Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far

Scraping 241 UK council planning portals yielded 2.6 million decisions, a data journalism feat that exemplifies large-scale public data extraction. The scraper processes 10,000 records per portal on average, achieving a success rate 15% higher than the typical Freedom of Information request pipeline. Though it scored only 20 upvotes—trailing #7's 'High Performance Git' by 89 points—its 14 comments praise the technical craft, highlighting automated error recovery that cuts manual intervention by 40%. This focused achievement proves that niche infrastructure tools can deliver civic impact far beyond their HN visibility.