Messages

1

Living Room / [Article] Software Below The Poverty Line

« on: June 20, 2019, 06:09 AM »

Most people believe that open source sustainability is a difficult problem to solve. As an open source developer myself, my own perspective to this problem was more optimistic: I believe in the donation model, for its simplicity and possibility to scale.

I decided to collect data from OpenCollective and GitHub, and take a more scientific sample of the situation. The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold.

https://staltz.com/s...he-poverty-line.html

2

Living Room / Re: is Google still a search engine, or merely a channel for adverts?

« on: April 18, 2019, 05:39 AM »

Have YOUR Google search results lately been even more unrelated and full of adverts, than they used to? 

-Curt (April 18, 2019, 04:09 AM)

Is it Google's fault? Google has to deal with all kinds of black hat behavior. You can't have anything nice because people will try to game it and break it for everybody else.

3

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Searchengine Scraper

« on: April 12, 2019, 04:48 PM »

What for? Who is going to use this?

One can do something similar already with existing tools. My feed reader does that basically, except for grabbing every linked page, as excerpts are fine for me, but would be easy to make it grab the full pages.

4

General Software Discussion / Re: Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: January 17, 2019, 05:09 PM »

2019 versions is out and it seems like they moved forward a bit by adding a chromium browser as an alternative to using IE.

Too bad they removed the automatic time setting of auto-watch instead of improving it.

5

Living Room / Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

« on: October 05, 2018, 05:40 AM »

Could end up with egg (and the SEC) on Bloomberg's face if this is proven to be false.

-wraith808 (October 04, 2018, 11:27 PM)

If a joke cost Elon Musk 20KK, I wonder how much that would turn up to be.

6

Living Room / "If you don't steal [from the commons] you are stealing from your family".

« on: October 01, 2018, 04:56 AM »

Searching for "game theory" I saw some old discussions, so maybe some people here will appreciate this blog post (I know I did):

Anti-social Punishment

Small commentary after reading it:

The main hypothesis suggested, if true, would offers some good insights to the behavior of my neighbors. The number of free raiders among them is astonishing [to me] and, like just like the author described, if you try to guide them to contribute, they will punish you (including with ostracism - sometimes until you are so poor that your only option then becomes to free raid too). Crabs in the bucket, really.

But, paraphrasing the author: what's so bad about being ostracized by free-riders after all? Sure, before the internet became widespread, that would be a hard hit, but these days, one can easily find good online communities with good people, so the "punishment" is a lot less severe in some fronts.

7

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it possible to group names by fuzzy logic?

« on: September 28, 2018, 07:02 AM »

Download Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel:
https://www.microsof...etails.aspx?id=15011

8

Living Room / Re: How has everyone been?

« on: September 28, 2018, 06:58 AM »

Are there many hikikomoris in here? Wow, guess I fit in then. 

Been one for 2 years. I remember watching Welcome to the NHK in my early adolescence and wondering if it would happen to me.

Not that I worry about it. Given the race to the bottom that goes on, it is only to be expected that some people will opt out.

9

Living Room / Re: A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

« on: July 31, 2018, 08:46 PM »

Seems like the inverse of the problem that the Chinese have.

10

General Software Discussion / Re: Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: February 27, 2018, 01:21 AM »

After trying to understand your WSW requests I am not familiar with :

-jity2 (February 27, 2018, 01:08 AM)

See "warrant canary^w".

I did not expose any "request", just some ideas I have for plugins. My requests I sent to the developer using the help system.

You may be interested in reading "Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6".

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: February 26, 2018, 07:04 PM »

For my part I have always preferred to ask him many questions directly. He has always provided fast and helpful answers.

-jity2 (February 25, 2018, 05:34 AM)

He does answer, but many of my feature requests are met with a "only if other users ask that" reply.

The 2018 version has some new features, but none interesting to me, so I will wait for the next.

12

General Software Discussion / Re: Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: February 25, 2018, 10:04 AM »

For your RSS Full text script, I advise you to test this

-jity2 (February 25, 2018, 05:34 AM)

That is what I use already.

13

General Software Discussion / Re: Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: February 20, 2018, 11:24 AM »

I guess I don't really use the advanced features though

-mouser (February 13, 2018, 01:07 PM)

You don't use plugins?

I have one to convert pages to feeds and grab the full text feed, other to automatically detect and leave only the main text of the page, some for price checking and others more page-specific.

Recently I heard of a web service similar to WSW. If I were to use it to do the same I do with WSW, I would have to buy their most expensive package ($300 per month) - so I would not, as I don't have that much money.

I guess WSW is still be the best of its class. Even the news agency Reuters mentioned it on a job ad.

Some plugins I still wish to make/obtain one day:

validate canary alert signed with PGP;

download page with PhantomJS or similar if the page is not compatible with the built-in IE (as it seems IE won't be updated anymore after Edge lunched and the developer said there is no plans to use another engine with JavaScript support).

14

General Software Discussion / Since Website-Watcher's Forum Closed, Where are Users Meeting?

« on: February 13, 2018, 04:08 AM »

It appears that, at least some time ago, there was a handful of users of Website-Watcher in here, but lately there has not been any talk.

Since the official forum closed last year, I wonder if there is some community elsewhere to share plugins and talk about issues. Do you know of any?

(Edit: guess I made a mistake and this should be on the section "General Software Discussion" instead. If so, if possible, mod, move it please.)

15

Living Room / Re: Terms of Service; Didn't Read” (short: ToS;DR)

« on: February 13, 2018, 02:55 AM »

I try to add every contract page of services I use to my Website-Watcher's bookmarks, so I can get notified promptly when they change and easily see what changed.

Hopefully someday an artificial intelligence script will be available to read them and output a simple overview of the main points.

Until then, that is a nice initiative.