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Re: This Video Has X Views

#151

Post by smcl »

matthewheath wrote: post #145
smcl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A British MP (I cannot for the life of me remember who) came under fire for owning a company made its money doing this - take existing content, shuffle the language round a bit and publish it with loads of ads.

Likely to be Grant Shapps > In 2012, Google blacklisted 19 of the Shapps's business websites for violating rules on copyright infringement related to the web scraping-based TrafficPayMaster software sold by them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps#Business_ventures

Yes! That's him. I only knew about that one, but this other one mentioned afterwards is hella shady too:

> It cost $497 and promised customers earnings of $20,000 in 20 days. Upon purchase,

> the "toolkit" was revealed to be an ebook, advising the user to create their own

> toolkit and recruit 100 "Joint Venture Partners" to resell it for a share of the

> profits

Sort of like a pyramid scheme, really. Incredibly this appears to have scarcely affected him, he is still an MP :-O

Re: This Video Has X Views

#152

Post by TeMPOraL »

akubera wrote: post #47

I'm reminded of this little gem: https://hookrace.net/time.gif (Relevant post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715 ) But on the topic: is there actually a dearth of APIs "these days" vs peak Web-2.0, or have the major players just restricted theirs due to abuse, and thus it seems like the whole world of possibilities have veen restricted? One can easily find lists of public apis (e.g https://github.com/n0sha…

What the GitHub list doesn't show is the amount of APIs that require you to enter a relationship with the API provider.

APIs I can just point my script at to get data are fun and useful for mashups. APIs where I have to sign a contract with someone are only worth it in rare cases, or if I need them for a business.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#153

Post by mav3rick »

hugs wrote: post #39

As the founder of one of the screen-scraping tools he alluded to in the video (Selenium), I just want to say the video has one of the best explanations for the difference between automating a process through a user interface vs an API. In the end, entropy always gets you, but you can push it off a little bit longer if there's an API.

Thank you for Selenium. I recently used it to parse some hotel data for Covid.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#157

Post by kuu »

diggan wrote: post #82
tonydiv wrote: post #41

I want to make an Instagram that will only ever have 42 followers ;)

Instagram has one of the least interesting APIs of all popular services, with basically just 2 GET endpoints or something. So if you do want to build this, you're gonna have to do a lot of reverse-engineering of the smartphone application. Probably a fun project on just it's own.

You could automate something in their m.instagram.com site with selenium :)

Re: This Video Has X Views

#158

Post by wastedhours »

mattl wrote: post #125
duxup wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me distantly of an earlier time when just the web was sort of owned ... by the web folk. In the sense that even corporate sites if you found it would have a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic. Some sort of character or tidbit before any of the branding drones were really aware of the web. All just because the 'webmaster' was the only one…

I used to beg people I met online to host pages for me, give me shell access, etc. I was a child in the very early 90s with basically no money.

The same, in fact my life would be very different if a random guy from (I think Kansas, given I'm from the UK) on a forum bought me a domain and gave me a slice of his dedicated hosting when I was mid-teens.

I've always wanted to pay it forward in the same way, but lots of things on the web seem overly complicated now that'd make that hard to do, and I've lost attachment to most communities.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#159

Post by jeffhuys »

function_seven wrote: post #58
wil421 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy. Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

> Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. I'm already feeling the pain of this. There was a game for iOS called GeoDefense (and a sister game, GeoDefense Swarm). To this day these were my favorite games on the phone. But iOS 10 ended support for one of them, then a later OS update bricked the other one. The developer hasn't updated these games to work in…

GeoDefense! Oh hell yes. I played so much of that. I still have a 4 and a 4s somewhere. Might try it out!

Re: This Video Has X Views

#160

Post by erikig »

diggan wrote: post #25
donatj wrote: post #7

I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I still long for this time. I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of all of my data. I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before ba…

> I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks. Yahoo Pipes was one of the greatest services I used, just when I started getting into programming. Maybe it was so cool because I was naive, but I really miss being able to pipe services together in the same way. Anyone know of any similar attempts that is open…

For a self hosted Yahoo Pipes alternative I’d recommend checking out Huginn - it’s been featured on HN a couple of times and the creator is tectonic@HN

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

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