Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#11
post #9

Awesome, I'm longing for something like this for a while. Especially for many cloud systems like salesforce etc. Reminds me of Bloomberg terminal. I tried signing up, but receive no confirmation email to jmechtel posteo.de

I just checked and it looks like the confirmation email was blocked.

One way to unblock is to sign up with a Google account (which won't require the email verification).

Otherwise, feel free to email me (ivan@slapdash.com) and I can help confirm your account.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#12
post #7

Could you speak to security of information that I allow Slapdash to access? I'd be very interested in using this, but how do I know the sensitive information that I give you access to is secure?

No much magic here, we use pretty standard protocols and approaches for security.

The data stored is public-key-encrypted (buzzwords: ECIES, Secp256k1, AES256+CTR), and the decryption private keys (per app/user) are available only to the very last and isolated layers (e.g. in particular, right before the search snippet is sent to your browser, or right before the text is tokenized and converted into an inverted index which erases the information about the actual words location in the text). The engineers can’t see the users' data.

App access- and refresh tokens (which we obviously need to send API requests to the apps you connect) are stored the similar way. They’re only decrypted in a separate layer right before requests are sent to remote cloud apps' APIs.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#13
post #9

Awesome, I'm longing for something like this for a while. Especially for many cloud systems like salesforce etc. Reminds me of Bloomberg terminal. I tried signing up, but receive no confirmation email to jmechtel posteo.de

I just checked and it looks like the confirmation email was blocked. One way to unblock is to sign up with a Google account (which won't require the email verification). Otherwise, feel free to email me (ivan@slapdash.com) and I can help confirm your account.

Are you using sendgrid? They've been having a lot of issues with spammers recently so it could be affecting your delivery rates.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#14
post #7

Could you speak to security of information that I allow Slapdash to access? I'd be very interested in using this, but how do I know the sensitive information that I give you access to is secure?

I think this is relevant. It's cool that you've mentioned a couple of "competitors" -- which are internal to large tech companies. Would you guys be open to providing a self-hosted solution for large clients?

We are definitely open to a self-hosted solution, but at the moment we have a small team, so we are trying to keep our engineering surface area manageable.

In the near future, we will be offering deployment to an isolated instance. It would be operated by us, but we would be able to provide infrastructure access.

A step after that would be to offer VPC deployment where the updates are applied by the customer and we wouldn't have access to the infrastructure.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked and it looks like the confirmation email was blocked. One way to unblock is to sign up with a Google account (which won't require the email verification). Otherwise, feel free to email me (ivan@slapdash.com) and I can help confirm your account.

Are you using sendgrid? They've been having a lot of issues with spammers recently so it could be affecting your delivery rates.

Yeah, it's SendGrid. Good to know.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#17
post #7

Could you speak to security of information that I allow Slapdash to access? I'd be very interested in using this, but how do I know the sensitive information that I give you access to is secure?

No much magic here, we use pretty standard protocols and approaches for security. The data stored is public-key-encrypted (buzzwords: ECIES, Secp256k1, AES256+CTR), and the decryption private keys (per app/user) are available only to the very last and isolated layers (e.g. in particular, right before the search snippet is sent to your browser, or right before the text is tokenized and converted into an inverted index…

We will publish a comprehensive overview of our approach to security, which I'll link to this thread for posterity. Frankly, we just ran out of time to publish this in time for the launch.

To compliment our architecture, I should mention we also also have strict company policy around general IT security and any type of customer data access. Security is an evergreen problem here.

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#18
post #16

This is very cool. I just installed it. I was curious, can you speak to how this differentiates from https://getcommande.com/ ?

Both Slapdash and Command E can search apps, but Slapdash can do other things too:

* You can also write to applications, it's not just read-only (create docs, file issues, close tasks, upload files, etc.)

* You can browse the structure of applications in Slapdash (not just search them).

* You can build sophisticated queries (show all tasks open tasks, that mention this customer, render it as a list)

* We are client-agnostic. While we love our desktop client, you can also use Slapdash just in a browser window, or as a Chrome extension (and soon mobile).

* You can control your desktop computer too (launch apps, search local files, etc.)

* You can build your own custom commands and share them with others (this turns out to be quite fun)

Re: Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

#20
post #9

Awesome, I'm longing for something like this for a while. Especially for many cloud systems like salesforce etc. Reminds me of Bloomberg terminal. I tried signing up, but receive no confirmation email to jmechtel posteo.de

I just checked and it looks like the confirmation email was blocked. One way to unblock is to sign up with a Google account (which won't require the email verification). Otherwise, feel free to email me (ivan@slapdash.com) and I can help confirm your account.

Thanks for unblocking.

The onboarding is a bit weird as i don't really know what i want to use this for, i guess creating github issues, but then i got distracted between installing the desktop app and trying to read the "get started".

Also i still don't really understand what "spaces" are supposed to be?

When creating github issues the first thing i wanted to do is create a command, that would include which repo i want the issue to be for.

But looks like I can't extend the existing commands, that would be cool.

Let's see how this work day to day, we are a microsoft shop. Some of the use cases I'm looking for:

- open meeting scheduler with these people - launch a zoom call to that guy (if he is available) - create sharing links for the currently opened document

Post reply on HN