I used to work for a small medical device distributor. We used an e-commerce platform that, at the time, didn’t have an API. We wanted to synchronize our products with their platform as products were added, discontinued, copy/image changes, etc.

I ended up using capybara (a Ruby gem for writing browser automation instructions for system tests in web apps) to automate all of the “clicks” to make the updates in the system.

It actually worked pretty well. It wasn’t fast, but it was better than having a human keep the data in sync.

After a few years, the platform released a REST API, and we transitioned to that. But browser automations worked great in the meantime!

edit: spelling

i was raised in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints (aka the mormon church) at some point in my adult life, the stress and anxiety of being a “practicing” member of the church led to the point where i couldn’t attend sacrament meetings without a panic attack. i have stopped participating and have found that my quality of life has improved.

i’m not sure what my belief system is, but i think about death a lot… and in an odd way it helps me appreciate life right now. the thought of an afterlife freaks me out. i want to believe that death is the end. the scarcity of time reminds me how valuable my friends and family are, reminds me to be generous to others, and helps me to live in the moment.

i believe in karma and have found that when i help others in their time of need that it circles back around when i am in need.

in my experience, organized religion overcomplicates things.

let’s be excellent to each other.

Also exmormon (agnostic but somewhat spiritual) here...

I like the concept that maybe we're just the universe dreaming of itself. Like when we die...it's like rain drops returning to the ocean.

If you haven't seen Midnight Mass, I can't recommend it enough great Netflix series, but as one character is dying, there's a brilliant monologue (depending on who you ask, some hated it but I loved it!) that touches on this idea.

I like to believe that there could be something else ..but that regardless it doesn't require a deity, and everyone's invited, and that I should live as if there isn't because I can't possibly know if there is, and everything in life is valuable.

this happened to me the other day for an item i was selling. at the first mention of a “code”, i told them first come first served and i have other people interested. that ended the conversation.

I live in a small ag-town in Merced county and we are currently allotted 3 days a week to water our lawns. During the last drought it was reduced to 2 days a week. This is a city ordinance and I suppose it’s up to the different cities to enact their own limits.

2 days a week is not enough water to keep a lawn alive when the highs hover around 100F in the summer. Many people converted to “drought friendly” landscaping, and there was a boom of lawn painting services. (Painting your dead lawn green so it still looked alive)

Does California do reclaimed water?

I ask because experience in Florida (of all places, did not expect but was pleasantly surprised by!). They reprocess waste water back to non-potable, but sterilized standards, then run it out a parallel pipe system for irrigation use.

Makes perfect sense, especially since you effectively get (1) geologic filtration & (2) lower discharge volume treatment effort for free.

Santa Monica has a dry-weather runoff recycling facility SMURFF, many millions of litres/day. Sells/trades it back to other LA cites, and locally for landscape irrigation and toilet flushing. They do guided tours, well worth going.

In ny hometown near San Diego the water from the local sewage treatment plant gets used by some nearby avocado farms.

Monterey county uses reclaimed water for agriculture, I'm sure there are others as well.

Irrigating non food crops hopefully? Idk anything about water filtration so maybe it’s fine?

Depends on the initial use. Water treatment is a surprisingly interesting (to me at least) rabbit hole.

You don't really control the upstream: someone flushing their toilet, or a laundromat dumping solvents down the drain?

But it's a solved problem to continually test the incoming water supply for the basics (pH, TDS). Plus intermittent checks for full workup (heavy metals, etc).

After that, it's a question of working it through the appropriate steps to get it to the state you want. Sort of like a continuously operating manufacturing line, except you get to blend the product at the end and only have to QA the blended result.

As someone quipped, "Dilution is the solution." Given enough volume and time, you can dilute even an arbitrarily large amount of lead to safe levels.

I've got news for you: wild animals shit on your food crops all the time.

My father was in livestock pathology and always had a chuckle whenever spinach or (insert product here) would claim field contamination.

His verdict: 9/10 it's rat feces at the processing or packaging plant.

But from a marketing perspective, field crop contamination is an act of God. Can't be helped.

Plant contamination would actually mean someone was at fault. And would require (expensive) changes.

