data processed by bots on your machine: [https://axiom.ai/privacy-policy](https://axiom.ai/privacy- policy)

<comment><USER2> As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true.

No one offers an easy way to let employees build and share "personal" bots. Part of this has to do with non-programmers having a much harder time understanding things like loops than we imagined they would. Another problem is maintaining business process logic and knowledge as employees come and go. And lastly there is the security thing. In an enterprise setting you probably won't want to run this in someone else's cloud, you want to run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you.

Maybe we're not who you are targeting, but we've yet to find a product that actually lets us let employees build small bots in a way that fits into our IT operations, and this is quite a big market in my country.

Of course you'll be late to the table, and not be what the big consultant agencies like EY are partnered with. But what they are currently selling isn't actually what we need.

So good luck, I'll certainly add you to our "keep a look out" list.

<comment><USER3> Virvar - out of curiosity - why is it that you would like to let the users build those bots? Intuitively, users just don't have the skills, patience, the technical mindset, the understanding of the IT landscape (imagine some non- working SSO - which user is going to know how to get that to work!). Basically "what's wrong" with doing it 'the normal way' \- which is to have an IT team (in-house or external like EY) do the work?

<comment><USER2> We operate 300ish IT systems of various size, from handling vacation time between leaders/employees to full fledged SAP solutions. We have 10,000 employees but only 5 developers of which 2 are also operations engineers developers. If an employee needs a little bit to automate some small workflow, to save them a few hours a week, that's way below the scope of where we would get involved to do an RPA process. But that doesn't mean we don't want people to automate those tasks. In the ideal world we wouldn't need RPA, because much of what it does is things that should work smarter in our current systems. But the enterprise world is far from ideal.

We didn't use one of the big consultant houses like EY. We didn't because we have plenty of business process people, project managers and so on ourselves. And that's typically what the big consultants mainly offer, they offer it along with tech consultants that are often from some partner. We started by gathering info on what was available, as well as what we thought we needed and we drew on experiences from other cities. Many places had gone with the big consultant agencies and gotten this big package on the business end, and one or two processes build with the tech consultant, and then their project stranded because the business part doesn't actually build RPA processes.

We decided to go with a small local startup, where we bought hours and "open" consulting. We did brainstorms with them, but then we build things ourselves and had them review it, and we put a much larger focus on learning the technical parts - and well - we are now the leading city on this area if you compare the 96 cities that aren't our two largest cities. So from my anecdotal view, that is far better than using the big consultant agencies.

I named EY, and that may give them bad publicity here, but EY was actually the best of the big package offers that we didn't decide to go with. Which is why their name stuck with me, so it's a little unfair if this makes them look bad.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Virvar, may I follow up (and I am really just trying to understand here, not to criticise or advocate one way or another): From what you said, I understand that, essentially, 'the kind of steps or tasks that employees would want automated' are too small for someone central to bother to look at. So it's an issue of economics - it's not worth the attention and not worth the cost. I fully understand.

On the flipside, you yourself mentioned a) the skill level (loops) and b) maintenance and - dare I add - say governance / standards.

I guess it comes down to the tradeoff of [not having tasks automated because it's not worth it for 'the experts'] vs [having a prolific ungoverned set of automations deployed by users with insufficient skill level perform them (kind of like excel macros)].

So given the skill issue, and given that users struggle with things like loops etc. - does that mean that they'll basically just be able to implement 'trivial automations that don't involve complex paradigms'? Or how can non- technical people, fundamentally, crack it and develop more elaborate (and therefore more powerful) automations?

This is what I'm grappling with - I see so many no code tools out there, but at the end of the day, you can only do very limited, not so valuable, automations with them. Curious to learn your thoughts there.

<comment><USER2> This is the issue. The "no-code" + "no real oversight" tools don't really work for us, but we wish they did. ;)

<comment><USER3> Alright -thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analytics without the need for a long-term engineered solution, are very satisfied with it. I find it powerful enough for production use (it works with IG and even FB to some extent).

Only downside I can think of: pricing is a bit opaque, outside the "desktop" license.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks!

Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out.

We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.

<comment><USER5> Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?

<comment><USER6> You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.

<comment><USER7> I would say it is impossible to make any business model work charging $1 to $3 per month.

<comment><USER8> $3/mo is $36/year, most templates on themeforest and other platforms are around that price and they are selling fine. Considering the code is running on the user's side, the marginal cost for low-tier customers is probably minimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, interesting. Does this run in the browser or on the backend?

