Hacker News Reader

The really interesting thing about this to me is that if this wasn't being put out via GitHub, I would have dismissed it as being potentially against the TOS or abuse of GitHub's free service. But with them putting it out, I'm quite interested in reevaluating my use cases for GitHub.

View on HN

See the comment from @jasoncwarner about GitHub actions being a platform for much more than CI.

I wonder how far that extends to non-GitHub provided services. For instance, could we leverage GitHub actions, perhaps even Flat Data, to scrape some web site and store it (perhaps uploading elsewhere) in a more comprehensive way vs. storing some small snippet of the data in a git repo?

you mean like in a database

Yes. Or S3 bucket, or whatever. The thing I'm getting at is, can we use GitHub actions for application tasks like web sraping that need compute and network access, but that don't really do much with with a git repo. Does GitHub want to support that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com