scrape_it

I might be generalizing and basing this on anecdotes but often people that work in the drug trade are users/addicts themselves, including the ones who are drawn to positions where it grants them the illusion of unlimited power & material excess. It's ironic that becoming a drug kingpin is the least efficient way of attaining those things, but when you live in a region where there is little to no economic activity, getting a Netflix drama portraying you is the highest point, even if it means doing consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison where you can no longer enjoy the very things you've worked hard towards.

The "entrepreneurs" who simply come from the same pedigree but who has access to both capital and network with capital that propels them to force the transfer of wealth through deception, including imitating the attires of those that have successfully convinced us they are the good guys, whose popular products produce so much human misery in another country where people couldn't care less about.

Similarly, that same banality we feel towards another far away country, can be amplified towards anything in life. If you ask a criminal why he did it, the answer you get is very much the same as a consumer--"because the opportunity existed". To you it may mean indifference to the children to adults working in horrid conditions overseas, to a criminal, that same indifference is just far more profound and pervasive. Literally a criminal will describe robberies, scams in full pride-just like you they were indifferent to the suffering and damage caused around them, instead these were "opportunities" that they took advantage of because no other options were desirable.

My 2 cents in reply to your question.

seems to be a quite desperate time for north korea supposedly undergoing another famine....how long can this tyranny last I wonder....

I am considering laying off the ganja for a while. but I need it to meet deadlines, to do the work the market demands at the best possible time to the best possible consumer, I am the invisible hand that keeps pushing me, in this struggling and character building times. thanks for the advice 친구!

Ah yes! Pleasantly surprised you'd follow up on here.

Does Estonia offer any anonymity through its e-residency program?

A lot of us have stereotypes towards EU regulations as being restrictive, wonder if you could address this one glaring fear in the back of our minds (ex. GPDR).

What should folks on HN know a thing or two about Estonia? I've literally only heard of the country 4 years ago when I played Arma: Cold War with an Estonian gamer, which ironically is a military simulation of gorilla warfare against a USSR invasion of the Baltics..... (see OF: Resistance)

This reminds me of the Estonian business startup thing that BBC covered, has anyone actually used this to a success?

What would be the point of starting a business in countries like Czech and Estonia vs the US?

is it possible to somehow buy this off-line in person in mass quantities? seems like it takes ages to ship from alibaba, also I'm afraid of the Chinese government tapping my phone (as I suspect happened on WeChat I foolishly installed, literally seduced by this Chinese chick who claims she's in Vancouver but then doesn't know where Surrey is???? red flags) potentially, so I want to tinker with these interesting DIY projects and get started with soldering and PCB etc., but I always can't be at complete comfort (I am well aware and conscious of the fact that my privacy standards are in the extremes), knowing what I read on HN all the time, maybe it's a good time to take a break.

So I would really love it if somebody could sell me large bulk of various stuff like this that you could literally get from Alibaba in some vain hope that some wholesale buyer/middle man can make a premium off this paranoia, I'd gladly pay $3~$4 for this if it meant that somebody bought like a million of these for $10,000, and then sold me a chunk of that (at a markup of course which I'm more than happy to pay for the same reason people use VPN and Incognito or Tor), why not for electronics?

tl;dr: Looking for somebody to start a wholesale brick and mortar business based on DIY electronic parts like this so I can pay with cash to escape suspected foreign state surveillance.

Imagine a younger, ambitious, slightly politically sensitive you from the past, expressed a common consensus held by a specific group of like minded peers who believed that a certain country Brad Pitt made famous in the 90s should be free to exercise their political, religious and cultural will against an aggressor state, those things suddenly attract the wrath of peers from that said aggressor state, who think very differently from us, things escalated and I'm still to this day freaked out and feel tense when I hear people speaking the official language of said aggressor state. Call me disturbed, paranoid, I don't care, you weren't there man, you weren't there when the Charlies flanked us and got embassy involved. What is this...People's Republic of Vancouver?

Hope the best for you guys, I really do! If realized, this could be too seductive for foreign governments that depend on importation of oil and polluting their air to support export industries. Cleaning up the air AND mining the skies for gasoline? Good deal imho.

You really hit the nail with those simple percentage, its clear as day to me now.

So it seems to me that Groupon really makes sense for businesses with fixed & low variable costs, thick enough margins to come out ahead and either repeat business or extra spenders.

I think the advertising comparison makes sense here.

I see so the primarily utility of Groupon is that businesses can pay for a chance of repeat customers and/or extra spenders? I think the theater is a good example of the latter.

Then the question arises, why can't businesses do this themeselves? Why can't the breakfast place you frequent just advertise $20 worth of food for $10? Why Groupon? Is it because Groupon can send foot traffic on demand for a cut of the sales?

