k1m

I really like the latest PHP release, 8.4. If anyone does any web scraping or HTML parsing, I've written a blog post about the big improvements made to the new DOM API: https://blog.keyvan.net/p/parsing-html-with-php-84

From the article:

> There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.

> The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.

Chomsky: 'if “they” do it, it’s terrorism; if “we” do it, it’s counterterrorism. That’s a historical universal.'

Not surprised. Jonathan Cook, who used to work at the Guardian, comments on how it is covering Israel's bombing of Gaza:

> As Israel continues to bomb Gaza back into the Stone Age, the running order in today's edition of the supposedly liberal Guardian:

* Number of known Israeli hostages grows

* Blinken starts diplomacy to limit coming death toll

* UK government urges restraint

* Might Egypt open its border?

* US deploys another aircraft carrier to Middle East

* Israelis vow to rebuild kibbutz destroyed by Hamas

* Jewish-Arab solidarity projects offer hope

* Frankfurt book fair cancels talk by Palestinian writer

* Antisemitic attacks on rise in parts of UK

* TikTok to curb disinformation about Israel and Hamas

> The only things on offer are details of how the genocide in Gaza is to be organised and why it's justified.

> The genocide itself, and the Palestinians being massacred, are bit players – the background noise to excitement over the coming ground invasion.

> Simply astonishing.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/17138503523430727...

A lot more info here: https://declassifieduk.org/iran-1953-mi6-plots-with-islamist...

> IRAN 1953: MI6 PLOTS WITH ISLAMISTS TO OVERTHROW DEMOCRACY

> Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.

I created Feed Creator, so nice to see it mentioned in the comments :)

I've written two blog posts about how we go about using CSS selectors when working with Feed Creator. Might be useful for those looking to do the same with RSS-Bridge.

How to turn a webpage into an RSS feed using Feed Creator

Part 1: https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/how-to-turn-a-webpage-into-...

Part 2 (using more advanced selectors): https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/how-to-turn-a-webpage-into-...

Sadly the trend does seem to be a move away from semantic CSS. I get the appeal of Tailwind for creating components and custom designs, but it's surprising when you see content heavy sites like the BBC no longer using class attributes in their news articles the way they used to.

That's been my experience too. Some of the bridges take into account the rate limits imposed by the platforms, and the steps required to get content without an API key.

So using RSS Bridge to generate feeds from large platforms is often a lot more reliable than the typical scraping script I'd code up myself for other sites.

> Then we must go for Russia first, this is no recent analogue to Russias coordinated execution, rape and torture of civilians, in not just Ukraine but in Chechnya too.

Are you seriously suggesting Russia is responsible for more death and destruction around the world than the US?

I run an experimental service to turn web articles into plain text (No HTML) by prefixing the URL with 'txtifiy.it/'.

Doesn't work on all articles: https://txtify.it

Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I

> Is this misinformation/propaganda? Maybe, maybe not, but false positives are better in cases like this than false negatives.

You question people's motivation when it comes to submissions. Why not when it comes to flagging? Does it foster intellectual curiousity to flag a story by a renowned investigative journalist?

In any case, what's surprising to me here is the reaction to dang's reasonable justification for disabling the flags on this story. I think those who continue to push for its removal after flagging have moved beyond "I personally don't think it's a suitable topic" to "I don't want anyone else to read it". I find the latter attitude very worrying.

And who determines what's been posted for zeitgeist-shaping or intellectual curiousity? And what can we say about those who have been frantically flagging this submission so their fellow community members don't get to read it?

I'm surprised at the reaction here. There's plenty of stuff posted on HN I don't agree with, but don't think I've ever felt so strongly about a submission that I'd want the rest of the HN community not to read it because of my personal reaction to it. If you don't like something you read on HN, why not let the rest of us read it and make up our own minds?

Thanks dang. I'm glad HN has moderators that make calls like.

Ah you found it! Didn't think anyone would try that. :D

This is an issue. I haven't experimented to see if there are workarounds, so the service currently checks the length of the article text and if it's very long, it will send a portion, otherwise we'll exceed the token limit. There's a note on the front page about it: "Limitations: The OpenAI API does not allow submission of large texts, so summarization may only be based on a portion of the whole article."

There are some recommendations here which I've tried to follow when I've worked with RSS: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile

They are from 2007, so you might have seen them already.

There is an activeTab permission which does this (limits access).

Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Chrome: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/manifest/ac...

Thanks. We already have extensions for most popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge. Links at the URL above. As well as an Android and iOS app.

Chrome extension here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/push-to-kindle/pna...

While not exactly like Pocket, there are services that can send web articles to your Kindle. I work on one called Push to Kindle: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

I enjoyed Jeff Schmidt's book on this topic. Disciplined Minds: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds

We've got some RSS tools at FiveFilters.org and we have something like this. Feed name and URL can be changed:

https://subscribe.fivefilters.org/?name=FiveFilters.org&url=...

Your comment reminded me of this bit from Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks

He addresses that: "It’s easy to understand why those suffering from the crime may regard it as an unacceptable indulgence to inquire into why it happened and whether it could have been avoided. Understandable, but mistaken. If we want to respond to the tragedy in ways that will help the victims, and avert still worse catastrophes that loom ahead, it is wise, and necessary, to learn as much as we can about what went wrong and how the course could have been corrected. Heroic gestures may be satisfying. They are not helpful."

This is great!

If it's useful, I work on a project where we maintain a repository of XPath selectors for extracting article content from many different sites: https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config - they're based on the original public Instapaper rules.

We also have PDF generation, but it's not really for crawling, and wasn't created for reading on a device like the Supernote, more for printing and reading: https://pdf.fivefilters.org/simple-print/

I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.

We've just launched a completely new version of our Push to Kindle app for Android.

It lets you send web articles you encounter on your Android device to your Kindle. The articles can then be opened and read like the books in your library. Many people find it useful for reading long-form web articles, or just saving material for later reading.

The new app is free to use with a 20 articles/month sending limit.

The easiest way to use is it is to have the Amazon Kindle app installed alongside Push to Kindle. We'll then use that to handle the delivery.

If you're familiar with CSS selectors, you could try this that I work on to generate a feed from the webcomic site: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

Declassified UK: Julian Assange's extradition to the US has been approved -- by Lord Chief Justice Burnett who is a 40-year 'good friend' of former minister Alan Duncan, the key government official who orchestrated Assange's arrest from the Ecuadorian embassy. - https://twitter.com/declassifiedUK/status/146925696662314599...

I work on a project intended to help people produce full text feeds from partial ones. It's essentially a web service that produces a new feed URL and handles article extraction when the feed gets requested by your feed reader: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/