3 ms·

Hi, I'm the developer of rdrview. I posted the project as a "Show HN" a week ago or so but it got no traction, so I'm really surprised to find it on the front p

by eafer 6y ago

Hi, I'm the developer of rdrview. I posted the project as a "Show HN" a week ago or so but it got no traction, so I'm really surprised to find it on the front page today. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

buzzert 6y ago
Just wanted to say that I love that you do the parsing in a sandbox. Very well written!
- eafer 6y ago
  Thanks, I'm glad that you like it.
dang 6y ago
> but it got no traction, so I'm really surprised to find it on the front page today There's a lot of randomness in what happens to get noticed or get traction on HN. We have various tricks to try to mitigate that. One is that we allow a small number of reposts if an article hasn't had significant attention yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
- eafer 6y ago
  > There's a lot of randomness in what happens to get noticed or get traction on HN. I'm the kind of user that just lurks in the front page, so I don't really have any right to complain if my work doesn't get noticed by others. I'm glad that it did though. > we allow a small number of reposts if an article hasn't had significant attention yet Does that apply to Show HN too?
  - dang 6y ago
    Yes.
ivanovb 6y ago
I was working recently on a similar project and I knocked my head in the GDPR walls; the most annoying being TechCrunch - you don't just get a modal that you could bypass, they send you to another site. Did you find a way to deal with this hindrance ?
- eafer 6y ago
  The core of my code is a line by line translation of the Firefox version. I know what it does, but not the exact motivation for everything, so it has many hidden tricks I never noticed. I'm not in Europe and I never tested this, but it's possible that it does remove some of the modals, as long as the actual content is on the page. It won't do anything for the TechCrunch case you describe, because it only fetches the one webpage you point it to (and any redirections).
  - danpeddle 6y ago
    I took a very quick look at the source code, and seems you’re using the curl default options for things like the user agent. Please correct me if wrong! Did you try pretending to be a search engine crawler, for an idea..?
    - eafer 6y ago
      I didn't; I guess I could let the user pick an agent. You think that would help with GDPR? So far, I've never run into this problem myself. If I did, I think I would use tor.
eafer 6y ago
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I've been told that rdrview can be built on OpenBSD as well [1]. I intend to add support for the BSDs soon. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/jaluzg/firefox_reader_view_as_a_linux_command_line_tool/g9abaf9/ https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/jaluzg/firefox...

by eafer 6y ago

buzzert 6y ago

Just wanted to say that I love that you do the parsing in a sandbox. Very well written!

eafer 6y ago
Thanks, I'm glad that you like it.

dang 6y ago

> but it got no traction, so I'm really surprised to find it on the front page today There's a lot of randomness in what happens to get noticed or get traction on HN. We have various tricks to try to mitigate that. One is that we allow a small number of reposts if an article hasn't had significant attention yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

eafer 6y ago
> There's a lot of randomness in what happens to get noticed or get traction on HN. I'm the kind of user that just lurks in the front page, so I don't really have any right to complain if my work doesn't get noticed by others. I'm glad that it did though. > we allow a small number of reposts if an article hasn't had significant attention yet Does that apply to Show HN too?
- dang 6y ago
  Yes.

ivanovb 6y ago

I was working recently on a similar project and I knocked my head in the GDPR walls; the most annoying being TechCrunch - you don't just get a modal that you could bypass, they send you to another site. Did you find a way to deal with this hindrance ?

eafer 6y ago
The core of my code is a line by line translation of the Firefox version. I know what it does, but not the exact motivation for everything, so it has many hidden tricks I never noticed. I'm not in Europe and I never tested this, but it's possible that it does remove some of the modals, as long as the actual content is on the page. It won't do anything for the TechCrunch case you describe, because it only fetches the one webpage you point it to (and any redirections).
- danpeddle 6y ago
  I took a very quick look at the source code, and seems you’re using the curl default options for things like the user agent. Please correct me if wrong! Did you try pretending to be a search engine crawler, for an idea..?
  - eafer 6y ago
    I didn't; I guess I could let the user pick an agent. You think that would help with GDPR? So far, I've never run into this problem myself. If I did, I think I would use tor.

eafer 6y ago

By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I've been told that rdrview can be built on OpenBSD as well [1]. I intend to add support for the BSDs soon. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/jaluzg/firefox_reader_view_as_a_linux_command_line_tool/g9abaf9/ https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/jaluzg/firefox...