Very promising but I'm going to hold out until I actually see this being applied in places like South Korea, literally suffocating from a combination of both local and foreign smog from Korea's favorite neighbor.

You can't really fault me because we've often seen groundbreaking, extraordinary claims, and very little of it is actually realized. Sort of like how we get news about how somebody found a cure for AIDs or Cancer. Again, not trying to shit on anybody, just practicing good old skepticism, I will believe it when my nephews and nieces in Korea are able to breathe in cleaner air and can play outside without wearing industrial face masks. Until then, fingers crossed and hope this is the real deal.

So the retailer is forced to provide a deep discount, even if it forces them to sell at a loss? Who gets the final say here, might we assume Groupon? If so, why would retailers continue to utilize Groupon if it ends up being a net negative operation?

Can you elaborate on why you think its a scam? What did the founders do previously which supports those allegations?

> It's a very compelling illusion of actually understanding the topic. I've seen less coherent responses on Stack Overflow and, dare I say it, Hacker News.

I think you've highlighted a very interesting angle. A lot of writings by users on the internet have common grammar mistakes or more like, the apathy towards adhering to correct English grammar.

After arguing and correcting people on the Internets for the past 20 years, the semantics became more urgent than the syntax, and as a result, I often read my own writing in aghast-the realization that when people write tl;dr they really meant it-because as soon as you hit submit the original meaning is lost and with our limited cognitive resources we choose to filter out only what we want to read and ignore the rest.

The true test for this sort of text transformer will be to generate an equally incorrect syntax and idiosyncrasy through writing style and skew towards the use of specific group of vocabulary (ab)used by the author, meaning an entire Reddit drama thread generated purely by AIs, complete with trolling, argument traps, and generalization, the complete toolbox of an Internet keyboard warrior.

edit: I finally got a response back from the generator: I typed 'lick my butt' and the result is shockingly good-its everything I'd expect from someone who would start off with that phrase: lick my butt. I don't know what kind of ass you got. I'll just crawl next to you. I'll crawl next to you like this, so that if you get a little pissed, you have time to take it easy and go back to enjoying the show. Don't make me go back to enjoying the show. You can go back to enjoying the show. You can walk with me. You can take me. You can crawl next to me. Don't go. It's okay. I'm just making you comfortable again. And, I don't want you to leave. And, it's fine. I'll let you keep my body. You can take me but don't keep me. I don't need you to keep me.

That's just the opening I mentioned from when she says goodbye and leaves him for it. It has been a while since I have been "comforted;" and not comfortable in a nice way. He's gone over her body in a way that just takes her from me, into my body again; but, doesn't take her any further. She continues to leave behind me that way, but we both know that this isn't just about me anymore. It's about her.

I don't know what to say to her at this point. As much as I want to go over what I experienced with her last time, I can't just let this go. After all, this wasn't a last-minute fuck because I couldn't come. It wasn't because he wasn't enjoying himself. It was because he has a girlfriend; and, he feels that she deserves to be comforted. (The way he says that doesn't work either; it's one thing if he needs me to be comforted, but it's another to tell her he wanted her too and he just needed time to enjoy himself. She deserves to be comforted too; after all, he is getting older and older.

Especially that line 'last-minute fuck because I couldn't come' is completely in line with the overall tone of the generated text. You would think this post was written by a 20 something red pill poster.

yeah my original idea was a sort of a Google Freebase P2P Strikes Back Like KaZaA

Imagine a structured gigantic tree data where relational, tabular data of any data is available?

You can see why I was seduced by this idea of an all out liberalization of information by making the storage and computation decentralized and p2p reliant-selective one at that which allows you to create your own private "pool" of workers each with a rotation-des-adresses IP of your choosing.

Basically any data that is uploaded to a scrape:// URL which is seeded by other peers running the Scrape.it client (people you shared the URL with) will stay up there theoretically as long as there's "seeders", sorta like Bittorrent.

You could share a scrape:// URL and maybe somebody will knock down your doors (CIA_OPEN_UP) but if it's shared globally and theoretically if one uses other means of traditional anonymically inclined tools of your choosing online that rhymes with possibly XOR, then anything is possible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Large scale amounts of data can be crawled because speeding up the volume and speed is literally authorizing another peer to have write access to your local Data Sanctuary (by default only read access is granted), virtually even the most stubborn 2009 non-vanilla AJAXY-ANGULARLY-JQUERY-SPHAGEHTEI web apps where the backward navigation is broken, Scrape.it have powered right through, essentially dramatically lowering the cost barrier to that data available online.

Ex) it can try every order of form automation permutation combinations, for every option in select drop down, for instance: search this list of product id and crawl everything on this J2EE enterprisesque web app from 10 years ago.