"All your bots live on you computer and process data in your web browser. We store the steps of your bot and data"

It seems the scripts are stored on your servers? Why? Does this mean that you can see my code or is it encrypted?

How does this compare to the more established web macro recorder tools (browser extensions) like the open-source kantu? [https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu](https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions!

This currently runs only on your local machine. We do have a cloud version coming soon, but running your bots this way will be optional.

Yes, the code only is stored, not the data it processes. We could encrypt them so we can't read, but it would prevent us updating your scripts in future for new versions of axiom.

It does mean we could run your code, but this is not something we do, unless you want us to run your script in our cloud.

UI.Vision and long-established macro-recorders like iMacros target developers; this is a complete no-code approach.

Our tool is primarily built for non-technical people. We also have and are building up a bot sharing system (i.e. templated bot app store). It will be subject to manual vetting for quite a while.

<comment><USER10> In a previous company we were scraping customers web pages to load customer and product information because the number of systems and teams involved to connect to their CDP would take months to get up and running. A few problems we had to solve was the web pages changing underneath us and some pages not being formatted the same. We ended up having to detect those changes server- side to alert us to update the scraper. How do you all deal with these use- cases?

Also, we tried to leverage: [https://www.diffbot.com/](https://www.diffbot.com/) but the lack-of- accuracy/lack-of-complete-data + cost never justified it's usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, very good question (I've answered a similar one on detecting whether the page has finished loading).

It's a deceptively hard problem. Essentially, what we do is fingerprint the element. If the page changes, it boils down to how effective our fingerprinting and search algorithms are, to find the element if it has moved or changed.

The algorithms behind that are good enough for most use-cases now, but it's something we're continuously iterating on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think for anyone who has ever tried to do significant scraping, or even testing, with something like Puppeteer, you can easily see what services like this should exist. The price is surely targeted towards businesses, and I think that's a smart move.

</comment><comment> dan-robertson I saw an old demo from Microsoft research in their programming by example group. The idea was to figure out how to extract (json-shaped) data from websites given a few examples of where that data was by the user. The video on this site reminded me of that. I think this presents a better interface than MSR and by restricting to tabular structures of data (as far as I can tell), I think the system is easier to understand and likely more reliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do indeed restrict ourselves to tabular structures of data, both on the web-page level and outside.

Many non-technical people think in terms of spreadsheets and tables. If you give people the spreadsheet/table as the data structure primitive through which you're iterating, they get the concept of a loop straight away.

Couple that concept with teaching them a variable, and they can achieve a lot.

<comment> dan-robertson I think a tabular model is probably a good idea

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a great tool, but $50/month is pretty steep especially when I'm the provider of the computing power. Can you explain the rationale behind this price?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we decided to start high, and introduce lower tiers after, because lowering your prices doesn't upset people, but putting them up does.

Many of our users are expecting to pay $50 p/m, but will get a present surprise of a cheaper tier this month, rather than the other way around.

<comment><USER13> AS someone who is the core demographic that will use this: if this works the way it says it does, it could cost $100 and I would still expense that to my company without blinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like the concept, having personally struggled with browser automation scripting in the past for business and personal use.

However, I'm concerned about the privacy and security implications of storing users' automation scripts in the cloud. What if I want to automate processes on sites or applications which contain sensitive data?

In other responses I think you've confirmed that scraped data itself is never sent to your servers, but even the script and its metadata (e.g. names of fields, search terms, IDs of elements on the page etc.) can contain sensitive information.

In several of my clients' environments the use of this tool simply wouldn't be allowed because no third party data is allowed to leave the internal network.

Is there a way to use the product without sending _any_ data whatsoever to your servers?

Also, does this work with browsers other than Chrome?

<comment><AUTHOR> This currently only works with Chrome (still an MVP). We would eventually like to expand support to other browsers with future iterations.

RE: Data leaving the network.

This is a very good point.

If you have a strong business-case you'd like us to look at, but find privacy is the main issue, e-mail me at yaseer AT axiom dot ai; we may be able to investigate what on-prem would look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Axiom is quick to use; just point and click, with no need for API > integrations or complicated code. Get bots running fast and spend more time > on the important stuff.

Great and it gets to the point for the end users. But..

> Step 2 of 2 - Install the desktop application.

> 168 MB for the DMG, 427 MB for the app.

