Show HN: Plottico Tracker extension – plot numbers from any site in real-time

Hi guys! Some weeks ago I announced the plotti.co microservice - the easiest way to embed web live plots with the simplest API, here comes the second part of the service and the full story behind it.

I am announcing the Plottico Tracker Pro chrome extension - its purpose is to track values on websites or SaaS services and send the updates to plotti.co. Think of it as a specialized web scraping product - built for monitoring and controlling processes only. You can directly track data from like google analytics, cloudflare stats, your hosting provider, or almost any other public or password-protected web application. Finally, no code at all is required to plot my server CPU load and data caps as my VPS provider admin panel shows it.

So what is plottico? Plottico is the way we win the fight against machines.

Guys, we are facing the potential existential risk from artificial intelligence, no joke! Last year we saw a growing serious concern about safety of intelligent systems with some great names like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk joining the efforts to draw attention to the problem. A few months ago I watched a Davos’16 conference panel on the state of Artificial Intelligence. Man, they had it almost the top topic for the whole panel!

So, I came up with this idea last summer but it crystallized only a few weeks ago: no matter how much everything is intelligent and automated - the final decision is still made by humans. It is us, who benefit from all the systems and machines and I want to make sure I have control over it. And how do you control something if a single person can no longer understand how the whole system works? How do you make sure everything is going right?

That is why NASA has its famous control room with all the key telemetry in one place, so do the nuclear plants, large factories, even subways and VISA has its control room. This is the idea behind plottico: to provide an easy way to monitor activities all over the scattered systems and subsystems, either for science, business, hobby or personal life.

And I take a strict approach: when everything is going in the direction of making the APIs and software more complex, plottico’s mission is to continuously make a simpler, cleaner product, with interfaces and code that are more comprehensible by humans having either technical or non-technical background.

So here is the tool that helps to monitor data from any source accessible from the web.

To make tracking more robust, I’ve implemented what I called the “entropy window selector” - it is a selector based on sift4 string-difference algorithm and aims to detect the correct textnode with tracked number even if it changes its position, IDs or CSS path.

And of course the extension is GPL, and as usual is an early beta - so feel free to throw tomatoes at me, I am prepared with a bug tracker :)

Currently I am looking for an investor and a team of civilian volunteers who are not afraid to take this fight with machines face-to-face. Human intelligence strikes back!