Sure is nice to live in a non-zoned area. I built an addition to my garage and poured a large concrete pad next to my driveway without consulting any government authority, here in western Kansas.
Great project! I can imagine this may greatly improve web certain classes of scraping. @gavino I'm curious what tooling and architecture you used to put this together?
Sure! The backend is actually pretty straight forward, it's a NextJS app deployed on Now with a few added endpoints to handle the incoming GraphQL queries.
Then for actually turning the query into a digestable output I used the GraphQL schema builder that handles accepts HTML nodes from the requested page and grabs the right variables.
Rich Hickey has given so much to the world of software and systems design. The value exchange has most likely not been reciprocal. Nor has it been sufficiently respectful, based on this message. People like Rich that give so much are rare. And people that understand how to respectfully recognize that seem to be becoming more rare.
Of course, one can remember that life is not fair, and people are often shitty even without being conscious of it, and that Rich has freely chosen to pursue this path.
But this leads me to a few questions: If you agree with what I have written above, and what Rich has written in this message, then how can we tip the scales just a little bit further towards respect and reciprocation? What kind of gestures, gifts, and generosities do you think are appropriate? What improved efforts to educate consumers of open source software would be effective? Further still, what kind of culture do we want?
One that you can certainly do is to be one of the voices of positivity and gratitude.
If I enjoy or benefit from something someone has released into the world, I've started trying to send them an email of thanks.
Many times I've gotten responses back, and they are always really grateful for the support. As a hopeful creator with a small but growing following, I've gotten a few of these myself and they really are motivating.
I generally make it a point to never criticize anyone online, since they probably know everything they are doing wrong acutely well and don't need me to tell them again.
Python is currently adding a “thanks” command to their package installer pip. There are efforts to wire pip to monetary rewards. I believe that’s the right direction: identify where the rubber hits the road most of the time, and insert positivity and gratefulness.
This was actually an idea proposed by RMS probably 20 years ago, but I think he was talking about music. Essentially it's the busking model. The key is making that small donation extremely easy to give. And also to get big corporations to press that button.
It seems strange to me that you're so concerned with how we should try to be more respectful to Rich given the querulous and disdainful tone of his post.
I took what I see as a moderate position lightly criticizing his tone, but because you're going way farther than that and asserting that he can be as much of a jerk as he wants, let's address that argument.
I think it's nonsense. Rich is probably among the most brilliant software engineers on the planet but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether he needs to be polite and show human empathy and decency like everyone else does. You can be toxic and hostile and people will put up with it if you're useful enough (c.f. Linus) but we shouldn't be lining up, comment after comment after comment, to cheer that kind of behavior on.
Again, I don't think this is a big deal. I think that his rant is just a small indiscretion and we're all human, but I'm dismayed to see such an outpouring of support for exactly the position that you're putting forward. What I'm saying isn't "nauseating PC culture" as one GitHub commenter put it; it's just not being an asshole.
Well, he and other 147 people, according to the GH contributors page. Though, granted, none with anywhere near the same level of contributions to the core.
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
Thanks for being one of the few voices of humanity in this exchange. This whole situation just feels.. icky.. to me. I wish I knew what long term effects Rich's statement will have on the community, but I can't help but think that it will probably verge towards the opposite of embracing diverse viewpoints. That makes me quite sad.
Rich is very quick to escalate from “I feel X about action Y” to “you are Z”, where Z is negative.
Example, people are frustrated about how Rich runs his project. They are expressing how they feel about Rich’s actions, which is fair. Rich is under no obligation to change, but Rich’s response is to call people entitled. This is an attack against the person, not against the action, and it’s a chilling escalation.
The far more important and long-reaching gestures would be: expressions of thanks, and standing up for creators whenever unwarranted demands are made upon them.
Like "everyone can freely use and modify this, except the people listed in appendix C, who are specifically prohibited from using any part of this code for any purpose whatsoever".
If you get too shitty at the maintainers, you get added to the C-list, and get to take your shitty attitude somewhere else...
yeah, I get that. But in any other area of life, if someone is being a complete dick to you, then you can cut them out of your life. Why can't open source maintainer?
