
Weboob - skitout
http://weboob.org/
======
p_l
It would have been funny, except unfortunately the authors do go the distance
to be misogynist, racist pricks:

[https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1034395646759976960](https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1034395646759976960)

[https://github.com/laurentb/weboob/blob/efda09b21aa121db2268...](https://github.com/laurentb/weboob/blob/efda09b21aa121db2268f28af79eedd88a66b226/modules/aum/module.py#L178)

[https://www.github.com/laurentb/weboob/tree/0ac4885ad8c21274...](https://www.github.com/laurentb/weboob/tree/0ac4885ad8c2127465840271676c911afd15918a/weboob%2Fbackends%2Faum%2Fpages%2Fsearch.py)

This is why we can't have nice things. I know it's old commits that got
deleted now, but it makes me seriously doubt the devs.

~~~
cheez
I read the code and the code context. I didn't see anything about dating or
women. Just the word slut. What have I missed? I wonder if people realize that
there is no requirement for them to read offending words.

~~~
stnmtn
What about the "block n-words" comment? Is that completely fine for you?

~~~
cheez
Personally, I don't care.

------
rashkov
Name aside, I really like the concept of liberating various websites’
functionality from HTML and the web browser platform. That feels like the
dream of the old interoperable web and it aims to make life easier for blind
folks which is cool if it works!

~~~
jiofih
Isn’t this simply replacing HTML with the QT XML markup and C++ code instead
of JavaScript? What is the liberating part?

~~~
spoondan
No. Look at the cookbook application
([http://weboob.org/applications/qcookboob](http://weboob.org/applications/qcookboob)).
It incorporates multiple sources of recipes behind a single, consistent,
tailor-made interface. This pattern repeats in the other applications. They
are not taking a single website and transforming it into a native application.
They are building applications to service specific domains that use the web as
a data source.

They are also bringing web content into the command line. They have a large
number of console applications. For example, there's a command and REPL for
tracking shipments.

Putting aside the misunderstanding of what this actually is, the premise of
your question seems to be that "simply replacing" one technology with another
can't be "liberating." I think that's wrong in general as well for the
specific example of transforming a web app to a native one (though these seem
to be Python, not C++). The web has constraining properties: browsers that
provide rich interaction with modern web content are resource intensive;
different websites have wildly different accessibility stories (and the lack
of UI and terminological consistency in content is, itself, a hurdle for some
people); ads, popups, and other distractions are harmful to load times,
network usage, and user experience; and on and on. There's plenty of examples
of transformations from one technology to another that trade out the source's
constraints for the destination's.

~~~
jiofih
I think you actually misunderstood my comment. You know what are also
“applications to service specific domains that uses the web as a data source”?
Web pages.

Deliver the QML over the wire here and you just reinvented a kind of browser,
that consumes html|json data from the web and has a different native UI
library.

~~~
hydragit
Web pages use a data source behind the scenes, but web pages are NOT a data
source. A rendered Qt app is not a data source either. weboob builds plain-old
objects (or JSON), it is a data source. The Qt applications are just an
example front-end using weboob data source as a data source. Furthermore, this
data source is made for aggregation/standardization, as weboob returns results
in the same format whatever the site you choose, so it's still better than if
each site proposed an API specific to the site itself.

------
dleslie
I would've called it WebWob: Web Without Browsers.

------
edward
This package was removed from Debian.

See
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-A...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-
AH-Archive-Removal) and [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907199](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907199)

------
Octplane
The then young guys who created this project managed however to pivot and did
open banking before it was something. Although the name is probably an average
choice, they managed to push their tech inside banks anyway.

------
vortico
I love command-line applications for interacting with web services! They allow
me to scrape things off websites that would be difficult with navigating the
HTML DOM or learning the service's specific JSON API. For example, `youtube-
dl` is a fantastic tool for downloading videos from almost every video hosting
site such as YouTube.

I've always wanted a tool that will scrape article text (either plaintext or
converted to Markdown) from news websites. I don't see it on
[http://weboob.org/applications/](http://weboob.org/applications/), but I
think it would be a nice project addition. Sometimes I just want to read or
download a news article without adapting to each specific journal's page
layout and dealing with ads. Firefox's Reader View does this pretty well, but
a command-line version would be more useful to me. It could be implemented by
writing a heuristic for scraping arbitrary news websites, and several hand-
written parsers for scraping popular ones. Cookboob
([http://weboob.org/applications/cookboob](http://weboob.org/applications/cookboob))
is pretty close to this idea.

------
forgotmypw77
it,s also good to make website data easier to liberate by exporting easy to
import formats like zipped txt or even ascii.

i ensure that entire web forum is exportable by any user as txt in such a way
that cloned forum retains all relationships and even same credentials can be
used.

using pgp libraries allows me compatibility with existing libraries and
infrastructure, e.g. using existing ,,stable,, key to validate ownership of
forum account, but also to generate user keys on the spot for in.forum use
only.

this may seem like a tradeoff between security and convenience, and it is.
additional verifiability can be accomplished by later signing blocks of hashes
with more secure signing method.

------
glenstein
I think this is a great idea. Something about the feel of applications that
have deep interaction with web-based resources but also desktop-level control
and precision over their interfaces inspires a lot of nostalgia and
satisfaction for me. I guess my main examples are file sharing and the first
desktop RSS reader + blogging app I used.

I get that those things are still around, but I think treating this as a
systematic way of looking at the web and apps may help to recapture something
that I think has been lost from user experience when everything moved to the
web and phones.

------
d357r0y3r
Really unfortunate name.

