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timmm

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Founder of macgyver - API Marketplace for Developers by Developers.

https://askmacgyver.com

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news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Why haven't you implemented AI in your software yet?

timmm
2pts1
www.youtube.com 8y ago

Neural Network Performance Prediction for Early Stopping

timmm
2pts0
askmacgyver.com 9y ago

How to Implement Musical Tempo Detection in Your Application

timmm
1pts0
askmacgyver.com 10y ago

Show HN: API Marketplace for Developers by Developers

timmm
54pts39
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Solo owner here, how important is automation?

timmm
10pts11
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Unlike Apple, Google does not receive Android App sales commission.

timmm
1pts2
highnoonsolutions.com 13y ago

Constructing the Reddit Content Stream & Algorithm in PHP

timmm
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Question: Why do laptops now ship with Windows 8?

timmm
2pts8
highnoonsolutions.com 13y ago

The Most Important Skill in Business / Entrepreneurship

timmm
1pts0
www.highnoonsolutions.com 13y ago

Using 'Right Action' to Change Your Life

timmm
2pts0
www.highnoonsolutions.com 14y ago

Can We Finally Kill Advertisement?

timmm
7pts3
getpragmatics.com 14y ago

Show HN: Play any version of any song you want in under 3 seconds.

timmm
1pts0
techcrunch.com 15y ago

Wufoo (YC W06) Aquired by Survey Monkey

timmm
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Anyone know of any user-generated content sites with quality design?

timmm
1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Why do people latch onto the superficial aspects of other startups?

timmm
2pts3
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

What's the best way to update a site after going live?

timmm
2pts1

I don't know the access to resources, sheer scale, research, and good pay would make it pretty enticing for me. But really it comes down to what you are looking for long term. Do you want to optimize, finances, lifestyle, work in a particular space, learn more and eventually start your own thing? A job at Google probably scores well along most of these dimensions.

Meal Replacement Companies such as Soylent will continue to experience healthy growth.

Chip Manufacturers like NVDIA and AMD will continue to experience over average growth.

Meditation will grow and we will become aware of the mental health of individuals (Trump etc)

Machine learning will be the best field to be involved with.

Probability of a bad event Nuclear/Bio/AI increases.

Bezos will emerge as the best entrepreneur of all time.

Understood, we will work on finding that info and surfacing it on the site. As far as monitoring and errors go, the program is actually hosted by us in this case. So unless the program is faulty in some way any response issue is probably our fault.

I just changed that to take the public key, thanks!. Users get a private and public key, the private key will work in all areas but should never be exposed. The public key can be exposed and in the dashboard you can white list the allowed origins.

You have docs for accessing it but I can't find any for me building an api endpoint. The docs also seem to suggest I use a client library called "kittn", which I'm pretty sure is wrong.

No you are absolutely right. The docs are not built out yet and you are seeing the template data. We will curate this process and provide documentation. But a quick overview is as follows.

The API endpoint is static.

POST https://macgyver.services

The payload is a dynamic JSON object that has the following properties.

program id, user key, program_data (as defined on the program input page)

It would look something like this -

{ id: "9s9z6J6b", key: "private-live-6w9c2p10G5p3b6y" program_data: {} }

As far as how the program should function I can just show you the addition program as example.

The program should be called "main" with a file extension that corresponds to the run time you want macgyver to call.

So the addition program is a javascript file called "main.js"

// user specified data format

var data = '';

var sum =0;

data = JSON.parse(data);

for(var i=0; i<data.values.length; i++){ sum += data.values[i]; }

var result = { "sum" : sum }

// This gets returned to the client

console.log(JSON.stringify(result));

The variable 'data' will have it's string content be populated with the clients payload send data at the time of execution.

https://askmacgyver.com/explore/program/addition/2c2c5w7W

There is some information on that here.

https://askmacgyver.com/how-it-works

It shouldn't be an issue - the API currently sits on Google's Cloud Platform which provides the infrastructure and tools to scale the service. IMO Snapchat's usage of the platform really speaks to the stability and capability of it.

