paps

Would you mind explaining why fail2ban is bad?

We use it in our CI, just before deployment, to compare the DB structure of what's being tested with the DB structure of our staging or production environment.

It's a last minute check that prevented a lot of mistakes.

Facebook Local?

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.

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

In France we have Anticafe[1]. They charge 5€ per hour spent there in exchange for unlimited wifi, coffee and pastries.

As I understand it they're quite successful. They have opened multiple new cafes in Paris' central neighborhoods.

[1] https://www.anticafe.eu/

> I think its also worth pointing out that less than 1000 entities owns 40% of the bitcoins.

This is FUD. 1000 wallets own 40% of BTC. See here https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

We're developing a library[1] for this use-case. The goal is to have the same simple API for multiple browsers. Right now it supports both Headless Chrome and PhantomJS.

We think we'll begin work on Firefox headless soon. PRs welcome :)

[1] https://github.com/phantombuster/nickjs

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?

It's the first time we're talking about Phantombuster here on HN :) Happy to discuss and receive constructive feedback!

Hope you like it as much as we liked building it.

In a similar vein there's this book that was mentionned in YC's winter reading list: https://www.amazon.com/Pandaemonium-Coming-Machine-Contempor...

I haven't received it yet but it seems promising

Thanks for this. I would use it but you only do HTTP requests, right? It would be great if you could also do a true ICMP ping (like the name suggests!)

I highly recommend using Alien Tube [0]. It fetches reddit comments for the video, it's really well done. If it finds nothing, it displays the orignal YouTube comments.

[0] https://alientube.co/

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.

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.

Mining scrypt coins is proficient. I make $400/month with 2 machines I built 6 months ago.

It has already happened: Sheep Marketplace, http://sheep5u64fi457aw.onion

Most SR vendors are transitionning to this site.

Or it's just a big honeypot.