I'm pretty sure I have seen other apps do similar things. The data they are feeding them does seem to be mostly public data. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, or how outraged / surprised I should be.

Just because the data is public doesn't mean it can be easily accessed or aggregated en-masse for real time survellience.

If Geofeedia was only using public data, easily available to anyone else, then Twitter and Facebook wouldn't have been able to cut off their access.

"Public data" doesn't mean easily accessible.

Twitter sells access to their data. They can cancel that account, but the data is still public. Without the access contract it is inconvenient and against the terms of service to access in bulk.

This is a somewhat unrelated question. I'm a systems programmer (I spend most of my days in the land of C and Go). I do understand the basic concepts of web apps and how you develop one. I have even built a few websites using Rails.

Can somebody please explain to me: 1) How does npm fit in in the process of developing a web app. How does it manage the js files / libraries and where does it place them? 2) How is yarn going to make your life easier

Please go easy on me.

1. npm == bundler. One difference: it puts the source of your dependencies into a node_modules folder in the project itself, rather than in some global spot

2. npm doesn't have bundler's lockfile, but this does. It's also faster.

I never guessed building a package manager / dependency tracker could be such a complex problem.

It's really tough! I like this post, if you want to learn more: https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m...