Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

Re:Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in yo... by A_Person on Monday June 25, 2018 @05:30AM (#17391033)

All of the websites concerned have strict authorization requirements and none have public APIs afaics. At the start, it just seemed easiest to automatically scrape them. I guess I could have reverse engineer their private APIs and used those - but as the doctors say, the retrospectoscope is a rare and expensive piece of equipment!

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Re:Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in yo... by PurpleRamen on Monday June 25, 2018 @05:38AM (#17391053)

Is authorization done with some activeX-applet? Otherwise I don't really see what IE is offering that Chrome offers too, but scrapping-libs can't.

BTW There are libs to use chrome programatically for those things. It's called headless-mode or chromeDriver. Similar things exist for other Browsers. So you could probably rewrite your app to become more indipendant without lossing the existing functionality.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in yo... by A_Person on Monday June 25, 2018 @12:24PM (#17393623)

I just don't see enough cost benefit from rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of working code at this time. I can't see IE going away, any time soon, due to corporate tie-in. Hopefully VBScript ditto. If it all falls over down the track, I'll review my options then :-)

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