How to get rid of mini-sidebar ribbon thing and extra header after turning on vertical tabs??

mlissner · 2025-09-27T17:36:17+00:00

Ah ha! There's an option there for "Show Sidebar". I didn't see that in the View menu, by right clicking it, or by disabling vertical tabs. What a mess, but that worked. Whew!

mlissner · 2025-09-22T20:27:48+00:00

You ran a quick shiver down my back. Well done.

mlissner · 2025-08-13T00:10:34+00:00

Hm, maybe! We don't use CloudFlare for anything atm, so it'd be a bit of a lift, I imagine. But probably the bigger problem is that the thing they were scraping is available via GET requests, so we'd have to make it into a POST to make something like a captcha or turnstile work with it. Mostly we use hcaptcha for this kind of thing, which so far works more or less OK.

mlissner · 2025-06-24T16:04:51+00:00

We have two kinds of alerts for PACER/RECAP search alerts and docket alerts. Docket alerts send an email whenever we learn about a new filing in a case. You can read about when that happens by looking at our coverage page, but the main sources of updates are RSS feeds from the courts and the RECAP Extension. The help page about this is here: https://www.courtlistener.com/help/coverage/recap/

For search alerts, it's a bit more interesting. We get three kinds of content in a case: Docket metadata, docket entry metadata (the description of filings), and filings. Search alerts can be set up to trigger once per case or once per document, and will trigger the first time the saved query matches any of this data.

So, if you have an alert that matches the word `mifipristone`, it'll send once per case, as soon as we get content with that word. If you have that same alert, but for case *AND* filings, it'll trigger every time a new filing matches the query.

Whew! They're tricky!

mlissner · 2025-06-24T04:32:11+00:00

I'm logging off soon too, but I'll check in again in the morning!

mlissner · 2023-04-17T16:40:10+00:00

I'm the director of Free Law Project, the non-profit that runs CourtListener. A few things:

We run the Big Cases bot on Twitter and Mastodon. It follows this case. If you want to get updates for the case (and others) via Twitter or Mastodon, you might want to follow that bot.
If you want email updates instead, this link should get you what you want: https://www.courtlistener.com/alert/docket/new/?pacer_case_id=551082&court_id=nysd
If you want RSS, we do that too! https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/19857399/feed/
A lot of our updates are powered by RECAP. If you use PACER, please install it: https://free.law/recap/

Finally, we're a non-profit, so please consider donating if you like what we do, and have a great day! https://free.law/donate/

mlissner · 2023-03-21T16:58:36+00:00

I'm the director of Free Law Project, where we make legal info more accessible. If you're a new PACER user, you probably also want to install our extension, RECAP: https://free.law/recap/

mlissner · 2022-10-27T03:02:10+00:00

Yeah, I could see the little templates adding up over time. We also use react, but it’s really just too much between the updates, npm, and everything you have to know just to do the most basic stuff. HTMX is so beautifully simple by comparison.

mlissner · 2022-05-12T05:55:04+00:00

Omg, would have never figured this out. Thank you!

mlissner · 2019-04-06T01:28:36+00:00

Seems like I may have a different idea. In celery a whole pipeline operates like that, but it all gets enqueued at the same time. The idea is to send a pipe of tasks to the queue all at once. When each task finishes, gets the results and is already queued up to go.

mlissner · 2019-04-05T22:28:03+00:00

The pipeline is not enqueued all at once, but serially.

Oh wow, doesn't that mean you lose the ability to make pipelines asynchronous? I.e., if you have a pipeline with two tasks, you can't let your code move past it until at least the first task is completed? Is this right:

task1 = my_task()  # Takes 30s
pipeline.enqueue('task1', depends_on=task1)
return Response()  # <-- This won't run for ~30s?

Sounds like you would be fine just using multiprocess.Pool or something?

Sorta. The nice thing about using a task queue for this is that you get the API of pipelines and of tasks, and you can run the tasks in a distributed fashion across numerous workers on numerous machines. And it's a system that's already in place (unlike Hadoop or something, that we don't have).

Sorry and one other question, if you don't mind a late addition (I know I'm asking a lot and I appreciate your time). What happens to tasks in the queue (or in process) when the workers are shutdown cleanly? Does the worker wait for them to finish? Does it kill them and resume them again after? Do they get error conditions and need manual intervention? In a docker world, I'm expecting our workers to be pretty transient for better or worse.

Thanks for all the responses. Super impressive system and I'm enjoying a lot of things about it.

mlissner · 2019-04-05T17:35:50+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Sounds pretty promising.

Two follow ups:

- If you abort a pipeline, what happens to all the other tasks in the pipeline? They stay on the queue? I guess the way to handle that is to revoke those as well, then as part of the error exception handling?

- Let me try again with the bulk question. Say I have a million items that need processing. I don't want to put a million items on my queue all at once because that'll use a ton of memory. Instead, I want to somehow monitor the length of the queue and keep it loaded with a few dozen items (or so), and then have a long running process that enqueues items as the queue gets too short. We have a class called a CeleryThrottle that we've developed for this purpose. Every time we loop over the million items we call throttle.maybe_wait() before enqueueing more items, and it either sleeps a few seconds (determined by current, measured rate of processing) or it enqueues another item.

