After deciding that life's too short and that I really should give it a try - I've found out that source maps doesn't work on Firefox's dev tools. Back to chrome.

I'm also not taking it too seriously. This is my pet project (I'm not obsessed with it), and a place where I channel the negative residue that sticks to me from logging into that site.

I don't keep it disclosed, Aù contraire, I write that plain on my profile "I use a JS script to filter out empty profiles". Most of the people that send me a message in OKCupid don't even bother reading my profile (even though I've kept my it brief). And the ones who do find it amusing, and interesting.

The solution was, obviously, to make my scraper run slower. :)

But I'm an engineer, so I've decided to automate my OKCupid experience.

Using node & puppeteer I've run a histogram, it showed that in my country, 75% of the profiles are almost completely empty (less than 10 words). I used to manually dislike these profiles (as they'll keep coming back in the search results until you dislike it), but now my script does it for me. The next thing I've done was to sort these profiles - I give higher priority to profiles that have a longer word count, that features keywords I prefer ("fascinating", "studying", "reading", are words that I catch my attention).

It used to be a very basic script, but every negative and toxic encounter has motivated me to keep it going. Right now I'm working on building a frontend to show the script's results. I'm planning on showing "suggested openers" based on the questions the potential match has said or mentioned and adding NLP features (such as sentiment analysis).

The most memorable day of the trip was our last one. We've rented a bicycle to ride to Teuflesberg, and on the way back we took the train (with the bike). Little did we know - one must pay an extra fee to get bikes unto the train, so we were fined. The whole encounter consumed too much precious time, and we were about to be late to return the bike. A hasty apologetic call to the bike owner, and 30 minutes of intense bike riding forward - and we were there.

While we were about to leave the store, the daughter of the owner (~50 years, or so) asked us where we were from. After we've told her we were Israelis, she offered us a ride to our motel.

During the ride, we've got to talk about everything - politics, history, and whatnot. And somewhere around the Jewish graveyard, she has told us about her father.

She told us about her father, as she remembered him - a kind, gentle, and loving man. And that he also served in the Wehrmacht. That reading about the war, and remembering the man her father was to her was almost oxymoronic. And that he had never talked about the war. The two of us read and hear testimonies by the survivors, and talked with them. But that was our first time hearing something close to a testimony of someone from "the other side".

That story resonated with me. The Israeli holocaust memorial day was held yesterday, and that story came back to me. If anyone of you, German readers, would be able to share his grandparents' story from the war, It'd mean a lot to me. (If you're not German, but would still like to share your grandparents' story - I'd also like to hear that!)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16830787

Points: 5

# Comments: 6

Yeah, I puff my chest when I think of my personal achievements. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a sense of pride when I read I piece of text written thousand years ago in the same language I speak today.

There's nothing wrong with being proud of being a part of something, as long you don't disparage others. But I guess it's easier to think in collective terms when you're born of a minority that for the larger part of history was oppressed.

Put things in context, mate.

It's being impressed our ancestors have been holding on to a religious and cultural identity for two thousand years. Years in which they were were a minority in different countries, spoke in foreign tongues, were forced to denounce their Judaism, and sometimes were haunted without even that choice.

It's that as a modern Hebrew speaker, I can pretty easily read a piece of text as the Bible - written thousands of years ago. And that even though my ancestors were from Syria, Iraq, and Morroco - they shared the same ethos as the jews from Hungary, Germany, and Russia.

Although, being a Viking is also very cool.