You can demo the program, so for OCR if you want to run it against an image you can do that on the demo page.

Try this and see how well it fairs -

Program ID: 9t5A2G2a (General Optical Character Recognition)

Private Key: In your /account under "User Information"

Send Data:

{ "image_url": "https://askmacgyver.com/images/passport.jpg" }

____________________________________________

This will run the OCR program against the image below -

The image you are testing: https://askmacgyver.com/images/passport.jpg

https://askmacgyver.com/demo

- What separates you from existing API Marketplaces (e.g. Algorithmia)

Macgyver differs from Mashape in that we host the program and actually run the program against the data (processing). This allows us to have more control over verifying the up-time as well as any changes to the program which might affect an end user's application (we do our own versioning so any new changes will be pushed as an incremental version) as to mitigate negative impact to clients already using the API.

We differ from Algorithmia in that we don't require you to learn our development tools or programming languages. We offer custom runtimes. We function by specifying -

1. How we will supply data to your program 2. The runtime you want us to use 3. How we expect the program to respond

But ultimately we don't care how your program does that or in what language it is programmed.

- Do you have programmer APIs other than JS?

Not sure what you mean by this, the API takes and returns JSON but it can be used with any programming language.

- From your blog I am assuming you use docker for running the algorithms? Will the docker images be made open too?

The programs are executed inside docker containers. We are still architecting the optimal workflow for our publishers and if that means making the macgyver docker image public we will do that but that is still TBD. We may just offer a sandbox environment for publishers to test in.

- How much effort do you think it would take me to transform an existing algorithm that I have to be available in your system?

It's likely going to be easier than any other tool. We are going to work on providing more documentation and releasing the API docs very shortly - but the gist of the process is that you can move your algorithm program (or directory) into a folder in a standard linux box and from there you will just need to modify how you get your input data and how you format your output data, and specifying a runtime for macgyver to call on your main program file.

Thank you for the interest!

::Tim

how much does Macgyver cost? Mashape takes a % of what I charge users

We allow you to name your own price and that is how much you will receive from those who use your program. However the client facing price will be higher as we tack on our additional processing overhead and a fixed percentage fee.

Does your side project really require you to run your own node server and mysql server? Do the cost benefit on running those things yourself vs paying more for something like Heroku etc or other services with higher level abstractions.

You're totally right, I have a bad habit of wanting to build everything from scratch and in house, I am aware of this and I will need to get over this and enlist other services if I want to run this company by myself.

I really should have used a service like shopify, instead I built my whole site from scratch and integrated the site with Paypal's api via node.js. The site looks and performs excellent but it was and will continue to be a lot of work.

Those are good suggestions and I will review those.

Facebook didn't start as a startup, neither did Google, neither did Craigslist.

True, but for those looking to start a company there is very little to glean from these examples as they are massive outliers. These are some of the most successful web companies/products in history their story does not reflect the average of successful companies.

There are over 5,000 more companies earning >1M/yr and even far more earning <1M/yr. There you will find more useful information to learn from.

Ask HN: Meditation 12 years ago

Acceptance is typically the answer for ones emotional well being. I find that I can still strive towards what I want but I accept that where I am right now is exactly where I am meant to be on my journey. That it all will serve a larger purpose.

Alternatively you can be in resistance to what is, which tends to rob you of your serenity.

I meditate daily, using this app - http://stopbreathethink.org/

Javascript.

Growing use among web apps, growing use on server side. Applications are running more and more on the client. Most popular way to build an API is with Node.js, API's are only growing. MVC frameworks are only growing. Use of JSON is growing.

The answer to this question seems fairly obvious to me.

Between enterprise backend web services.

For me at least I would not want this sort of job, and I doubt I would be considered qualified.

Android

It's unclear to me if native apps won't be usurped by the webview route.

and to a lesser extent desktop apps

This is almost clearly on the down trend.