amalantony06

Seems like most people here think hospitals and health care companies act purely out of the benevolence of their hearts and not for profit, judging by the down-votes on your comment ;)

Doesn't Debian do exactly what you've said?

Why does const irk you? const sounds a lot clearer than con. Is that your primary criteria for picking a language? ;)

Hi Darren, thank you for the comment! Webhooks is indeed something that's on my immediate to do list. As a matter of fact, it was originally supposed to be a part of the MVP, but was put on hold so that the launch could happen quicker :).

I'd like to understand your use case better and shall drop you an email!

Hello HN,

Webtrackr is my first attempt at building an Indie SaaS app. I've been working on and off on this project for about a year now and it's finally ready. Webtrackr lets you track a section of a webpage or an entire webpage for changes & notifies you by Email, Slack and Telegram on detecting a change.

Webtrackr was born out of me "productizing" a script I'd written to scrape Lenovo's website to alert me on offers while I was shopping for a new Thinkpad. If you're a hacker, it's not too difficult to write a script to crawl & parse a webpage for changes, but this is out of scope of the average user. Besides, even for a developer, scraping webpages today is a non trivial task - a lot of websites block requests that do not originate from a browser and based on IP if too many requests are sent. Additionally with most websites today being heavy on Javacsript, simple scrapers don't quite cut it anymore. This is the problem Webtrackr wishes to solve.

Webtrackr uses Headless Chrome/Puppetter to crawl webpages and requests are routed through a distributed network of proxies to get around being blocked or rate limited by the target websites the user wishes to monitor. So the user can always count on getting notified on changes regardless of the nature of website they're monitoring or the frequency of the checks.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community on Webtrackr. Is this something you'd use?

Electron app obv implies more privacy in a sense (assuming that no data is sent to their server).

You wouldn't but "average users" would prefer to run it on their phone. For example, this could turn into a social media management tool for "influencers" and celebrities - managing their social media profiles with advanced deletion conditions etc.

This is an excellent counter perspective.

This is a poorly thought out comment. Hosting providers are a commodity and so they cannot de-platform you. Only a platform like Twitter can de-platform you. If a hosting provider suspends your account, you still own the domain and all your data - you'd just move it to the next host.

Besides, when there's sufficient demand, there'd be several more options for hosting, including ones that are "pro free speech". OTOH, monopolies could end up destroying individual liberty and choice.

AWS and Google Cloud are not the only infrastructure providers around ya know ;). There are plenty of other superior and cheaper alternatives like Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH, Hetzner etc.

Regrading credit card processors, I don't see why it'd be necessary for a personal website. If it's about accepting donations, one could accept cryptocurrency.

The simplest no-brainer answer to the censorship problem is for everyone to own their personal websites with custom email and RSS feeds so that friends and family can "follow" you. Nobody can censor you on your own website can they? ;)

Free markets cannot work without some oversight from the government - esp for the protection of rights of individuals against monopolies. Unfortunately the biggest consumer tech giants (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc) have turned into 1 giant monopoly (since they collude illegally, as numerous news leaks have shown).

The only way to truly protect the rights of the individual would be for the government to step in at this moment to put big tech in it's place. Unfortunately I have very little confidence that it'd actually happen. Esp since the newly elected government in the US seems firmly on the side of big tech (political contributions and what not).

Failing government intervention, I fear a technological dystopia is not too far away in the future, if not already here. The other alternative ofc would be for individuals to take back control by moving out of these platforms towards their own personal websites with custom email and RSS feeds.

Regardless of your political views, behaviour such as this from tech monopolies/gatekeepers should be a cause of concern for anyone who'd like to keep their freedoms (esp of speech) intact.

The ideal scenario would be for people to use the web as how it was originally intended: ie, everyone having custom websites (and private emails) hosted on a VPS with an RSS feed so that your friends can follow your "feed". That way you'd own your content and wouldn't have to worry about censorships/account bans etc.

Discover-ability is just about the only downside with this.

> The failings of The Church are well documented and don't need to be repeated here.

The failings of the Church does not make it questionable. Like with any endeavour of man, there are bound to be failings. Heck, the first Pope, Peter, chosen by Christ himself denied him thrice. So, why should the failings of the subsequent members of the clergy be of any surprise to anyone? The epistles in the New Testament talks about false teachers and immoral people within the early Church. So this is nothing new under the sun.

> I'm more interested in what doesn't get talked about: the crowding of the marketplace of ideas.

Not sure what century you live in, but in the 21st century, the Church and the ideas that it espouses are mostly rejected, esp of, but not limited to matters of chastity, teachings on what constitutes a valid marriage, divorce, religious piety etc. Your claim might have been valid in the 13th century, but we don't live in the middle ages any more.

> The belief system promulgated by it is antiquated and does not serve society well.

That is an opinion, and cannot be philosophically or scientifically proven.

Questionable how?