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paps

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Co-founder of https://phantombuster.com (martin@phantombuster.com)

Personal site: https://martintapia.com (contact@martintapia.com)

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/martintapia; my proof: https://keybase.io/martintapia/sigs/gDIRFlJk-m3IIBCwtbGwmwqhNg_WwL4bYsPZYPSxEyQ ]

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Show HN: API store 8 years ago

Well, it's up for debate. We automate websites on behalf of our users (that is, logged in as them). Which means the site knows at all time who's doing what and can take action in case of abuse.

Also, we see more and more ruling indicating that scraping is in fact legal. Websites can block users according to their ToS but they can't take legal action against them or us. Maybe.

In any case, our platform also provides the tools for anyone to automate any website (make them into an API). That part is just a developer tool.

Show HN: API store 8 years ago

It's similar in the sense that it's a listing of APIs. But we're providing non-official APIs that work by automating / scraping websites. Our platform runs Headless Chrome instances behind the scenes.

As a matter of fact, the automation code is available here: https://github.com/phantombuster/api-store

Where I work (https://phantombuster.com) we use them for scraping the web.

They're a hassle-free way of getting the data. No need to worry about CORS, sessions, cookies, CSRF and other modern web stuff. Just simulate a human and you’re in.

Where I work we prefer jQuery to the native DOM API for scraping. It really speeds up the process of extracting data.

For example with Puppeteer you can do page.injectFile("jquery-3.2.1.min.js"). I think that would simplify your evaluate() calls.

It would also be easy to speed up the whole process by doing a single evaluate() call per page with all your scraping code in it.

BTW we just released an article with tips & tricks for Headless Chrome: https://blog.phantombuster.com/web-scraping-in-2017-headless... What do you think?

[dead] 12 years ago

Fees are there to prevent micro-transaction spam. If there were no fees, anyone could flood the network with very small transactions and it would suck.

For big transactions like this one, involving old coins, no fee is needed and miners will accept it immediately.

[dead] 12 years ago

No need to pay fees when the coins are old. Fees are there to prevent spam.

You can add coins to a paper wallet many times.

What is considered risky is spending only a fraction of the paper wallet, for the following reasons:

- you just used the private key for creating a transaction, so the chances of it being compromised increases

- the client you used might have sent the change to another address while you're thinking the remaining coins are still in the paper wallet

But if it's done well, yes, it's possible to spend a fraction of a paper wallet.

>Set up an internal company security word of the day and don’t give any information to anyone who doesn’t know it.

I don't think it's a good idea. Imagine a social engineering attack from inside the company, or if somehow the hacker has access to the word of the day. When he'll say the word, the guy on the other end of the phone will be way more relaxed and ready to give much more information...