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90%+ of all tech meetups in Austin are this. Such sad garbage. I'm in NYC now, and haven't been going to meetups because I feel burned out on them from having so many bad experiences.

Hopefully the new charge that meetup is foisting on attendees will kill the platform and we'll see some of these alternatives take off.

Remember, you can't make friends unless you pay your corporate masters!


Nonsense - beautiful soup is free.

Don't pay for something you can program yourself.


Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this project, I'm also a programmer isn't part of it's target demographic. But:

Are you suggesting that if somebody wanted to setup a basic scrapper, they should learn how to install python, use packages, figure out how the webpage is structured, and dig through the page source to figure out how to extract their data?

This project has a decent visual data picker, interface, etc. You could literally hand it to a non-programmer, and have them scraping comments off hacker news without any programming knowledge at all.

I get paid over 25$/hr professionally as a programmer. This project costs 40$ one time. I'm not saying it's worth the money, but all it has to do is save somebody 2 hours of time.

If you are a programmer then this project likely isn't for you.


Sure, everyone's time is free too, after all.

(Alternate smart-ass reply: Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)


I'm not the OP, but it looks like it was in reply to the "cheapest way" part of the title. Incidentally, that line doesn't appear on the web site.


> Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)

No because they were all free.

And I suck too.

But it was free.


https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

I mean...

soup.find(id="link3") # <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>

Is this hard?


For HN's audience, no, that's not hard. But this product is clearly not only for us, and you've also cherry-picked a very simple example.

There's also the aspect of downloading the page in the first place and dealing with things like authentication and bot detection which a product like this helps solve.

I personally don't have a use for this product right now, but I won't be so bold as to say I'll never find a case where using it wouldn't be easier or more cost-effective than hacking up my own solution.


Good, now do that on a page that uses JS and authentication. Trivial on this extension, not so much using BS.


If you show that to non-programmers they'll take one look at that and understand that about as well as egyptian hieroglyphics.

"Soup? Python? What's an 'id'? class? href? I just want to select the title!"


Complete and total nonsense. "Passion" is a buzzword meaning work for free until we deem you worthy of payment - and that time frame keeps getting longer and longer as the race to the bottom in labor keeps happening. NAFTA was a prelude to the internet revolution. Like programming? Well, someone living where rent is a tenth of yours can do it better than you. Enjoy poverty!


Exactly. And we have that magnesium and other macro-nutrients are declining in fruits and vegetables (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/). Unregulated capitalism will grow "food" in the form of apple shaped buckets of water and sell as many as they can as the soil is exhausted.

We're doomed.


But, importantly, not the current account balance (https://www.bea.gov/news/blog/2019-03-27/us-current-account-...).


I guess, but then how are developers in first world countries supposed to pay the rent? If a company wants to source all their developers from third world countries maybe they shouldn't be allowed to list their stock in first world exchanges. Seems fair, no?


They can take some other job which will presumably pay more? Nobody's forcing them to work for $25/hour.


Except if we outsource all the jobs...Likewise, no one would be forcing Automattic to list on a first world exchange - there are many other ones where they could be free to float their stock. How come all's fair for labor, but not for capital?


Exactly. In the long game remote = outsourcing = race to the bottom. Marx saw it coming a long time ago.


Not at all - both sides benefit from trade. And also 3rd world investors buy a big part of that stock (including a part of my savings).

AFAIK developers in the first world still get better than the average salaries.


Looking at the current exchange rates, I don't earn a huge amount more than this, and I have a mortgage, support my partner and child financially, and live very comfortably in a city in a first world country. Admittedly one with non-insane healthcare, and not in a capital city/city where house prices are sky high, but still.


In Finland 25$ per hour would be way higher than average wage. Finland is very much a first world country.


How much would it cost the US to source all of its products in countries other than China? I imagine it would be expensive, but possible over something like a 5 year span.


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