Why is this kind of post allowed on HN? It's not recent nor relevant and not specific in any meaningful way (literally linked to the homepage). I occasionally see posts just linking to Wikipedia articles as well, same sort of feel as this. At the least, OP should have to offer some sort of discussion point or tidbit from the linked content.
Personally these and the Wikipedia posts are my favorite posts on here. News is cool, but there's a lot of cool things that don't change very often, and I love seeing those things too.
Also, in response to your "low effort posts do not invite meaningful discussion" from a different comment, I don't see how this is any lower effort than every other link only post (i.e. the vast majority)? And there's over 40 comments on this thread now talking about other scrapers, projects you can do with scrapers, better docs, tangential use cases and how to handle them, etc. Seems like a lot of people have a variety of things to say about this, I don't see how that's not "meaningful discussion".
EDIT: I also disagree with requiring a couple of sentences from the submitter. If they have something to say they can say it, otherwise it's fine if they don't try to influence the discussion - it's more interesting to see where the random commenters take something, then trying to chart a course.
I used to feel this way too, but then I realized that we need to welcome the newcomers (not just newcomers to HN, but also newcomers to this material, and especially young people) who haven't yet encountered these things for the first time. For us grizzled oldtimers, they may be classics or perennials, but not for everybody. So it's ok for these posts to be part of the mix.
One of my favorite things about HN is that it has a lot of both serious oldtimers and high school students. It's actually a place where one can, at least sporadically, get the technical mentorship that many of us longed for, but missed, early in our careers.
Did you know that you don't have to read every article posted here, nor read every comment that is added?
If you don't want to participate in this post, it's OK to skip it. I skip dozens of posts a day - the best part is it's more efficient than going to them and putting the effort to whine!
As for not inviting meaningful discussion: there's some good discussion on this post - the very article you claim isn't capable of generating such.
