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Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by dmix on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:15AM (#33818297)
Techcrunch has more information on what Pulse is:

> Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack

> Pulse in its initial guise was a “virtual office” platform called Loop Team, but after honing the idea for a couple of years it pivoted and rebranded last November. Pulse, essentially, was an automated status-updating tool that used signals based on pre-configured integrations and preferences set by the user.

> For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/mozilla-acquires-the-team-...

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by Cthulhu_ on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:19AM (#33818346)
Am I the only one that thinks anyone could hack up something like that in a few hours tops? I mean I can't because I'm lazy and don't do anything with my slack status to begin with, but still.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by ainar-g on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:35AM (#33818637)
Reminds me of the (in?)famous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224.

It's one thing to implement something. It's another thing to implement it in a way that makes other people want to use it.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by droopyEyelids on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:40AM (#33818729)
That is actually half of an ignorance dichotomy, the other half is the guy who refers to The Dropbox Comment in all situations, as if there are not projects that could be hacked into a product a short period of time.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by Karunamon on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:57AM (#33819028)
Perhaps there are. But I think the one of the many lessons of The Dropbox Comment is that nobody cares about any of these projects until they actually are turned into a product. Many of the ideas behind some very successful services are shockingly simple, in a "I could have built that!" sort of way. But I didn't, they did, and that's why Dropbox printed money.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by misnome on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:12PM (#33820153)
Nobody? It was a comment, not the consensus of the entire community.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by Karunamon on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:16PM (#33820215)
It was a comment that demonstrated being out of touch at the end of the day. HN lives in this bubble of tech enthusiasts where people are a lot more forgiving of poor polish and poor UX because they know and care how things work.

Outside this bubble, rsync and git and cron are not solutions to syncing your files across devices. Outside this bubble, people just want a solution to the problem, not a box of parts to construct their own solution to the problem from 2nd principles.

…Also, people tend to want this inside the bubble too :-)

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by perardi on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:57AM (#33819019)
It’s another thing to implement something that is, in fact, trivial to make, because there are lots and lots of calendar-to-Slack integrations that update your status to show you’re in a meeting.

https://slack.com/app-pages/google-calendar

This is not robust cross-platform syncing of huge files on flaky networks. This is looking for the the word "dog" in your calendar and changing the emoji to a dog.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by tiffanyh on Thursday December 01, 2022 @12:20PM (#33819353)
WhatsApp started out as a "simple status updater".

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/whatsapp-status-guide/

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by hbn on Thursday December 01, 2022 @12:33PM (#33819531)
The difference is the Dropbox comment is expecting every user to reimplement a complicated recreation of the service.

The user you replied to is (I assume) suggesting someone else can make a recreation of the service and give it away. i.e. not suggesting everyone hack together their own implementation

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by denton-scratch on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:00PM (#33819971)
Well, you can just push it at users for ten years solid, like they've been doing with Pocket.

It strikes me that there's a positive correlation between executive pay, and the user-hostility of the resulting product. Firefox (and derivatives) is my daily driver, but I despise the company that makes it. They made their name by being a lightweight, standards-compliant fast browser. I don't know how the company became such a pile of sh*, but I find it credible that excessive executive pay has more than a little to do with it.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by satvikpendem on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:03PM (#33820014)
That's nothing, I can just ask ChatGPT to make me a clone instead (last image in this album): https://imgur.com/a/d8LZicq
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by inanutshellus on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:23AM (#33818429)
Yeah ...maybe... we're missing something, or maybe they just wanted to hire the 3 guys in the company and called it an acquisition?

<edit> the other comments here are also calling this out as a hiring effort.

