I'm not suggesting anything but that you can't build it from first principles. Collecting data and building a theory is not working from first principles, it's just a more structured way of hacking it until it works. You're still liable to have the next website you crawl break your parser.
> but that you can't build it from first principles
Do not confuse principles (which are universal, simple and beautiful) with specs (which suck shit a metric ton per second).
> it's just a more structured way of hacking it until it works
You're confusing hacking with cargo cult coding. Hacking until it works is exactly this formal loop: collect the data, build a model, test if it's applicable. Cargo cult is "google for an answer, paste some code from stackoverflow, see if it works". The OP article is about the latter.
