Hacker News Reader

Comment by chillfox | Hacker News Reader

I used to not bother with APIs and instead use selenium to drive the websites. It neatly avoided all of the politics around API access.

View on HN

HTTP is an API of sorts…

> HTTP is an API of sorts…

True, but it is an API that they can't easily deprecate on a whim.

But they can quickly change the "structure" of that API.

I believe this is where smarter tools like Kadoa [0] can be of help. It detects data structure changes for existing workflows, and adapts to them.

[0] https://www.kadoa.com/

A small problem compared to not having an API key and being stonewalled as to why.

I worked for a very early billpay company where you could pay your bills online to vendors, even if the vendor didn't support it. We used API's where we could, but where we couldn't...

We had a whole team dedicated to keeping up the changes vendors would make to their websites that we scraped for info. The team was called, of course, "Scrape and P(r)ay".

Isn't that similar to deleting your API key except you can at least fix the structure of the selenium one.

If you build your scraper to find data on the page based on the shape of the data itself instead of the structure of the page then it will be resilient to most changes that don't materially change what data is displayed on the page.

So, prefer regex over css selectors, and css selectors over xpath, where possible. And don't select based on nesting or position if possible.

You're one CAPTCHA added to the flow from this access being effectively deprecated.

In the AI era, is this as true?

Depends on your development and per-action cost. And on the possible latency. It also changes your whole stack from "send a request" to "emulate each step in a browser while taking screenshots at (hopefully) the right event/delay" - that's a huge difference.

That may be a CFAA violation, a felony in the United States. See Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings, Inc.

This literally made me lol. Not sure if it’s true. I might be true. But come on!

That's because Booking was also committing some type of misrepresentation and taking revenue away from Ryanair through their browser automation. Even then, the infraction was sooo bad that they got a $5k fine.

I think the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn case is a better representation that scraping is generally allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

When it comes to CFAA violations, corporations get a $5K fine, while individuals get hounded to suicide.

Start a company then do my nefarious work under that, got it!

You should do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING in your life under a company. And I mean EVERYTHING

My wife hates it when 1099 her for services rendered, especially since she refuses to bill against the PO I set up for her. The kids at least accepted NET15 payment terms. Although the oldest said if I short pay him for lawn care again, he’s going to take away my early pay discount.

Have you considered short paying him again through the same entity? After all, that's one use case of limited liability ;)

Kafka is smiling appreciatively at your approach to marriage

corporations are more people than people.

Unironically, yes.

How does that work, though? Setting up a company has an initial cost and then recurrent costs (accountant, etc). Are the benefits that high for the average Joe?

It's hard to answer without specifics, even if you're not doing anything neferious there are a lot of benefits to putting an entity between yourself and your customers. It depends on where you live and what your business is of course.

> In November 2022 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.

Reminder that the earlier ruling was overturned, it is no longer clear whether scraping is legal or not.

Very Probably No way they could find me.

Just say you train an AI on it and it's all fair game.

Good thing I am not an American, don't live in the US and have no intentions of visiting then.

(I gave you an upvote, I don't think your comment deserve to be nuked for bringing up a possible legal risk)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com