Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recreation.gov

recreation.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 205 posts

Re: Recreation.gov

#181

Post by 205guy »

bsimpson wrote: post #86

It pisses me off when I see "All rights reserved" on a federal government page. The copyright for publicly-funded works should reside with the public, free for use by all.

The feds run various websites and create content for various reasons. NASA images are free to reuse with attribution, and lots of astronomy sites do. But you wouldn't want someone making a copycat of the reservation site and scamming people. So it makes sense for the US gov to assert some rights to protect its services--and the people it serves.

Re: Recreation.gov

#182

Post by fasdjfaslfj »

oefrha wrote: post #19
abhiminator wrote: post #4

This is fantastic. The search RP displays parks and sites in the increasing order of distance as well as the price from the input zip code, and pulls together places from different government agencies like Fish and Wildlife Service, NPS, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, etc. They also seem to have a nice collection of KB articles under the 'Help' link [0] in the header. [0] https://recreationonestoppr…

I can't be the only one who's not a fan of being served close to a megabyte of JavaScript for some support articles (site is useless without JS). To add insult to injury, the landing page has a 2118x1415, 2.6MiB background image.[1] Doing a `-quality 70 -resize 50%` conversion to JPEG results in a mere 176KiB. Although, having experienced service-now.com in other settings, it definitely could be worse. [1] https://re…

Fixed

Re: Recreation.gov

#183

Post by peterangular »

jachee wrote: post #55
peterangular wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge - both are ineffective. Even if it's a "global rate limit" I'll find out the value (never ran into someone randomizing it) and jump on the web request faster than anyone else RIGHT as it comes up. With CAPTCHAs I'll bypass with a solving service and/or computer vision if it's easy, or even just get past the noCAPTCHA solutions with primed browser instances from cred…

I like how the sibling comments all expect an abuser to reveal how to prevent their abuse. To paraphrase Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to divulge how to prevent something, when his salary depends on his not preventing it.

I'm an open book! Ask any question that you would like!

Here's the thing - all of this info is out there (largely in other HN threads on this topic) and I'm nothing special in my field-of-knowledge ;)

I'm confident if people fully prevented my "abuse" they'd start to block actual users... simple as that.

Re: Recreation.gov

#184

Post by mgontav »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #131
lotsofpulp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parks really should have had better defenses. Requiring a deposit payment at time of booking is a pretty easy one. Make it non refundable if it continues to be a problem. Increase the price if it still is a problem. If the goal then is to make it fair for everyone regardless of ability to afford it, require a legible scan of ID or passport and restrict each person to reserving 1 spot in the future at a time, an…

Years ago in Texas I wrote a simple selenium webdriver script to check on the status of available camp spots in a popular state park and notify me when one became available. Kind of a last ditch effort to camp as people would book months ahead of time but would sometimes cancel their reservation when they realized they can’t make it. I think they’d do it before their small deposit became non-refundable. The alternati…

This was pretty much my experience as well: had to build a small scraper 2 years ago to alert me whenever spots for camping became available in Yosemite. Bear in mind that this was around 3-4 months in advance. Just for the sake of it I let it run after we had the spots, to understand how many people cancelled, and the amount of cancellations are actually insane.

While I don't think my approach was too harsh (I wasn't constantly querying nor booking automatically), it could be solved if they provided their own alert system, or discourage the book-cancel behaviour (higher cancel fees? Might not make much sense since the camping itself is pretty cheap...)

Re: Recreation.gov

#185

Post by baddox »

CrazyStat wrote: post #136
baddox wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that’s definitely shady. But what are the shenanigans one must go through to reserve a campsite?

Using a bot to reserve it before all the other bots snap it up.

Okay, I guess I was confused about how people buy tickets to concerts online. I've always just...gone to the official ticket website and purchased the ticket. I've certainly never created a bot.

Re: Recreation.gov

#186

Post by baddox »

habosa wrote: post #172
baddox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What shenanigans? The popular spots really are popular, which is why nearly everything will be booked to most interested visitors. Are you just suggesting that there shouldn’t be online reservations at all?

