4 ms·

A little word of warning/encouragement. I did something similar a long time ago (JSONDuit), which got posted to HN by someone else. You will probably run into

A little word of warning/encouragement. I did something similar a long time ago (JSONDuit), which got posted to HN by someone else. You will probably run into a healthy mix of "that's cool" / "I did that before you!" / "but how will it make money?". Ignore it and do your thing. If you figure out how to monetize it, great! Even if you don't or if you have no desire to, you will have learned and grown during the course of the project. That is invaluable. Have fun and screw the haters...

xaduha 10y ago
I find this attitude "shoot first (write code), ask questions later" as something to be admired and a bit worrisome at the same time. Nothing against people learning stuff, but why does it have to be promoted this way? Lack of humility is what gets me. Maybe I'm just jealous or something, but it rubs me the wrong way.
- iamben 10y ago
  I think it's less about promotion and more about feedback. "Here's what I've built, what do you think?" We're meant to be an inclusive community of smart people. The idea is we'll encourage the poster and offer constructive criticism (or praise). If the post is useful to no one, it simply won't get discussed or upvoted. When something does, it's validated as an idea, or as something of interest.
  - xaduha 10y ago
    "Just because you could, doesn't mean you should" - that phrase should have been applied to both writing the software and posting about it here. Plenty of mediocre stuff gets to the frontpage and plenty of gems fall through the cracks.
    - barranger 10y ago
      Perhaps your view of what's "mediocre" and what's a "gem" is not consistent with the views of Hacker News readers at large
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - ryanlol 10y ago
        Have you ever visited /newest?
- Rollo_ApplyHN 10y ago
  Possible that I've misunderstood your comment, and while just an example, appears that Linux started out as just a side project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux Related topic, cowboy coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding
bryanrasmussen 10y ago
I think the wanting to know how it will be monetized /support itself is a reasonable question. If there isnt an answer you know not to build something using it, expecting it to last.
- awinder 10y ago
  It's an open source project so, maybe it's not meant to make money?
yeukhon 10y ago
> "How will it make money" I was trying to implement a Firefox add-on which navigates the web based on speech for my senior project (the theme was assistive technology). The major blocker with developing any tools to help navigate web page despite some effort in ARIA is that there are so many actions one cannot parse nor do without writing custom code for every single website. i.e. how can you tell where the login button is? what to click? frankly if you look at Gmail the DOM was a huge huge compressed mess (names all rewrote, without gmail.js I wouldn't be able to get Gmail working in my project). If every website exposes a standard set of APIs that can reduce the barrier by a good percentage. So think of combinging HATEOS from REST and this. Here we turn things into JSON with href allowing a client to navigate, sort of a first step making a website more "web client" compatible... funny is it?
dpweb 10y ago
It's not a totally original concept. Screen-scraping has been around for a while - essentially what this solves. I did mine for Ajax: this.get(html, selector, function(s){ var es = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html').querySelectorAll(selector); return [].slice.call(es).map(function(n){ return n.innerText }); }; It's not a product per-se, but combination of data and view is one of the unfortunate aspects of the web that (sorry) won't get fixed - Not everyone will build JSON apis. And, hate away but HTML & JS are here for a long time to come. The need is very real and would be a critical part of a scrape or IFFFT like service - plumbing - if not a product you sell outright to end users.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>It's not a totally original concept. Screen-scraping has been around for a while This is basically a subset of "I did that before you!"
  - metasean 10y ago
    dpweb: - mentions the term that this concept falls under (no where on the OP's page, so he may not know that there is an entire set of software, plugins, etc that does this) - provides one alternative implementation - adds commentary related to why such services are necessary, and that they should be able to be monetized So yes, he starts off with something along the lines of "I did that before you!", but he doesn't use a condescending phrase, and he provides additional useful information.

xaduha 10y ago

I find this attitude "shoot first (write code), ask questions later" as something to be admired and a bit worrisome at the same time. Nothing against people learning stuff, but why does it have to be promoted this way? Lack of humility is what gets me. Maybe I'm just jealous or something, but it rubs me the wrong way.

iamben 10y ago
I think it's less about promotion and more about feedback. "Here's what I've built, what do you think?" We're meant to be an inclusive community of smart people. The idea is we'll encourage the poster and offer constructive criticism (or praise). If the post is useful to no one, it simply won't get discussed or upvoted. When something does, it's validated as an idea, or as something of interest.
- xaduha 10y ago
  "Just because you could, doesn't mean you should" - that phrase should have been applied to both writing the software and posting about it here. Plenty of mediocre stuff gets to the frontpage and plenty of gems fall through the cracks.
  - barranger 10y ago
    Perhaps your view of what's "mediocre" and what's a "gem" is not consistent with the views of Hacker News readers at large
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      Have you ever visited /newest?
Rollo_ApplyHN 10y ago
Possible that I've misunderstood your comment, and while just an example, appears that Linux started out as just a side project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux Related topic, cowboy coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding

bryanrasmussen 10y ago

I think the wanting to know how it will be monetized /support itself is a reasonable question. If there isnt an answer you know not to build something using it, expecting it to last.

awinder 10y ago
It's an open source project so, maybe it's not meant to make money?

yeukhon 10y ago

> "How will it make money" I was trying to implement a Firefox add-on which navigates the web based on speech for my senior project (the theme was assistive technology). The major blocker with developing any tools to help navigate web page despite some effort in ARIA is that there are so many actions one cannot parse nor do without writing custom code for every single website. i.e. how can you tell where the login button is? what to click? frankly if you look at Gmail the DOM was a huge huge compressed mess (names all rewrote, without gmail.js I wouldn't be able to get Gmail working in my project). If every website exposes a standard set of APIs that can reduce the barrier by a good percentage. So think of combinging HATEOS from REST and this. Here we turn things into JSON with href allowing a client to navigate, sort of a first step making a website more "web client" compatible... funny is it?

dpweb 10y ago

It's not a totally original concept. Screen-scraping has been around for a while - essentially what this solves. I did mine for Ajax: this.get(html, selector, function(s){ var es = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html').querySelectorAll(selector); return [].slice.call(es).map(function(n){ return n.innerText }); }; It's not a product per-se, but combination of data and view is one of the unfortunate aspects of the web that (sorry) won't get fixed - Not everyone will build JSON apis. And, hate away but HTML & JS are here for a long time to come. The need is very real and would be a critical part of a scrape or IFFFT like service - plumbing - if not a product you sell outright to end users.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>It's not a totally original concept. Screen-scraping has been around for a while This is basically a subset of "I did that before you!"
- metasean 10y ago
  dpweb: - mentions the term that this concept falls under (no where on the OP's page, so he may not know that there is an entire set of software, plugins, etc that does this) - provides one alternative implementation - adds commentary related to why such services are necessary, and that they should be able to be monetized So yes, he starts off with something along the lines of "I did that before you!", but he doesn't use a condescending phrase, and he provides additional useful information.