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Comment by timrogers | Hacker News Reader

OP here. It's a fair point. I'd love to hear the thoughts of other HNers.

I tend to think that this kind of thing is okay for personal use, whereas it wouldn't be en masse - for instance, if you were using it to power and advantage a competing music site. Others' opinions may differ.

For instance, I've previously built scrapers for banking services (American Express [https://github.com/timrogers/amex] and Lloyds TSB [https://github.com/timrogers/lloydstsb]) and the UK's university application system, UCAS (https://github.com/timrogers/ucas) and none of these organisations seem to have had any problem with it, but the library has been really gratefully received by users.

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Thoughtful reply, I really appreciate that. Thank you.

And don't get me wrong—I love APIs, I build them for a living. And I know how much users love them. Unfortunately, not all companies love providing them, or have the economics of doing so fully worked out.

No problem - great to engage with people's opinions. HN has such a wealth of knowledge.

You might find my response below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6229617) interesting, on that front. My guess is that for Rap Genius, the only API that will make real sense is one offered on a commercial basis.

Any advice on how to build the API if a banking service uses 2-factor auth?

Perhaps SMSing the secret number they send you back to your system (assuming you can't give your system direct access to phone number your the secret number will arrive at)?

Interesting question - I haven't had to try it yet. My scrapers are all read-only at the moment, and (afaik) none of the UK banks require two-factor in any form for that kind of operation.

Potentially using Twilio (http://www.twilio.com) you might be able to have an application which receives the two-factor request itself and handles it. It'd make the process async though, which wouldn't be ideal.

As someone applying to university this year, I can't thank you enough for the ucas scraper!

Hah - glad you like it. Did you find it before, or is this the first time you've spotted it? I built a cool frontend too that you might be able to cannibalise if you'd like to share your status online - see https://github.com/timrogers/ucas-frontend.

If you wanna chat at all about any of this stuff, drop me a line at me@timrogers.co.uk.

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