Skip to the Wayback Machine Scraper GitHub repo if you're just looking for the completed command-line utility or the Scrapy middleware. The article focuses on how the middleware was developed and an interesting use case: looking at time series data from Reddit.
The full code for the completed scraper can be found in the companion repository on github.
UPDATE: I've spoken to @dang over at Hacker News and he's been extremely understanding and helpful in both explaining and handling the situation. A new post has been created and it can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867739.
My previous post accidentally had "(2010)" added to the title by a moderator and then users flagged the story because of this and it was automatically penalized after hitting a hidden flag threshold. It sounds like the other submissions were penalized due to excessive flagging and there has been some interesting discussion as to whether some users abuse this and possible solutions.
The idea that people die as a direct result of setting the clocks back for Daylight Savings Time is an annual favorite. I'm no fan of losing an hour of sleep and I have to admit that I find it somewhat vindicating to disdain something that's not only a minor inconvenience but also a cold blooded killer. A healthy mixture of confirmation bias and macabre fascination has allowed me to go on for most of my life without ever questioning that people die in sleepy droves on the Monday following the switch to DST. It is after all eminently reasonable; people are tired when they drive into work after the change and driving while tired reduces reaction times and increases the likelihood of accidents.
All data and code used in this article can be found on GitHub.
A blogpost by Nayuki about unshredding images using simulated annealing was just posted on Hacker News. This is just a simple demo to support my comment on the article and illustrate that a much simpler greedy algorithm is both faster and more effective for this specific problem.
What follows is a set of somewhat meandering musings. If cold hard facts are more your thing then you may prefer reading our recent paper Optimizing Touchscreen Keyboard Layouts to Minimize Swipe Input Errors. You might also want to check out the open source libraries dodona and svganimator that were used for the analysis and to generate the graphics in this post.