The most recent discussion on how the web needs an open index, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713604, so that others may build on it will still the ideal standard.

Creating a completely free and decentralized bank for structured data that is impossible to completely take down once shared with other than your group, with full end to end encryption in-between, cryptographically verifiable list of order edits....

but alas, I'm really pressured to get this out the door so looks like I will just have to focus on the bare minimum in terms of client for now.

I originally aimed this to be a standalone self-hosted desktop/server tool...

anyways I digress, I need to get back to work. Lately honestly been a challenge mentally and emotionally(?) from some other life bullshit, its only when I get into the zone do I feel free

oh yeah forgot about that....its a great template, everything all one one html...many thanks. I will swap out the drawing.

I'm working on it as I speak.

It uses a sort of a DSL that I came up with, and removes a lot of boilerplate.

Headless yes.

You write WSL (Web Scraping Language) to scrape 2 pages of HN:

    GOTO news.ycombinator.com | EXTRACT {.morelink, 2} {news: .storylink}

(you may certainly remove that ' , 2 ' business based on the moral system you subscribe to)

yeah I've actually had a sudden change of heart - implementing a p2p/decentralized theme is quite a bit more work than I anticipated, mainly syncing problems. originally planned on releasing 3 weeks ago....this p2p is taking up almost all of my time and I'm not sure if ppl even give a shit about it....so much for my ideological mania

I'm going to put that p2p stuff on hold and focus on getting a REPL terminal app that you can start running WSL on this week.

I often wonder when reading articles on African American news, whether it's more than a concidence that areas with high concentration of African American population is lacking the same access to public institutions as the rest of America. For instance, why is there so many liquor and gun stores in the 'hood so to speak?

Really happy and proud of this owner for this initiative, but other than just being another Model Minority Today piece, the institutional racism evident in the US is clearly visible to me as an outsider, and it appears to me, a sly, covert, purposeful, institutionally enforced ignorance prevalent in American society as a result of Nixon's attack on ethnic political expression through a caricature that is the war on drugs, in accelerating their collective demise through economic and educational deprivation. It wasn't like African Americans weren't trying either, for example, there once was a thriving economy called "Black Wallstreet" that was destroyed by the white establishment.

It's not evident just from the treatment of African Americans throughout US history but other minorities. For instance, disarming Koreans who were defending their stores from looters, and letting the communities they built up burn to the ground, and only then, sending in the national guard, Japanese Internment Camps, more recently the plight of hurricane Katrina victim's treatment, kids of refugees and asylum seeking parents who are stuck in a privatized camp with reports of sexual abuse from the caretakers in the absence of their parents, are escaping an increasingly violent narco-economies in South America that were formed out of the same institutional deprivation and usurpation of national resources by American corporations throughout Latin American history, ex) United Fruits Company, comes to my mind.

can't believe the first one didn't result in a ball of fire...

the second was even more shocking, all of a sudden it looked like he was trying a Cobra maneuver until he ejected! that's insane.

huh? interesting, do you have more info, I love reading stuff like this. I don't know much about the Gripen but it is my all time favorite after the F-16.

Off topic but here's a neat youtube video of Gripen jets undergoing rapid turn-around, on a normal street road with just a handful of people, and special tools for the crew:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49L9BlYQSjw

Well, to support the top parent's comment, here's what John Carmack had to say about SAAB's fighter jet:

> The fly-by-wire flight software for the Saab Gripen (a lightweight fighter) went a step further. It disallowed both subroutine calls and backward branches, except for the one at the bottom of the main loop. Control flow went forward only. Sometimes one piece of code had to leave a note for a later piece telling it what to do, but this worked out well for testing: all data was allocated statically, and monitoring those variables gave a clear picture of most everything the software was doing. The software did only the bare essentials, and of course, they were serious about thorough ground testing.

> No bug has ever been found in the “released for flight” versions of that code.

so not quite that tests are useless because blackbox, but more that yes, it is possible to write software that facilitates showing a code will do what it says it will do.

In another note, I do feel sorry for the engineers but at the same time Airbus also has similar MCAS system, but the only thing that saves them is an extra Angle-of-Attack sensor whereas I believe the boeing relied on just one or two. Airbus had 3 AOA sensors and if 2 agreed, that was the data fed into the MCAS.

It still boggles my mind that they would place a bigger engine when the original plane was not built for it at all, this was 100% profit orientated move to prevent Airbus from taking Boeing's majority marketshare, it's highly ironic that the opposite results.

Even more infuriating is that Boeing passed it off as the exact same plane, not much extra training is necessary, along with FAA giving their blessing, now caught up in the mess.

Canada for instance is now looking to the EU for an independent auditing, as any credibility FAA has built up over the past years has taken a significant hit.