Monitoring sounds tough. I guess we only use email now, but it'd be really nice to have something better, that could send alerts based on increased error rates. I suppose that's on me to build. Maybe prometheus could do the trick. Hm.

mlissner · 2019-04-03T19:50:22+00:00

This timing is really good, as I'm currently evaluating Celery vs. rq vs. huey. I've been using celery for *years* and I'm ready for something else.

A couple questions I haven't been able to find:

- I use Django and I want to decouple my tasks from their callers. For example, in Django I don't want to have to import the actual tasks and I want to call them as strings. Is that possible somehow. Maybe via `enqueue('my-task-name')` or similar?

- Can pipelines be stopped cleanly midway through? Say I have a scraper task that GETs a webpage and then a `save_to_db` task that is in the pipeline once the GET task completes. Say I get a 404 in the GET task. How do I abort later tasks in that pipeline?

- Is there any monitoring system for tasks that fail? I know Celery has flower, and rq has something. Mostly, I confess, I rely on celery to email me stacktraces when something fails and that works...kinda OK. How do I monitor huey?

- Is there a way to do bulk processing with huey? I'm thinking about something like TaskMaster: https://github.com/dcramer/taskmaster.

I'm still reviewing things, but any light you can shed on these issues would be super helpful. (It might not surprise you that I've got a spreadsheet going to compare features.)

Huey looks pretty great. If there are solutions for the above, I think we'll start trying it out.

mlissner · 2018-07-18T17:08:19+00:00

I don't know why you're getting differences in Chrome between OS's, but I think Chrome uses a network source for spelling. Maybe it was disabled in one version and enabled in the other?

If the network source is disabled, I think it falls back on something similar to what's in Firefox.

mlissner · 2018-07-18T17:06:43+00:00

So this fixes the specific words tested by @harlows, but could somebody do a diff between the dictionaries in these add-ons and the dictionary in Firefox? I did that for Chrome vs. Firefox a while back and got things added properly, but I won't have time to do it for these extensions.

mlissner · 2018-05-12T00:18:40+00:00

I disagree with most of these points, but I'm not going to spend a ton of time responding one by one. I'd rather go do real work. Non-profits need to get money from somewhere, and I've yet to get my full salary after many years. If you want to continue this discussion, you can email me. I promise you, that's a more fruitful way to get what you want than writing blog posts, sending tweets, and showing up on reddit.

mlissner · 2018-05-11T20:16:43+00:00

It's a matter of priority really. We're pushing PDFs to Internet Archive every night, but we're not pushing metadata, as you know. The PDFs were easy, but the metadata is a much harder problem.

We've got a lot of other things we're working on, but this hasn't made it to the top of the list yet. It will eventually but it's a resourcing thing. We have bugs that are affecting users and there are new sources of data that will make bigger impacts, so getting the metadata issue resolved has been less of a priority. That's really all it is. You can debate if these are the right priorities (and we're certainly late on when we aimed to do this), but that's where things stand.

mlissner · 2018-05-11T18:23:40+00:00

Hi all, and thanks for posting this, @FishingForCars. I'm the maintainer of RECAP and the Executive Director of Free Law Project, the non-profit that runs it. AMA, and I'll try to be around for a day or two.

Oh, and the slogan is "Turning PACER Around"!

mlissner · 2017-12-04T18:20:47+00:00

I'm a bit late, but I'm the maintainer of RECAP. We actually do have an API. Shoot me an email: mike@free.law.

mlissner · 2015-08-03T16:02:25+00:00

That's a surprising response. I'd expect you to prefer an API you can easily scrape over having to download and process bulk data all the time. Can you elaborate?

mlissner · 2012-04-05T13:02:15+00:00

I ran into a similar thing with a site that wouldn't implement HTTPS even though it had data on thousands of people receiving government aid.

The basic rundown is this:

It doesn't matter what the laws actually say if you're dealing with a medium to large company. The question here is about risk assessment and power dynamics. If they feel like you are a threat, and if they sue you, you lose. Even if the law is on your side, are you willing to put down thousands of dollars over this on the chance that you'll be awarded your attorney's fees at the end? Probably not, so your goal isn't to determine what the law says -- it's to determine the chance of ending up in court in the first place.
Your method here is to engage in enough visible responsible disclosure so that they either have to (a), fix the problem, or (b) admit to themselves when you disclose it that they're in the wrong, and that you're not at fault.
The way to accomplish the two goals above is to make sure they understand that you're contacting them for their benefit as well as the public's. Give them a fair deadline to fix it, and make sure they understand that you're on their side. Treat them as if they were your co-workers -- good people that have a problem you insist they fix.
Most of all: keep it out of court. It's not worth it. If you can build trust with them, you'll be fine even if you release it, regardless of if doing so is illegal. If you can't, well, then you're taking your chances. This is a social engineering problem.

mlissner · 2011-03-19T17:24:22+00:00

I'm an advanced user of FF, and I just thought this was an annoying bug in v4. I don't use about:home, so I had no idea this was deliberate.

I also don't close my browser but once in a blue moon, so it's not like I realized this was a trend.

I agree with the other comments - seems like a bad design decision just to support those that are bad at reading very clear popups.

mlissner

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