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Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#41

Post by HPouillot »

__ka wrote: post #26
HPouillot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, we are rendering the whole page with the javascript, that's why it takes longer than a curl. For now, it's especially useful for dynamic pages but we also plan on supporting pages that don't require rendering.

Maybe you already do it, but I think integrating adblocker functionality when loading JS sites would be desirable to reduce load time. And if ads are what the API user is interested in, perhaps add a flag for whether or not one wants ads to load. Recommendation: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker Should be the fastest adblocker library (used by Ghostery, Cliqz and Brave)

Thanks for the advice, it makes a lot of sense !

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#42

Post by HPouillot »

turtlebits wrote: post #31
HPouillot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, we are rendering the whole page with the javascript, that's why it takes longer than a curl. For now, it's especially useful for dynamic pages but we also plan on supporting pages that don't require rendering.

Sounds good. It does make sense to check to see if your selectors work with raw HTML on publish to verify if you require JS or not.

Yep, that's our plan :)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#43

Post by MCorbani »

RazZziel wrote: post #39

Looks promising, but it's only available for OSX and Windows. Will we be seeing a Linux release soon?

Yes! we have been quite occupied since the end of YC but we plan on releasing it soon =) Please ping us at hello@dashblock.com and we will inform you when the version is live!

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#44

Post by MCorbani »

the_watcher wrote: post #29

It looks like the 10K API call offer is limited to people who sign up for the developer plan ($149/mo), but your post implies it's free. Did I misread the offer in your post?

No you read it correctly : by creating an account today, you will have 10k FREE API calls =)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#45

Post by jakubbalada »

_xnmw wrote: post #32

A productivized scraping service - useful! Entire companies are built around scraping certain popular sites - this is a disruptive idea indeed. A growing catalog of up-to-date scrapers for popular websites would put of lot of freelancers out of work. I would invest in this. However, the ML claim is highly suspect. There is no way that a machine could reliably understand the semantic content of a website - that would…

> A growing catalog of up-to-date scrapers for popular websites would put of lot of freelancers out of work. I would invest in this.

Check out Apify store (https://apify.com/store). It's built exactly for that purpose.

(Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Apify)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#46

Post by HPouillot »

_xnmw wrote: post #32

A productivized scraping service - useful! Entire companies are built around scraping certain popular sites - this is a disruptive idea indeed. A growing catalog of up-to-date scrapers for popular websites would put of lot of freelancers out of work. I would invest in this. However, the ML claim is highly suspect. There is no way that a machine could reliably understand the semantic content of a website - that would…

It doesn't require Artificial General Intelligence, with enough training data (crowdsourced data and human-edited metadata like JSON-LD or RFD), we can classify automatically the attributes on the page (product name, movie title, creation date, author), structure them and recognise the type of entity.

Feel free to contact us if you want to invest (hello@dashblock.com), we are currently raising funds ;)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#47

Post by lucasverra »

MCorbani wrote: post #44
the_watcher wrote: post #29

It looks like the 10K API call offer is limited to people who sign up for the developer plan ($149/mo), but your post implies it's free. Did I misread the offer in your post?

No you read it correctly : by creating an account today, you will have 10k FREE API calls =)

good marketing, im creating an account to use later in the year

what’s the mínimums macos versión ? why not web if this is electron ?

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#48

Post by MCorbani »

omarhaneef wrote: post #37

I really want to try it because I think I need something like this. However, how do I know it is a legitimate product and not some virus/scam software? I know YC is a vote of confidence, if it is a YC company, and all the copy sounds legit, and you sound like a pair of honest, hard working entrepreneurs. But is there some way to check before I run the software? Edit: Note that I would not have this concern if it were…

That's a good point. Our app is validated by Apple on MacOS and the Windows version will be soon. Also, we have thousands of users and you can google us : no claim for spam at all =)

Note : FyI, we worked on a SaaS version but the user experience was not slick enough in our point of view (e.g. iframe of the websites).

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#49

Post by HPouillot »

w457uiw4gftyi wrote: post #38

Are you supporting the use case where web site providers consider scraping to be hostile? Ie, spinning up new cloud instances until one isn't blacklisted by the site, all behind the scenes so the consumer of your API doesn't have to worry about such things?

We don't use sophisticated methods for now, we just use a serverless architecture, so IP changes at each invocation. Feel free to contact us at hello@dashblock.com if it doesn't work for your use-case :)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#50

Post by rvnx »

HPouillot wrote: post #46
_xnmw wrote: post #32

A productivized scraping service - useful! Entire companies are built around scraping certain popular sites - this is a disruptive idea indeed. A growing catalog of up-to-date scrapers for popular websites would put of lot of freelancers out of work. I would invest in this. However, the ML claim is highly suspect. There is no way that a machine could reliably understand the semantic content of a website - that would…

It doesn't require Artificial General Intelligence, with enough training data (crowdsourced data and human-edited metadata like JSON-LD or RFD), we can classify automatically the attributes on the page (product name, movie title, creation date, author), structure them and recognise the type of entity. Feel free to contact us if you want to invest (hello@dashblock.com), we are currently raising funds ;)

But, what's the value compared to using open-source products like Portia https://portia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started.html ? Functionally it looks very similar.
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