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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#201
You deserve a nobel peace prize.

I recall fondly informally introducing colleagues to chrome dev tools, injecting jquery via a booklet, and querying the dom like xml xpath. Then taking this headless (server-side) with almost minimal wrapping due to your work.

Hail you and damn regexp.. :)

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#202
post #147
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what "moloch" means in this context. I can google it, of course, but I get "Biblical name relating to a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice". Which doesn't help me much. End users are children that Google is sacrificing? Or?

To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed…

It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#203
post #180
post #104

PhantomJS enabled us at the time to bootstrap a big project at work where at the end workflow the app had to turn HTML orders to PDF on the fly, eventually we moved to WKHTMLTOPDF ( https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ ) which is much less hungry with resources but nonetheless PhantomJS played a huge role during the early days of the project and was easy to setup. If I remember correctly the only down side was to find the correc…

We have used PhantomJS and WKHTMLTOPDF both. Phantomjs hogs a lot of resources but is very good when you want print large PDFs (500+ pages). WKHTMLTOPDF struggles with larger HTMLs.

Good to know, this is not our use case at the moment, we mostly generate PDF of 2-3 pages long.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#204
post #202
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed…

It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?

Well, there is more than one social allegory related to Moloch. Many of them have no obvious relationship to Google. Which is why I asked the question in the first place. So people tried to be helpful and identify any sources that might be related.

I just read the character description for Moloch in Paradise Lost, and don't see any obvious theme you might tie to Google.

In fact, I'm still not quite sure what the original comment was trying to say. Apart from some fuzzy notion that capitalism is sort of like Moloch and we keep feeding it with our "children". Where children is what? Privacy? Money? Open source tools?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#205
post #32

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.

Yeah, I really think that open-source software shot itself in the foot by incorporating unlimited free sharing for every recipient into its mantra. Now everyone thinks that open-source has to mean impoverished, because despite all the happy vibes, very few people will pay for software that they could otherwise get for free. You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definition…

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#206
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.

This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's cu…

They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#207
post #202
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed…

It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?

Like I say, I don't know that it is. I presented a hypothesis that seems like it fits the facts fairly well.

Do you have another hypothesis about what the term means in context? I note that "it's a reference to Paradise Lost" is not very descriptive: for example, if I talked about "Google's Frodo" you might ask what I mean by that, and "he's a character in Lord of the Rings" does not answer the question.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#208
post #113
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it makes sense. You want Chrome in your tests if your users are using Chrome. Very few (if any) of your users will ever visit your app with a headless PhantomJS browser, so it's not a platform that you should go out of your way to support. I've been using Selenium Driver with Chrome in xvfb for my headless testing needs, and I've used PhantomJS for some automation things in the past where it was great, but since…

Thanks so much to the PhantomJS maintainer for his hard work over the years! To me, it feels like his decision is the correct one here. After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our massive angularjs app, we got rid of all browsers but PhantomJS in our karma suite. PhantomJS' slowness, lagging-behind in webstandards and just my general gut feeling (these facts above made me question the…

> After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our massive angularjs app

Really? When I was writing JavaScript I thought I'd hit one ~ once a month. As a matter of fact I hit a v8 bug just yesterday which apparently doesn't support /Etc/GMT[-+][0-9]{0,2} timezones.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#209
post #113
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it makes sense. You want Chrome in your tests if your users are using Chrome. Very few (if any) of your users will ever visit your app with a headless PhantomJS browser, so it's not a platform that you should go out of your way to support. I've been using Selenium Driver with Chrome in xvfb for my headless testing needs, and I've used PhantomJS for some automation things in the past where it was great, but since…

Thanks so much to the PhantomJS maintainer for his hard work over the years! To me, it feels like his decision is the correct one here. After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our massive angularjs app, we got rid of all browsers but PhantomJS in our karma suite. PhantomJS' slowness, lagging-behind in webstandards and just my general gut feeling (these facts above made me question the…

[deleted]

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#210
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

The question is reversed: open source software _is_ a positive externality, but happened almost always _without_ any government involvement (save for some rare exceptions like SELinux). This is probably the reason it worked so good. So, do we necessarily need governments for other positive externalities in the list?

The comment above mine was mentioning chronic underinvestment; I would say that this indicates the current system doesn't work.
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