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0 pointsalways_good8y ago0 comments

Agreed. It's some mix of the XY problem plus the self-entitlement of "if I had the idea, then it should work."

Yet the classic HNer confuses this for inherent weaknesses in the underlying platform that they then need to share lest someone has something good to say about the platform. And they'll often be using words like "terrible", "garbage", and "I hate..."

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2 comments · 1 top-level

squeaky-clean8y ago· 1 in thread

Please, no one said Wikipedia was terrible. You're taking statements out of context. The original comment said:

> Wikipedia's markup is just terrible for trying to do any sort of scraping or analysis.

I'd like to emphasize the "for trying to do any sort of scraping or analysis." Should we instead lie and say it's wonderful for scraping?

It's not an insult, it's the truth. If you want to build an app that automatically parses Wikipedia, it will not be easy.

laumars8y ago

But again, that's the wrong tool for the job so of course it's not going to be well suited. When it's that obvious of a wrong tool saying it's terrible is still kind of silly. It's like saying hammers are terrible at screwing things or cars make terrible trampolines.

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