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If it isn't my favorite website collector, Mr. Condor

It's as if using the technology the way it's designed to be used is a reasonable idea. Who could've thought?

In case scraping doesn't work for a certain link, you could have a "limited" update feature: Download website html, compress and hash it and store locally; each update cycle, download it, compress, hash and compare to local copy. If it has changed, then simply light it up in the UI. For me, simply seeing that there's something new on the site I want tracked is enough information so I can visit it and check out the new article myself.

Of course, false positives are a downside. Someone fixing a typo shouldn't count as an update. I'm sure the community can think of settings for the "update sensitivity" where level 0 requires at least a new tag to appear on the page, level 1 requires a change of at least N characters, and level 2 notifies on even a change of one character.

I love this extension already and am willing to help out with PRs :-)

Yep. And the sad part is that some of the students I met here don't realize what they're learning is not CS. I only applied to avoid the compulsory military service, I was already learning a bunch on my job.

On the bright side, the local job market demands match what they teach here very well. According to my anecdata, lots of students who had no knowledge or experience working as programmers now have full-time jobs mostly as web developers. Looks like the university's doing its job and I'm just a whiny C student.

There are two sides to this kind of teaching. If you're MIT, you can afford to hire great lecturers who know to teach the students fundamental and deep truths about the tools they're using and not trivia. That way, they can generalize onto other tools, so anyone who studied git can quickly adapt to using cvs or svn. My university (in a developing country) is on the other side. Last semester was a disaster.

We had an AWS course, half of which was memorizing information about pricing and S3 tiers. If I were going into a job as an AWS guy, I'd definitely have to know that, but this is just third year of undergrad in CS :-/ and not a training course. The quizzes also had deliberately deceiving questions, which is the worst type of trivia!

Even better example. The Windows Server course was also compulsory (just like the AWS course) and mainly consisted of memorizing trivial information about context menus, which buttons to click and the licensing terms/durations/prices for different Windows Server versions. I'm jaded from the experience. Got my first two Cs in both since I spent time learning stuff described in the post instead of that nonsense.

I got goosebumps reading the second one, because it's so close to what could actually happen. I live in a small eastern European country in a frozen conflict with Russia. Both cell carriers in my country have a way to send messages to its users en masse, which is at the moment used to spam people with ads and political messages (given that the commissioner pays enough per message).

Russian hackers hijacking both cell companies to send a string of messages to citizens seems like a very plausible scenario. Our software companies are notorious for their terrible security measures (which are often nonexistent). Just a few months ago, a few major hosting companies were hacked by possibly Ukranian or Russian actors to have every site hosted on them be replaced with a single image of our past megalomaniacal president holing our flag with subtitles saying "I'll be back". It could have just been a test run to see how we'd handle it or respond to it. I had access to one of the websites and skimmed through its directories. The directory which contained static content for serving had multiple child directories following a naming pattern: `name`, `name_`, `name__` ... I think the virus would recursively add an underscore to the directory it was creating if a directory with the same name already existed. Seems like the attacks happened multiple times and were automated, so it probably didn't require great effort from the attacker. Maybe the multiple names were due to different ways of attacking and it's saddening to see that 3+ different ways to hack our hosting services worked.

Russia has been slowly creeping the border towards our capital city. If Russia wanted, it could easily just annex the entire country and nobody outside would give a damn. We'd just have to comply because we're in a total mess. EU would wag their fingers and "condemn" what Russia did and that would be the end of it. I think Russia has bigger plans. Just taking us over has less value compared to the alternative: to test out its cyber-attacking power on a small challenge such as our country before moving onto bigger targets, such as Ukraine.

Where do you suggest I move? Finland and Canada are looking great, their immigration policies seem lax :-)