
Apply HN: Booleans.io - alanfriedman
URL
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booleans.io<p>BACKGROUND
Last weekend I posted Booleans.io here, much to the amusement of the Internet.<p>As it turns out, a good number of people saw a legitimate use for this service. I had a CS student reach out wanting to use it for a class project. Others found it useful for prototyping feature flags without setting up a database. And some wanted to connect it to IFTTT&#x27;s maker channel. One person just wanted to know: &quot;How can I pay for this?&quot;<p>For some it was just a cool&#x2F;fun API to play around with. There are now open source client libraries written in Ruby, Python and Typescript.<p>One of the most requested features was the ability to create private booleans that only you can read&#x2F;write, and custom labels.<p>So I spent last week hacking on it and just launched those features yesterday. You can signup here to check it out: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booleans.io&#x2F;signup<p>CONCEPT
I look at booleans kind of like the ones and zeros of binary code. They&#x27;re the most fundamental building blocks that can be used to carry out more complex actions.<p>A simple true or false (on&#x2F;off, yes&#x2F;no) value could be used to trigger a variety of events - IoT, home automation, software builds or anything else imaginable.<p>Soon I&#x27;ll be rolling out webhooks, making it even easier to respond to events.<p>MONETIZATION
This service lends itself well to the freemium model. Paid subscribers could have a higher cap on booleans, a higher API rate limit and analytics&#x2F;data-vis tools.<p>ROADMAP
Eventually I think it would be cool if users could &quot;subscribe&quot; to other users&#x27; booleans in kind of a marketplace fashion. Companies could also publish booleans relevant to whatever industry they&#x27;re in, and consumers could then subscribe to get updates. I realize there&#x27;s some overlap with IFTTT but I think they can happily co-exist.<p>THE END
Thank you for all the great comments&#x2F;discussions from last week and I welcome any feedback or questions.<p>- Alan
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ryporter
Not completely jokingly, you could follow up with constants.io (the domain is
currently available).

It would be used for "constants" in the programming sense-- i.e., named values
that are not actually constant over time, but rarely change. You could be the
global repository for config files! :)

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osullivj
Love it! How about NaaS? Null as a service? You'd need to make the return
value configgable somehow, to yield a NULL, Null, None, Nullptr or 0 depending
on the consumer.

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hussfelt
Stumbled upon this through Hacker Newsletter. This is awesome. Pure. (Evil.)
Genius.

Thanks Alan!

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alanfriedman
Haha thank you!

