timrogers

Very interesting point - I'm not sure how best to judge what is exploitative and what isn't. I guess it becomes exploitative if it serious subverts in some way the business model of the original data/service provider.

But then I'm not sure still...maybe that is okay if consumers massively benefit from the reverse engineering, and thus overall utility is increased...! What do you think?

OP here. I agree - for me, the only exception is where data is being abused for overtly commercial purposes. This obviously isn't one of those cases, and I'm doubtful as to whether unofficial APIs (i.e. screen scraping) can ever work properly for that kind of scale.

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.

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.

I actually saw your library, it's super cool - it's currently pretty much the top result for "Rap Genius API", apart from the tweet I refer to (https://twitter.com/RapGenius/statuses/245057326321655808).

As I've said in other comments, I'd love RG to have a public API, but I can see why they don't.

It'd be cool to compare notes on parsing Rap Genius. Drop me an email if you have a moment, me@timrogers.co.uk.

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.

Thanks. I'd imagine an API is on the cards, but I could be wrong. As far as I can see, beyond the website, their data has two markets:

- Embedding in personal blogs - this is probably best achieved by a simple embed code (which I'm planning to use my gem to build), rather than a full API

- Commercial use - for instance, Spotify (or competitor) might like to display rich lyrics in-app.

The situations which would demand a full-on API, I suspect, would be commercial use. Thus, I'd imagine that any API they build will be private and commercial, providing a (first?) revenue stream.

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.

This is a typical example of a policy that is both pointless and ineffective. The government is, for one, not clear on what the goal of the policy is.

If it's to thwart child pornography, that won't work because if you wanted to view it, you'd just toddle off to your ISP and opt out of the filters.

If it's to stop children looking at pornography in general, that will fail children/young people are smarter than people imagine at circumventing these things.

This sort of thing gets proposed because it makes people think the government is doing something to social problems, even if it is technically problematic and won't really achieve the stated aims. I'm actually all for discouraging the use of pornography because it is something of a scourge on society, but this is not the way to do it. Education is.

Thanks George - I appreciate it.

An archaic British spelling of jail, nevertheless.

FWIW I'd love to see this too. We have a semi-regular paper-reading club at GoCardless (YC S11) and this could be super interesting.

What are the legal specifics of a case like this? Does this mean his US citizenship has been revoked, ergo he is a stateless person? Would love to know.

Is there actually any hard evidence that the event has any relation to Flickr?

That seems like something of a bizarre argument - there's a different between a computer reading it and a person doing so. I'm not convinced privacy is infringed if it goes through, perhaps detects particular phrases (which are presumably related to illegal activity in any case) and checks links for malware. I don't have a problem with that.

Is there any reason that Tumblr couldn't take the freemium route? It has high engagement, and a passionate audience that might well be willing to pay to keep the same Tumblr they always had, as opposed to a sanitised ad-friendly one.

Of course, there's the possibility that its audience won't have the means to pay up, or that people will just go elsewhere.

Facebook does this as well - they will hit any URL you post. This doesn't prove any malice, in fact, quite the opposite.

For me at least, http://gov.uk is a lot better - it's far more minimal and puts the information first, whereas I can't help but feel that this Manchester City Council site is more about the sexy design that it is about usability and actually giving you the information you want.

Agreed. Depending on context (of the content and myself!), sometimes I'll want to save and sometimes not.

A prompt from the browser would be the best option, but alternatively, I'd want the site to offer me an option as to how the external file should be handled. If the browser doesn't implement it, it says that the "Right click to save" nonsense could make sense.

Not sure they can be considered fait accompli necessarily because they are "works". The rule [1] they can't be copyright by virtue of what they are seems more compelling.

[1] http://macwright.org/2013/02/14/the-law-is-public-domain.htm...

I'm confused by this comment. What change would you expect? What would the benefit be? (Just interested.)

Looks like a pretty good tool. It's always a lot of effort to try out lots of different backgrounds, going through downloading the .zip archives and putting them into the CSS. This will definitely encourage me to actually experiment!

At GoCardless, our current support staff (including myself) are pretty technical. We regularly push code to the main project repo, and it's a great way to get the things we want done, done.

For our support documentation, we're using the Desk.com knowledge base. Although not ideal, it works pretty well for us and is at the very least easy to update.

We took steps like this with our blog (https://gocardless.com/blog) which we've now built using Jekyll. This is awesome because:

a) Anyone can write articles if they can write Markdown

b) Full text previews in our GitHub pull requests...with images (perfect for reviewing!)

We want to transfer these great advantages to our help documents. Jekyll really is a great tool for any (relatively) static site, not just for blogs.

I'm guessing you could maybe host it with Gists, using the raw link? Although the content type headers might be an issue...

Tim here - I work at GoCardless.

That's what we recommend. It's super easy to sign up and integrate so it's absolutely worth signing up and just giving it a go. That way you can see whether it works for you and your customers.

Tim here, writer of the post.

Indeed. We'd love to open-source it, and I plan to get it to that stage in the long term. The challenge is updating it as so that it's useful for more people and not tied into our internal services and metrics platforms.

Watch this space.

Thanks - we really appreciate it!

Hi - I'm Tim from GoCardless, writer of this post.

At the moment, we still use Desk.com for our emails. Here, we were looking for a simple system for tagging our phone calls, but one which could be tightly integrated with our internal services and metrics. We found that the best way to do this was to build our on.

Twilio has been great, offering a huge amount of flexibility to build this how we want to.

Tim from GoCardless here - that's a really cool idea.

We'll look into it for sure, and we'd definitely consider down the line releasing more general data about what our merchants' customers call us about. We think it's really important to help those using us to optimise their integrations.

I had the impression that GoCardless was founded by a few ex basketballers, how come when they 'become' startup founders they start attacking their own trade? Also judging the whole population of ex-NBA players by seeing a few overly-anxious ex-baller job seekers doesn't do any justice?