Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by HPouillot » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

sbr464 wrote: post #20

Nice work. Do you have an admin API for creating or managing the APIs you generate? Asking in the case of integrating into another app. Also, how well does it handle JavaScript apps? Can you specify different engines to parse a site with or specify JS disabled/enabled etc?

We don't provide an API to manage other API yet, but this inception use-case is interesting. Could you specify what your app would like to do ? We render the Javascript of the page and for now we don't provide a way to specify if you want to render the page or not but we plan on doing so.

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

#52

Post by MCorbani » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

ryanSrich wrote: post #25

MCorbani wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Kimono Labs built an amazing product and has been finally acquired by Palantir. The main difference between us comes from our machine learning model that gives stability to extraction over time and parse webpages in a generic way. We are also working on automating navigation, which is something they didn't do =)

How would you compare to something like UiPath? Congrats on the launch.

UiPath and others RPA actors allow their users to mainly automate local processes on Windows. We are cross-platform and focusing on the web, which makes us useful for other use-cases like gathering data or automating navigation sessions!

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

#53

Post by HPouillot » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

lucasverra wrote: post #47

MCorbani wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Ahah, great ! The minimum required version is 10.10 (Yosemite)

If you want to do that on the web, you'll have to render the page in an iframe to select the content and most websites don't allow it. In short, the user experience is way better with a software.

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

#54

Post by HPouillot » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

gargarplex wrote: post #33

Has anyone tried this for careers pages? Would be interested in how this performs on a random sample of ~50 crunchbase NYC startups’ careers pages. I dunno how much time would have to be spent training data...

We did :) It works on all kind of pages. You just have to set it up on one page and it will work on all similar pages of the website. Did you have in mind to train a model to recognise careers pages across websites ?

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

#55

Post by HPouillot » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

username18 wrote: post #5

Are the number of API calls per month? Is the answer the same for a free account?

You have 10k API calls when you sign up and 1k per month after that. Does it answer your question ?

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

#56

Post by MCorbani » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

udayrddy wrote: post #40

did you mention WebSITE, not WebPAGE ?!! Oh wow, instagram.com is on your youtube demo video thumbnail. Interested to know on how is it traversing the site, I do not think fb has put the usernames in public.

We don't crawl the websites yet. However, you can create an API on a given webpage and gather data from similar webpages on the same website by calling the API with the new URL.

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

#57

Post by MCorbani » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

jtx22 wrote: post #34

I wonder how long it'll take these sites to require Captcha for basic access.

Good question. However, that would require websites' users to validate a Captcha every time they navigate it, which is not optimal in terms of user experience.

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

#58

Post by miki123211 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

I see some potential in this for accessibility. There are some websites which are impossible/very hard to use with a screen reader and don't provide an official aPI, mostly for corporate lock-in reasons. Using this tool for API generation and then writing a super nice to use client would be awesome. My life could be so much better with solutions like those.

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

#59

Post by whoisjuan » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

This has been tried many times and it never seems to gain traction to become a relevant concept. Off the top of my head, I remember Kimono Labs that looked quite promising. Then it was acquired by Palantir and shut down. I also have seen many solutions that are similar (basically most scraping companies, like Diffbot which also claims to use machine learning for their extraction techniques)

What's the plan here to really become differentiated? Why is now the right time for this concept and not before when others tried it? Also, how do you plan to address the concerns of companies that don't want their data to be accessed programmatically? That seems like a big challenge to overcome in order to become commercially succesful.

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

#60

Post by skidMarkUndies » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

MCorbani wrote: post #57

jtx22 wrote: post #34

I wonder how long it'll take these sites to require Captcha for basic access.

Good question. However, that would require websites' users to validate a Captcha every time they navigate it, which is not optimal in terms of user experience.

reCaptcha V3 operates behind the scenes though:

https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3