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Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

by pyromaker on 1/6/25, 11:54 AM with 39 comments

• by xnx on 1/6/25, 2:49 PM

  Also check out https://nodered.org/ and https://github.com/huginn/huginn if you're interested in free and open-source software you can run yourself.

• by mapt on 1/6/25, 4:02 PM

  I played with pipes for a minute to manage an RSS ecosystem, but didn't build anything that I kept around.

  The site seems to be down.

  Let's say we all build wonderful apps on this, and then you run out of money or legal liability for hosting.

  Is there a way to construct this so that we can export our Pipes to some standard format that the next person to pick up the torch could activate, and migrate to that?

• by Xeoncross on 1/6/25, 2:35 PM

  I used Yahoo! Pipes to make a consolidated social feed some years ago (https://github.com/Xeoncross/MicroStream). It actually placed as an honorable mention in AListAparts 10k challenge.

  It was really fun to have a service that could handle all the backend requests for you before sites like Zapier existed.

• by arkensaw on 1/6/25, 2:36 PM

  I miss yahoo pipes! I used to use it to aggregate movie reviews for some project I was working on. Brings me back.

• by mtrovo on 1/10/25, 7:13 PM

  Congrats on the launch! It's awesome to see someone resurrect the best parts of Yahoo Pipes, I really miss the simplicity of those days. Have you thought about supporting other sources, such as websites with tables or social media feeds?

  I've been thinking a lot about how LLM agents need some kind of glue to connect them to everyday websites at a level higher than raw HTML. What you’re building here really reminds me of that idea.

• by donatj on 1/7/25, 7:31 AM

  My biggest use for Yahoo Pipes was filtering podcast feeds - namely, filtering out episodes I don't care about. For instance, a podcast I listen to has episodes where they just talk shop and others where they play Dungeons & Dragons. I really cannot be bothered to care about the latter type.

  I actually wrote a little, easily modifiable Digital Ocean function I've been customizing and deploying per feed I want to filter. It feels like a hack, and it is, but it's "good enough". It's been working reasonably well and runs rarely enough that it falls into Digital Ocean’s free tier.

• by raphar on 1/6/25, 4:17 PM

  Brings me back too. But what stayed stuck on my memory, was something i read here on HN: at some point, one yahoo dev added his affiliate code to the links !!

• by bewal416 on 1/6/25, 2:39 PM

  Cool project! Yahoo Pipes was before my time, but I remember a Tom Scott video that mentioned it. Imagine having a service like that for free today…

  This video has … views by Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0?si=J3sVKEJhkABUSjN_

• by ChrisNorstrom on 1/6/25, 5:53 PM

  Is anyone able to scrape Bloomberg news? For years now they have no RSS and have made it very difficult to create one.

• by pentagrama on 1/6/25, 9:19 PM

  Great product, is awesome play with RSS feeds. Will check it out.

  Want to add for anyone wanting to quickly apply a filter to one RSS feed I recommend https://www.siftrss.com/, it doesn't require create an account and it works perfectly.

• by xrd on 1/6/25, 7:19 PM

  I had a lot of fun wiring and rewriting an RSS feed using this. Super simple and worked well. RIP Yahoo Pipes, but this looks like a worthy successor.

  And, I can't help but think there is gold to be found mining the graveyards of tech that people loved but was never a billion dollar revenue source...

• by samsquire on 1/7/25, 1:28 PM

  Thanks for putting the work into this.

  These kinds of software pipelines can be strangely satisfying to implement.

  The development style of thinking of stream processing and online algorithms

  It's also inspired by mapping and filtering and functional programming with flatmap.

  It reminds me of factorio

• by webspinner on 1/6/25, 6:01 PM

  Oh, this is really cool, and exactly what I'm looking for, but uh, I really wish I could test it! Thing is, I probably can't. I use a screen reader, so I doubt the interface would work for me, but maybe I'll try it, just for fun.

• by thellmnator on 1/6/25, 7:30 PM

  Wow interesting, I think I'm too young to remember yahoo pipes

• by sreejithr on 1/7/25, 7:26 AM

  Not gonna lie. I've been looking for something like this. It tried it, works really well. I'm gonna build a daily news pipeline for myself.

• by rcarmo on 1/7/25, 8:38 AM

  This is nice. Over the years I moved to Noda-RED for this kind of thing, but Pipes was just so much easier to use for quick queries and filtering.

• by Uptrenda on 1/7/25, 12:10 AM

  I've heard many people here over the years mention it fondly. You must have left quite the impression on them.

• by onli on 1/7/25, 10:07 AM

  Hit me up if you want to compare notes about Pipes successor implementations ;) And best of luck.

• by strawhatdev on 1/6/25, 3:39 PM

  For some reason, on mobile, the demo and pricing links in the navbar get me a 404. Works fine on desktop.

• by instagary on 1/6/25, 8:33 PM

  The demo was intuitive, congrats on the launch! Can I ask what you used to build the canvas UI?

• by paulimsouza on 1/6/25, 8:53 PM

  can you add a JSON export option?