I get that this is your first release but is it possible that the Chrome extension can be used on its own? If not is it possible to reduce the size of this app? I say this because my impression after opening this app is that it will be running in the background which will take up more of my Macbook's RAM given that it is Electron.

On top of that, I already have 11 other Electron apps installed and this one is twice as big as three other electron apps I already have and my disk is already complaining about freeing up space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we definitely want to eliminate the electron app. I agree they are bloated and annoying.

The first route for this is running your bots in the cloud, although that will mean we have to process your data (something we don't currently do).

We do want to release a stripped down version that can run with the extension alone, however, this won't support many of the most common use-cases for axiom, like bulk downloading and uploading files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like something similar to the PawClaws project:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallbafpdefmmkfipkgdgpknmhfl?hl=en)

[https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws](https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws)

[https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt](https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt)

I wonder though: How do you deal with asynchronous sites which may take a variable amount of time for elements to load? Do you synchronize with Angular or try to detect elements or is it just the old stopwatch-and-pray technique?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very, very good question. The long-story short is that I don't think there's an algorithm that can determine the completion of page-load with certainty for complex JS SPAs.

We fingerprint elements, check if the page is changing along the critical path and wait if it is, and look at network traffic.

We can't say with certainty, but we can form a good guess - the accuracy of that guess is always improving.

This is something I think would benefit from open-source collaboration, if we went down that route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Web scrapping is a huge problem and I am happy to seem more usable solution but why do you need these permissions from me:

See, edit, create, and delete ALL of your Google Drive files

See, edit, create, and delete ALL your spreadsheets in Google Drive

<comment><USER18> Google Drive and Google Calendar permissions are not that great. IIRC there is no distinction between individual CRUD actions, so if the app wants to create a file they also need perms to edit and delete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> hey @yaseer, Really cool idea, thanks for sharing! RPA is a great, underserved niche for the SMBs.

I've read through your privacy policy but i'd like some more clarification.

specifically, can you talk about exactly what data is sent to your servers? For example, if i use Axiom to login to a vendor site, those log on credentials should be stored only locally correct? Does your team have the ability to access any of the data that would be retrieved from the vendor application? I have a few really solid use cases but I need to cover the data privacy concerns first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, of course.

That's right; Right now, we don't store credentials.

The cookie from your local machine when logged in is passed to axiom locally, and never sent to us.

We store the code for your script on our servers. This is necessary to update scripts for future versions of axiom. We do not store the data this code processes.

We do have a cloud version upcoming that will process data on our servers, but this will be optional, and not enforced.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, for example, you would be able to see the steps of the automation, and the site (full URL) where the automation is targeted, the name of the fields being captured during scraping, and you might receive some data about the success of the step/process. But you do not receive any feedback about whats gathered or returned to the desktop.

Cloud version could be cool for some people but i think it might kill any shot at the industry I serve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's exactly right - we would see the URLs, the names of fields (from the DOM), and success states.

Just not the data itself. It's basically what would be stored in a web- scraping or automated testing script.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I could see this being useful for tracking COVID data on government websites. Ontario only posts the current days stats for 24hrs until the next day. You could extract it into a spreadsheet with this.

I'm also curious if there are some use-cases for tracking releases of new content on various sites, similar to how CouchPotato combines TV show releases and tracking them on torrent sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've thought about this too! It's not really effective with our desktop version.

The cloud version should enable it though.

One of the most common things people want to do is create a series of bots than consolidates data and generates reports; it has general applicability for use-cases outside COVID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The promo video includes "Click Social Media Buttons: This bot only clicks on the social media button if it has not already been liked or followed" [vid]. I can't think of the intended use case; how do you envision this might be used?

[vid]: [https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112](https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112)

<comment><AUTHOR> In private beta, a lot of users were using axiom to automate their likes and follows, to build up an audience on Instagram. They were doing this work manually in any case.

We would not want this to be done at scale, in a cloud, like a nefarious bot- farm. However, at the scale of a bot tied to a single individual's browser, doing repetitive work in growth-marketing and sales, we'd allow this usage.

<comment><USER22> Isn't this a violation of Instagram's ToS?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371](https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371)

Creating user accounts with bots, and crawling certainly is, but I can't see anything about automating likes (correct me if I'm wrong).

There are many chrome extensions which do specifically automate likes on the Chrome store. Ours is just a chrome extension for general browser automation, where this is just one use-case.

<comment><USER23> "We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or _otherwise accessing any content_ on the Service via automated means"

...

"You must not create or submit unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications (a/k/a "spam") to any Instagram users."

