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calebclark's comments

calebclark | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Counter – Simple and Free Web Analytics

The product looks awesome!

I do have a question... If Counter is free, what is the revenue model? How will you sustain the platform? Although it's open source, it seems to be a SaaS platform that runs on your servers.

calebclark | 6 years ago | on: Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)

What happened to the web's early vision of an information superhighway, an open repository of data that could be linked, shared and remixed?

The efforts (and lawsuits) to lock down and control data on the public web threatens to stifle innovation. Websites are only valuable because they're connected to the internet, which for all intents and purposes, is a general utility. It was funded by the U.S. government, and is now managed by a consortium of NGOs such as ICANN, W3C, etc.

When you publish a website, you're distributing it to the world. It's similar to when you publish a book. It has always been the right of those who buy and read a book to be able to use the facts contained therein. Although readers are not allowed to steal the creative elements, they have a basic human right to use the facts however they desire. And the medium doesn't change this truth -- whether you read the book yourself, ask your friend to read it out loud, or employ a bot to read it. So it should be with websites.

Data placed on the public Web is accessible by everyone and should be usable by everyone. It shouldn't matter who parses the page's HTML, whether it's a person, a web browser, a bot or a robot.

We're starting a movement to ensure that the facts of the world are always available for innovators to build on top of:

https://dataliberationfoundation.org/

calebclark | 12 years ago | on: Prison Switcharoo

Although the supplied answer guarantees that no prisoner will die from alligators, it does not guarantee their freedom.

The answer includes a major (and I believe flawed) assumption, which is that the visits will be uniformly distributed. However, the puzzle states that "I may choose the same guy three times in a row".

The Counter could visit the switch room 44 times without flipping the switch if such visits were the first 44 chosen. After everyone visits (which would be 1,012 visits since "given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else"), the Counter will be no closer to knowing the truth.

Of course, it is true that the greater the number of visits the greater the probability that the Counter's final visit will fall after everyone has visited, but there is no guarantee.

Regardless of how many visits you assume for each prisoner, there will always remain a probability that the Counter's visits will be clustered early in the visitations. In such a scenario, the Counter's role becomes useless and all prisoners will die in prison.

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