If you want a campsite in a major national park you need to look up when they are released (normally 3mo in advance) and wake up at exactly 6:59am and get your trigger finger ready or you really don't stand a chance. I just wish there was a "calmer" way. The experience of exploring our national parks should be an escape from our hectic every day lives. That begins with getting a place to sleep.

Believe me, I feel the same way. I've spent a great deal of time at campsites and trails that are extremely popular and difficult to get permits (like Yosemite). But that's not really a technical problem: it's an inevitable problem when you have vastly more demand and a small finite supply.

What I was pointing out is that a lottery does not on its own help with bots. Bots are good at making reservations very quickly at a specific time of day (in reservation systems that are first-come-first-serve), but bots can also easily be scaled up in number to sign up for an arbitrarily large number of slots in a lottery.

> The experience of exploring our national parks should be an escape from our hectic every day lives.

I totally agree, and it bums me out too. I have visited Yosemite several times per year for the last 6 or so years, and it's only gotten more and more popular. I rarely visit the valley any more, because it's such a madhouse. Even in the last few years I've seen demand go through the roof even for relatively difficult wildnerness backpacking trails. But the fact of the matter remains: way more people want to go than there is capacity for, and I'm sure they all want an easier calmer way to get reservations.

Re: Recreation.gov

#187

Post by CrazyStat »

baddox wrote: post #185
CrazyStat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a bot to reserve it before all the other bots snap it up.

Okay, I guess I was confused about how people buy tickets to concerts online. I've always just...gone to the official ticket website and purchased the ticket. I've certainly never created a bot.

Have you ever tried to get a ticket to something that sells out in seconds?

Re: Recreation.gov

#188

Post by nython »

peterangular wrote: post #178
nython wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge Any recommendations for books/other information sources? Currently doing some backend work for a company that mainly does scraping and a lot of this seems to be based on the tribal knowledge of the resident old wise one.

I sorta disagree on this being tribal knowledge - a lot of this stuff is out there if you're willing to dig a bit. Tons of it comes down to network reputation and having a legitimate-looking bot. If you're scraping at scale it's an infrastructure problem just as much as it is a fingerprinting one. Stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479015 is a goldmine for me and it usually is a fun weekend working aro…

re: tribal knowledge - didn't mean the field as a whole, just that bus factor is pretty low at the place I'm currently at.

Re: Recreation.gov

#189

Post by wil421 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #160
wil421 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this experience in North Georgia as well. WMAs and National Forests with roadside camping. Preferably roads without RV access. They call them dispersed campsites. State parks are terrible from the fees, crowds, and rules. It’s more like camping in a grass parking lot than anything else.

The Dawson WMA has added a $7/night camping fee in addition to the land access fee (or a fishing/hunting license). Hopefully that doesn't spread to other WMAs.

The internet says it’s the City of Atlanta owned tract of the WMA. It was the proposed site of the second Atlanta airport and a former nuclear testing area for Lockheed.

It’s much closer than my other spots. I’ll check it out soon, maybe even Friday. Looks like they just stocked Amicola creek with trout.

Re: Recreation.gov

#190

Post by giobox »

sealthedeal wrote: post #144

So these camp spots, is this just like a general area where RVs can hook up to power? I don’t quite understand why camping spots are so desired that people are writing web scrapers and even selling on a secondary market? Sounds like a whole new world I’ve never heard of.

There are usually different types of spot, from RV with hookups to a simple campfire for a tent. As someone who likes camping, this issue regularly rears its head for me. There are sites that I have only been able to visit twice in four years due to lack of availability for me, despite frequent checks.

It's not really all that hard to understand, it appears on the face of it to be supply and demand. There are a lot of people throughout America who love camping and not all that many sites at the popular locations relative to that demand. Has been this way for many years. I imagine the problem is likely particularly acute in places such as the Bay Area given the population density and climate, as well as the more popular National Parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone etc. If you haven't recently visited one of the major NPs at peak season you might be genuinely surprised how many people cram into these places.

I've taken recently to just booking whatever I can get - I often don't have much choice but to take what I can find that's actually available.

Post reply on HN