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Comment by daverobbins1 | Hacker News Reader

How is this different or better than Steven Black's project?

Repo: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

To be completely fair with you, I didn't know this was out there. Then again, I think my solution is more elegant, especially if all the todo's are finished.

Patching a critical system file with python on a regular basis... What could go wrong?

I mean, if you don't trust the sources, you can use your own. Or if you don't trust the software, don't use it. It's up to the end user to decide what is in their best interest. I believe the included lists are trustworthy and I use them myself.

I don't understand the aversion to python here. What is it about python that makes it less reliable than any other piece of software?

Yes, downloading hosts files from 3rd-party sites is kind of sketchy. But using python to do it is what you're worried about?

my first question too. Steve Black's updateHostesFile.py is extensible and can be automated and is well trusted and gets tested by a large community. I don't want to sound critical but would like to understand the value add in comparison. Both are in python as well so I don't get it

I assume you wrote a hello world once or twice, what was the point of that?

sure I did but I didn't bother with a "Show HN", also this is well beyond the scope of a Hello World. It just made me wonder if OP hasn't studied what was already out there and if he did why no explanation or credit or mention of Steven's work ...

even if he disagreed with Steven solution and chose to reimplement, it would have been interesting to understand what the motivation was. I'm not saying he shouldn't, but just that it would be nice to know what motivated his design and why he thinks it's better to redo ...

Who posts their hello world on HN? My question was a valid one given the circumstances.

People posts simple projects, learning projects, projects that are inadvertently a dupe of some other project, projects that are deliberately patterned after existing projects, etc, etc, etc all the time.

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