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I agree this a grey and perhaps questionable area.

This seemed to be something legitimate people/users were doing a lot, so we gave them a building block to make it easier. Maybe we should have thought about it more.

We'll take a step back from that path if our bots become a nuisance on social media. In all honesty, we built axiom with other things in mind (e.g. Repetitive data entry and admin).

<comment><USER24> It's not grey it's a TOS violation. Facebook goes after these types of bots ruthlessly, especially in election season. I'd recommend not poking that bear, you have so many market opportunities!

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, we'll take this on board!

It was honestly just some user requests we integrated without enough thought, not something nefarious. This isn't our market by any means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is your product called Axiom "AI"? I'm struggling to see any actual AI baked into the product.

<comment><USER26> I had the exact same thought. I would suggest to take out the .ai because it IMO makes you look disingenuous. If your name is already clear marketing BS, then someone may extrapolate that to the rest of your product.

That happened to me, you already lost credibility with me by naming it .ai because, in my mind, you either 1. Have no idea what AI means, or 2. You know very well but you are lying.

I'm not saying either of those are true, but that's what was going through my mind when I first opened the website.

<comment><USER27> I really don't see what the problem is with the choice of domain name.

Looks like a useful tool that I'll definitely have a play with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gonna check this tomorrow. Lately I had big pleasure using nbrowser node in node red [https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib- nbrowser](https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-nbrowser)

</comment><comment><USER29> Really exciting to see this! My friend and I are also working on a very similar open-source SaaS offering, Puppet [1], so much so that we use the same "no code browser automation" words to describe our service.

When we launch in the coming weeks, I'll be sure to post on HN, but in a nutshell, it's entirely cloud-based (as opposed to having to downloading something), open-source, and at a price point closer to ~$5/m.

Of course, Axios is a far superior product with many more features, but we're targeting individuals who want to automate small parts of their workflows rather than businesses who'd pay $50/m.

I'm glad to see your launch and I'm sure there's plenty of room to play. :)

[1] Very under construction landing page (all hash links) for the extra- curious: [https://puppet.js.org](https://puppet.js.org)

<comment><USER30> Congrats on nearing launch. You're being downvoted because it's socially unacceptable here to use a competitors thread to promote your service. Unless you are specifically mentioned by another commenter or you have a broader, vendor-agnostic insight to provide related to the service, you'll be better off discussing your service in your own submissions about it. Good luck with the launch!

<comment><USER29> Got it, thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I see this is sponsored by SAP. Is it integrated with their existing RPA offerings?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a startup from SAP.io's accelerator program, so quite a separate entity.

We received funding/mentorship from SAP via Techstars, but don't integrate with their RPA (right now at least...).

SAP's RPA is more focused on larger enterprise use-cases within their ecosystem, whereas we're looking at SME and even consumer use-cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How easy is it to customize data output? If I have a JSON Schema I want to conform to that requires collecting data from multiple linked pages, is it possible to do that?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is possible - but you'll need to write code.

Right now we have a custom code-block with a gloriously undocumented API.

I recommend playing around, seeing if you think axiom is useful for you, then dropping our support an e-mail on ai AT axiom.ai and we can talk you through the rest of your use-case. We're pretty responsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Congrats on launching! yaseer, why does Axiom require a desktop app (vs running purely as a chrome extension)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We found a whole set of technical limitations to using just a chrome extension (file downloads and uploads to name but one). The simplest solution was to include a desktop service, although I agree it's a huge inelegant electron app.

This paved the way for running axiom in the cloud. Once we can do that, you won't need the desktop app.

I hope with time we can have a slimmed down extension-only version too, but this will be more limited in capability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You mentioned sports betting funds - Just wondering if you could elaborate further on the use case here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Collecting and consolidating data + filling in the forms across different sites to place bets

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> also, there's no download link on your tutorials/help page. kind of a growth hack fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. There is now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks quite similar to Ghost Inspector.

</comment><comment><USER36> Any plans for open source for on-prem use ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now it's actually entirely on-premise, as bots run only on your local machine - we don't process data.

Open-source is something we'd definitely consider - there are many hard technical problems with browser automation that would benefit from open-source collaboration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correction -it's not entirely on-premise. The script storage and login is tied to our server.

This thread has given us some serious thoughts about a fully on-premise version though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of Ghost Mouse from 20 years ago. I remember using it to automate Connect Four and win a few bucks from iWon.com.</comment>