71–80 of 184 posts
As the founder of one of the screen-scraping tools he alluded to in the video (Selenium), I just want to say the video has one of the best explanations for the difference between automating a process through a user interface vs an API. In the end, entropy always gets you, but you can push it off a little bit longer if there's an API.
As the founder of one of the screen-scraping tools he alluded to in the video (Selenium), I just want to say the video has one of the best explanations for the difference between automating a process through a user interface vs an API. In the end, entropy always gets you, but you can push it off a little bit longer if there's an API.
Thank you for your work sir. I love Selenium.
I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I still long for this time. I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of all of my data. I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before ba…
There are 3 big problems with open APIs 1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).
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> This would be noteworthy if the counter was included in the video Pretty sure that would be impossible, unless I am missing something.
Yeah unfortunately Youtube doesn't let you edit videos, which sucks for creators who want to fix minor mistakes after a video has gone viral. You can, however, add and edit "cards" on top of the video. On another note, it would be noteworthy if the title on Hacker News also included the counter.
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> I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks. Yahoo Pipes was one of the greatest services I used, just when I started getting into programming. Maybe it was so cool because I was naive, but I really miss being able to pipe services together in the same way. Anyone know of any similar attempts that is open…
Not sure about open source and paid hosting, but there is node-red, https://nodered.org/ , which is open source and easy to get started with. Combining stuff is something Zapier excels in, https://zapier.com/ , and the free tier can suffice for some tasks (not open source). You could also try my attempt at a spiritual pipes successor, https://www.pipes.digital/ (but it's also not open source). If there is something m…
What I likes with Yahoo Pipes compared to NodeRED (at least as far as I looked at NodeRED, I might be wrong) is that Yahoo Pipes worked out-of-the-box with services out of the box. I seem to remember that you could use the Google Search API for example, with Yahoo Pipes and pipe that into other things. That's what Zapier does as well, but with less flexibility than NodeRED.
So I guess my dream would be something like the integrations provided by Zapier but with the UI and flexibility of NodeRED.
Haven't seen pipes.digital before, I'll take a look as it looks interesting, but for anything serious, open source is a hard requirement (gotta learn from the Yahoo Pipes history :) )
I really liked this video, it highlights that a lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working. The frequently updating title thing is cute, it'll be interesting to see what dies first - YouTube pulling the "title update API" or Tom's script running wherever he's put it
I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy. Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?
I really liked this video, it highlights that a lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working. The frequently updating title thing is cute, it'll be interesting to see what dies first - YouTube pulling the "title update API" or Tom's script running wherever he's put it
I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy. Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?
Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple’s discontinuation of 32bit apps.
I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I still long for this time. I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of all of my data. I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before ba…
There are 3 big problems with open APIs 1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).
If you create a popular API, people are going to find creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that many users.
There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on, because the people writing apps that consume the API have no incentive to moderate their usage, or try to be efficient.
Since the company that is providing this API is paying for the resources to run it, they can quickly get very expensive. Unless there is a clear financial benefit for allowing it to continue, most companies will shut them down eventually.
If it's actually spot on, it's a miracle. I got the counter and the title both showing 3,690,744 when I first opened the link - so how unlikely is this actually? Probably not really too unlikely. Or I got really lucky. EDIT: Thinking about it, as YouTube probably updates the view count only every couple of seconds or minutes it might actually be spot on most of the time if the title gets updated at about the same fre…
YouTube's view counts update at a notoriously slow rate. It's not hard to find new videos with more likes/dislikes than views.
That doesn't mean that the view counter is slow. Views are only counted when you watch the video for X seconds (or percentage complete, can't remember) while you can like/dislike the video by going to the page, clicking the like/dislike then close the page before the view would even count.
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I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy. Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?
Some of those NES and Gameboy games might not work as originally intended. Lots of them had internal batteries in order to save information and those batteries are starting to die. Floppies from that era and early CDs are also at the age in which they are likely to degrade. So while some of this old tech might have a longer shelf life than tech today, as the video says, entropy will get us all in the end.