It’s a bad idea to get into pissing matches with shitty people. It’s bad for your mental health and it makes you look like a child. Ban toxic people from the mailing lists, I am all for that, but stop giving them drama and attention.
It is orthogonal to the Times article, but George Gilder's recent book "Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy" [1] offers a valuable perspective. His recent interview at the Stanford Hoover Institute [2] is compelling.
Great tool! I'd like to see you keep going with this. Quick feedback: it would be useful to copy the entire ruleset, including the selector and brackets (as an option). Further if you can reach into source via document.stylesheets, grab the selectors from source (as another option).
Hey! I have good news! Just updated the app. Now you can copy the selector name! If you use Chrome, the extension will update itself. On Firefox, I'll implement auto-update functionality tomorrow. More updates to come!
I think it is the same book. Personal review: This book makes the history of computing tangible, visceral, and fun to read about - covering all the important characters, and showing the network of connections among them, from Vannevar Bush, Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, all the way to Bob Taylor and Alan Kay. Licklider forms an important node in the network with his imagination, and actions taken such as this 1963 memo for the "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network" [1]
Agreed, this seems to be written as marketing first, education second. Good content marketing puts the priority on learning first. If the Bit folks are reading this and interested in improving, I suggest reading Kathy Sierra's book and watching her talks.
That's the simple logic of rent vs. buy, but as the article details, there are other considerations. Opportunity cost being one primary cost that you're not taking into account. To me the most important question is the most fundamental: "Am I a real estate investor?" - I am not, and the overwhelming majority of persons are not. And yet the moment we purchase a home, we become real estate investors. In my case the simple fact that I've only purchased one property in my entire life means that I'll do it with less education and awareness than my landlord did when he purchased the home I currently, comfortably, live in. I think my landlords own and rent more than a few properties, and they do a great job of managing them. I am not confident that I would manage this asset as well as the professionals do, and so I cannot claim that were I to buy this home from them with a mortgage, that I would gain anything. In my opinion this is the key fallacy within the argument favoring the Buy option.
If you intend to live in a home for the rest of your life then you're effectively short one home (or half a home if you're going to share). So I see buying your primary home as more like covering your short than making a positive investment in real estate.
This is an incredible way of putting it. I'm not sure if I like what it implies, though, but I'll definitely be mulling it over. It's not a perfect analogy to securities shorting, because no one is going to lend you a house to immediately sell, so effectively all us renters would actually be naked short-sellers!
Maybe there is a business model in lending out houses so people can short the housing market? Again, not sure how that would work since houses aren't fungible in the same way that securities are.
Lending out houses.. Explain. I'm intrigued. My long term goal (we're not counting my husband here) is to buy a townhouse, live in it for a few years, then rent it out and buy a free standing house - with a backyard! Now we'll have two or more rental properties in competitive markets hopefully bringing in some income. I've been extremely lucky with the house I own now. Good tenant that I did not raise the rent on at renewal. $380 is plenty for me. She knows my goal is to protect the house, not make money off of it, so maybe I'm not the best person for an example in real estate investment.
I own a stock. You think the price will go down. To make this bet, you borrow the stock from me. You then immediately sell it at the current price. Later, if the stock is down, you can buy it back at the new (lower) price, give it back to be, and pocket the difference. If, unfortunately for you, the stock's price has actually gone up, you have to either continue to pay for the carry on the position (essentially paying me rent for my stock), or else take the hit by buying the stock at a higher price, giving it back to me, and eating the difference.
The analogy doesn't quite work with houses, because they're not fungible. I don't care which specific share of stock I get back, because they're all the same. I DO care which specific house I get back if I rent it out to you. Furthermore, I would be REALLY mad if I rented you a house and you then sold it to someone else, since that is just flatly illegal.
Still, I wonder if a lot of the structural problem with housing markets is that there is insufficient short pressure. In other words, there is an obvious way to make the bet that prices will go up (buy one), but no obvious way of making the opposite bet, unless you already have a house, and decide to sell it and begin renting, which hardly anybody does.
How can we let ordinary people short housing in their area?
