I tried a couple of web scraping tools in the past weeks and Dashblock was by far the best. Easy to start and getting the results with an API is exactly what I wanted. (In my case I connected it to Zapier + Airtable).
Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#92It 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 =)
Ah, guess I missed the 10k limit by only signing up today? Certainly wasn't clear that it was limited to day of the post.
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sure this comment will go down in history like the Dropbox comment
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#94I've had some ideas that have relied on scraping data from sources that don't provide an open API (and server-render their sites), and the scraping part has been a bit of a barrier - gotta say I'm amazed how easy it was using your tool. The UX was pretty intuitive also, I like that you've basically embedded a web browser, cos everybody already knows how to use a web browser!
Thanks for your feedback !
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#95I tried a couple of web scraping tools in the past weeks and Dashblock was by far the best. Easy to start and getting the results with an API is exactly what I wanted. (In my case I connected it to Zapier + Airtable).
Thanks for your feedback !
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#96This looks awesome, just tried it out on Poshmark (they don't have a feature to alert me when new items in my size are listed). I was a huge fan of Kimono Labs before they stopped operating, and this serves a similar purpose for me. I might have missed it, but how can I see (or edit) the configuration of my configured API? It looks like all I can do is run the API or delete it.
I was a huge fan of Kimono as well. You can't edit an API for now but we will add this feature in the next release.
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
ok, downloading now. Can i still benefit the offer pretty please :)
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#98Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#99A 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…
Duplex for web [1] would certainly benefit from this kind of understanding so I wouldn't be surprised if Google is working on this.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18531195/google-duplex-web...
Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sure this comment will go down in history like the Dropbox comment
Fine, I prefer to loose my comment than my invested money