Hacker News Reader

No, you were right and be was wrong. Just because he made a copy of unix doesn't mean he knows how to parse HTML with python. Anyone that's done a lots of web scraping or (as in my case) crawling/indexing will see the merit of your response.

View on HN

Was that actually Linus Torvalds? I just assumed it was someone trolling as him. For web scraping, PhantomJS is much better than Beautiful Soup or any xml parsing library. Lots of stuff happens in JS these days, so you need programmatic access to the DOM to really grab data efficiently. In fact, lots of sites hide important values inside JS in order to thwart libraries that post-process html/xml like Beautiful Soup.

It is interesting, when you read a lot of his stuff. It seems that absolutely did not want to worry about the "user" space. User software.

I always wondered, did he ever write user level code. He did write 'git' eventually. But I wonder what else, what does he think of web application development, etc?

>But I wonder what else, what does he think of web application development, etc?

He doesn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com