Not worth a mention on HN, IMO. </edit>

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by yamtaddle on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:30AM (#33818560)
Blog post says it's an acqui-hire and they want that company's ethical AI team (why did a status-update-bot company have an ethical AI team?!) to work on... Pocket, of all things. Yeesh.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by luckylion on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:37AM (#33818679)
May Pocket will soon offer to set your Slack status based on what you're reading. You know, things you need an ethical AI team for.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by projektfu on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:48AM (#33818876)
It needs to figure out the productive spin on your slacking off and update your status accordingly.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by skorpeon87 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @12:23PM (#33819394)
Both the Pulse and Pocket acquisitions look like corrupt favors done by Mozilla executives for their friends, so it makes sense to lump both together.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by guessmyname on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:26AM (#33818483)
Yes, anyone can build that. They did and got acquired. Lesson for everyone out there: build your ideas, unless you want other people to take the credit.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by corobo on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:40AM (#33818723)
Not the only one, no. I already have this. It syncs my Everhour timer with my Slack status and unsets when I stop the timer using an automation tool (e.g. Zapier, make.com) so folks can see what I'm working on.

Wasn't required, just fancied doing it. 15 min job.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by dmix on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:33AM (#33818601)
There's usually more to a business than just the software:

> the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user

Sounds like the want the team not the tech anyway

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by throw_me_5555 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:27AM (#33818492)
There are always people who write that about anything here. Sometimes there is some hidden, no obvious complexity. Probably it would be best to ask Discord developers for estimate, their extended presence is similar.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by corobo on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:43AM (#33818805)
Nah, it's easy enough. I've got a thing that sets my Slack status to whatever my Everhour timer is named when I start one. It unsets the status when I stop the timer.

I've got mine set up in make.com but you could use Zapier or probably any other automation tool that supports triggering on your timer status. Chucked it together in 5 min or so.

Of course this Pulse probably does a bit more than that (cue dropbox comment), but that's all I wanted.

I'm pretty sure Slack can already sync with your calendar meetings using this app if that's all you're needing https://slack.com/app-pages/google-calendar

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by onion2k on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:59AM (#33819049)
Am I the only one that thinks anyone could hack up something like that in a few hours tops?

Like most apps 95% of it is probably trivial, and then there's that 5% where you spend almost all of your time. In this case it's probably the integrations with other services and making a system that enables users to glue them together with rules in an intuitive way. That is not simple, especially if you're trying to work with lots of third parties rather than just the big ones.

You probably could hack together a working app in very short amount of time, but that's true of everything. Making it robust, secure, user-friendly, and maintainable is where the value lies, and that takes time.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by dang on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:14PM (#33820186)
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33818297.

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by BitwiseFool on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:25AM (#33818455)
As far as Slack statuses go, I only check if it is Green, Red, or Do Not Disturb. I have never actually read someone's status message, much less used it as a birthday indicator.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by MonkeyMalarky on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:27AM (#33818497)
This plus the palm tree and sick emojis are the only things I care about. In the latter cases I'll just not even send the message.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by BitwiseFool on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:55AM (#33818985)
I'm not saying it is totally pointless, some teams might like this. But I just don't see how such a product could be a viable business for how little value it seems to actually provide.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by snotrockets on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:52AM (#33818951)
Kinda smell like the reason Google bought Blogger. Cheaper to buy the company than the product.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by stvnbn on Thursday December 01, 2022 @12:36PM (#33819568)
> For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar.

That's not AI, that's a big "If" statement

Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by rusticpenn on Thursday December 01, 2022 @12:40PM (#33819632)
AI is basically a big set of if statements if you think about it.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by mardifoufs on Thursday December 01, 2022 @02:43PM (#33821608)
I don't think that's been true for at least the past 10 years. I don't see how anything related to deep learning can be described as "if statements" imo.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by dingi on Friday December 02, 2022 @12:13AM (#33827074)
care to elaborate on how ML models work then?
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by Filligree on Friday December 02, 2022 @11:28AM (#33832664)
Big piles of linear algebra. I don't think anyone involved with deep learning would describe it as 'if statements'; that's expert systems.
Re:Mozilla Have Acquired Pulse by dang on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:14PM (#33820183)