~~~
untog
They have an app called “handjoob” so safe to say it’s deliberate. And the
site shows all male contributors, you say?

~~~
formerly_proven
[https://github.com/hroptatyr/clitoris](https://github.com/hroptatyr/clitoris)

~~~
untog
_edgy_

------
hprotagonist
'boob'? they don't _look_ like simpletons, this looks fairly clever!

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/boob#etymonline_v_15598](https://www.etymonline.com/word/boob#etymonline_v_15598)

------
fab13n
with a "Jerome Kerviel" logo openly mimicking that of Société Générale, at
least parts of the site or of the contributors are here as a joke.

------
frizkie
This... isn't a joke?

------
froasty
I'm going to engage in concern trolling about the name to preemptively beat
everyone else.

Let's all bike-shed about how bad the name is and how we'll never use it in
our giant production data vacuums to mercilessly exploit the commons for money
and prestige.

Here's a pointless mention of CockroachDB and an observation that GNU Recutils
has a logo of two turtles engaging in sex.

Something something GIMP.

Here's twenty overly emotional pleas for why we should eradicate any memory
that the Internet used to be used by and for amateurs, without consideration
of what Fortune 500 companies and crisis PR firms might think about it. Really
bad look. Period. It's 2020, etc.

~~~
smt88
If you want to defend the name, defend it.

Openly creating a straw man for you to dunk on is not interesting or
substantive.

Lots of us want to get children and relatives onto apps we enjoy, and a silly
name can make that harder.

On the flip side, what does this project get from names like "QHandjoob"? It's
a joke that a typical 12 year old might have grown out of, and it's only a
joke the first time. After that it's just a stupid name I'm embarrassed for
anyone to see over my shoulder.

I'm not offended, and I doubt anyone is (despite your prediction). I just
don't see the point.

~~~
dvt
> I'm not offended, and I doubt anyone is (despite your prediction). I just
> don't see the point.

Well, unfortunately, you'd be wrong: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907199](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907199)

I feel that this is going to turn into my daily HN post in defense of free
speech. There's nothing that the name adds, it's stupid, it's silly, and it's
juvenile. The authors themselves, in fact, seem to be racist shitbags[1]. But
Debian essentially deplatforming it is absolutely not the right move here. I
think protecting speech is a hill worth dying on, and even a despicable Neo-
Nazi should have the same right to speech as me or you.

[1]
[https://github.com/laurentb/weboob/blob/0ac4885ad8c212746584...](https://github.com/laurentb/weboob/blob/0ac4885ad8c2127465840271676c911afd15918a/weboob/backends/aum/pages/search.py)

~~~
hydragit
You seem to be pointing at a specific revision and the file doesn't seem to
exist anymore in the current version of the repository. I confess I didn't
check more than this though.

~~~
jgwil2
Does that really make it any better? It's in the commit history and now it's
there for all of us to see. Why on earth anybody would write something like
that is beyond me, but doing it in public is mind-bogglingly fucked up and
stupid.

~~~
s9w
It's also legal, at least in some countries

------
29athrowaway
Could they not pick better names?

~~~
wk_end
What, you don’t want QHandJoob on your desktop?

~~~
weboob
Or wetbook, comparaboob, or boobsize?
[http://weboob.org/applications/](http://weboob.org/applications/)

~~~
dhosek
Oh dear, it's clearly intentional and, frankly, not that funny. The concept is
kind of neat, but I don't think I will use these people's software.

~~~
nyberg
It's a great filter for those that care more about names than code.

~~~
dhosek
It's not a question of caring about names over code, it's a question of
dealing with software written by people who are at best emotionally immature
and are likely to have negative values of half the population. This is a
warning sign about the quality of the code too. Cultural assumptions can make
a big difference in the design of a program.

I also wouldn't use software written by white supremacists no matter how well-
written it is.

~~~
nyberg
Why it's a good filter. It deters a large portion of those that attack someone
based of silly jokes the authors may have made in the past or present and
would judge without speaking to the person before hand to get a better view of
who they actually are.

Judge the code for technical merit and not the assumed character of the
author. Denying work based on social correctness only curbs engineering and
scientific progress in the long run over bikeshedding matters.

~~~
soco
Facebook is a great piece of software. Facebook is also breaking any privacy
rules they can get away with breaking. Which way should we judge them? Sorry,
for some people it's both.

~~~
hydragit
You probably don't use a lot of things, right? Did you do a background-check
on the thousands of developers that contributed to all the software you use?
Did you check the smartphone you use wasn't built in modern slavery
facilities? Did you check in what conditions all the raw material needed for
it was extracted, what countries and their political situations? Did you check
the ethics for all the chain of the food you eat?

~~~
soco
The fact that I'm a bad person doesn't change the same argument even you are
making - it's a murky world out there.

