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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Is this just scraping http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ ?

I've looked at their data, but I believe I've dropped some things that they consider releases. The whole thing is kind of subjective as to what constitutes a release or not. But no, I didn't just scrape their site. I compiled my own data from a variety of different freely available sources.

Might I ask why you built your own, knowing there was an almost identical offering in place for years? For example, did your different choice of releases cause a statistically significant shift in arrival times? I imagine you've done analysis comparing your approach to theirs.

I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be. They even updated the design a year or two ago and all they did was give it a coat of paint, rather than rethinking how to best visualize the data.

> I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be.

I love your approach :) it's very helpful!

That's a great reason! I agree their design sucks and yours is orders of magnitude more usable.

It's just too bad that you have to re-collect the same data. N historically up-to-date data sources for N designs is just unscalable.

Indeed. Maybe I'll post the data on GitHub or something.

That was my first exact thought as well. The macrumors guide also provides a lot more data for your viewing pleasure.

If any scraping was involved in the production of this site, it was viciously over-engineered. These are static values that only need to be updated manually once after each Apple announcement...

Edit: And before anyone says that everything should be automated, keep in mind that scrapers will break far more often than you'll ever have to update these numbers.

They probably meant whether or not I "took" the information from somewhere else. But yeah, actually scraping the information would have been ridiculous. It's all just in a static YAML file.

My guess is wikipedia. And no it isn't "just scraping". The look is very different and the predicted number of days isn't on the macrumors site.

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