The issue when it's people is it let's parasites enter a lifecycle which isn't complicated. Human feces is more likely to have parasites infectious to humans

Right but apparently that doesn't kill me. The question is what happens to industrial runoff in the water stream and if that has any effect on food safety.

I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) US stormwater / runoff systems have to be isolated from sewer systems. Maybe an EPA requirement?

So reclaimed water is typically dealing with "anything anyone puts down a piped drain in their house."

(That said, I think there are also runoff processing requirements before discharge into waterways too)

I saw an “adopt a highway” sign that the company sponsored while visiting the city where they happened to be headquartered. I looked online to see if they had any positions available. They did, so I applied and the rest is history.

I did the same thing: Unfollowed everybody except for the people I truly cared about. Needless to say the news feed wasn’t nearly as full, and a lot of the content was redundant because I had a real “off network” relationship with the people I still followed. It became unnecessary to check Facebook at this point, and now I rarely log in, if at all.

I also highly recommend curating who you follow, you may realize you don’t need FB after all.

I found a similar thing with email notifications. If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. Delete the app from your phone or neglect logging in and you’ll start to get email notifications about the silliest things. Of course they don’t contain much more than “so and so shared a link” without any description of what was shared (trying to get you to login and look.) Not quite as bad as 2FA number, but irritating nonetheless.

Facebook has been steadily decreasing the usefulness of its email notifications in order to push more use of its app and website. The old notifications used to give you the content and allow you to reply through email, but not anymore.

The notifications are also dark-pattern hard to manage. If you don't want a type, you have to wait to receive an example of it to unsubscribe. Their central notification page only allows you to re-enable particular notifications, but give no way to disable them individually.

Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough.

> Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough.

For the sake of humankind, I'd rephrase it as "Facebook is a terrible company that can't die fast enough."

They may not realize, but they really badly reinforce why people leave.

If you try and deactivate, there’s a horrible series of hoops to jump through which just make the service feel so desperate.

If you minimize your usage, you get flooded with desperate emails trying to convince you to login.

If you’ve stepped away out of fear it’s becoming a low-grade attention merchant full of bad practices, these tactics just reinforce the idea that you really really are doing the right thing backing away.

Back when I had the Facebook app installed on my phone, if I didn't open it for a long period the "so-and-so posted an update" push notifications would eventually slow to a trickle and ultimately peter out altogether. But if I so much as touched Facebook, the floodgates would re-open and I'd be spammed with them throughout the day, until the process repeated and they died away again.

In a weird way Facebook ended up conditioning me to avoid using it.

I have blocked all of FB's allocated networks worldwide on my machine (via a look up of allocated IP space and fed into iptables / ipset).[0] So FB doesn't even get "phantom" traffic from me (indirect traffic from FB logos / js on random websites). I only log into FB a few times a year and only via a temporary VPS in another country and using an incognito browser tab.

So now FB has taken to emailing me complaining that they are missing me and that I should log in.

:)

WAYNE: I don't own A gun let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. STACEY: You know Wayne if you're not careful you're gonna lose me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222936

EDIT: fixed link to go direct to the comment

I know a few people that completely block every IP range owned by Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

Most of that works fine, sometimes some shitty websites are on AWS or GCP or load JS frameworks from their CDNs, but the worst is:

You can't connect from Android to their WiFi anymore.

Android pings a Google server, if it can't open a connection, it immediately disconnects. In Android 8.1, there's no way around that anymore. You can try every setting in the WiFi settings, and it won't change a thing.

Can the response be faked?

Probably, considering that domain is HTTP only, but why is this even necessary?

Sometimes I do want to connect to a local network without internet.

Oh I agree, it is a very one size fits all fallacy kind of mistake.

I always enjoy a wee chuckle to myself every time I get down voted on HN for expressing humour; I feel like a modern common man G.B.S.

'My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.'

> If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone.

This is false. My nan has an iPad she basically only uses for Facebook, and her email is unusable because she has thousands of messages from Facebook. I have no idea why they send thousands of emails to somebody who logs in every day and never ever opens one of their emails but they do.

Also they reset your notifications settings regularly. I have disabled the email notification settings at least 5 times but after a while they keep coming again.

i would love to read a follow up that dove into the PHP dark ages. i was doing PHP around that time as well.