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rakjosh

rakjosh on Hacker News

Re:Neural.love: An AI-powered HD portrait generator on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @05:32AM (#27512985)
"Created 34 minutes ago Waiting in a queue… You will get an email upon portrait generation."

Not sure if this is legit or just a way to collect data. I find it odd that it has been 34 minutes and my image is still in queue.

Re:Searchable PPP Loan Data on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @09:42PM (#23766145)
I was working on a similar website :) https://ppp-loan.info/
Re:Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @04:52AM (#23757061)
https://ppp-loan.info/ Shows all the businesses that were approved for more than $150K Loan (SBA PPP Loan). Filter by company name, city, state, loan amount
Re:Show HN: Website to see all Businesses that received SBA PPP Loan w... on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @04:42AM (#23757014)
Created a small website to find businesses in my city that received SBA PPP (Payment Protection Program) Loan. For now the you can find businesses that received loan above $150K filtered by Name, city, state, amount.

I'll be adding some more visualizations and statistical summery. Any suggestions on what kind of summery would be helpful?

Ask HN: I came across customer data exposed, for a company I interviewed?

Posted by rakjosh on Sunday November 17, 2019 @01:31PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I interviewed for an e-commerce startup company a month ago, I saw their ad on FB and was browsing their site and came across an API endpoint that was exposing potentially all customer's data, including name, email, phone, and full address.A little background about the company, they scheduled an interview with me. I was ready for the interview and the guy interviewing me wanted to reschedule...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website? on Friday October 05, 2018 @02:25PM (#18150473)
I don't think I'll be able to do dictionary checks because people from different country use this, in their own languages. I get around 5-6K people every day from all around the globe.

It would be ideal, but very hard to implement for all different languages I think, unless I'm missing something.

Re:Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website? on Friday October 05, 2018 @02:22PM (#18150450)
IP is not something I can rely on, because looks like they have enough unique IP addresses to use. And like you said, motivated and a lot of time on their hand. I feel like adding that 60 seconds delay only make the UX bad for genuine users.

Ask HN: How to prevent abuse of free service costing money to website?

Posted by rakjosh on Friday October 05, 2018 @01:56PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I run a website (https://freephonenum.com/send-text) that allows people to send FREE SMS worldwide. I started this service a little over 1 year ago to allow our remote dev team to test sending and receiving SMS to and from US number.After a few months, I realized that a lot of people needed that service; I started getting organic traffic to my site.But recently I've been seeing few people who...

( Read More... | 14 comments | 13 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ra... on Thursday August 23, 2018 @12:32PM (#17828601)
This is my website if anyone was wondering: https://freephonenum.com/

My competitor was scrapping all my phone numbers and SMS received from my site and displaying it on their site. It took me several months to figure that out. I was seeing abnormal bandwidth usage for JSON (my API endpoint) but never realized that someone was constantly pinging my APIs.

[edit] Now, I've removed the API and everything is served as HTML (not easier for someone to scrap my API)

Re:Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ra... on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @08:17PM (#17815052)
The content is served using API that is open for everyone to use. And that is making it difficult for me to protect it. I've tried changing the structure of API response several times, but they counter it within few hours. Tried adding unique headers to requests etc (That worked for quite some time) but they figured it out ultimately. I come up with some solution, they figure it out in a day or two. And that went on for few weeks
Re:Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ra... on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @08:11PM (#17815020)
That is what I did initially. My API was sending garbage data Saying this website is shutting down, please visit [mysite] for more info :D. But later on, they figured, I was sending garbage data and people were visiting my site because of that. I even put in a tracked link to see how many visitors I'd get from there site and I was getting around 500 people every day.

It was like a cat and mice game for a few weeks.

Re:Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ra... on Monday August 20, 2018 @07:59PM (#17805396)
That was definitely a very good resource. I've gone through that and tried to implement as many things as I could.

Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

Posted by rakjosh on Monday August 20, 2018 @07:46PM
from the ask-hn dept.

One of my competitors has been scrapping my site and providing service to their users without paying anything. And now they surpassed me on google ranking.I've created a website which gets around 5K unique hits every day. It's a free service for users but I've to pay a monthly fee to a third party service provider.Because my site is free for users and doesn't require users to register it's been...

( Read More... | 123 comments | 224 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Disposable Phone Number sites and legality

Posted by rakjosh on Monday July 09, 2018 @02:48PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Recently I've seen a lot of websites that provide a disposable phone number for receiving SMS (https://freephonenum.com/) this is one I found when I googled. Most of these services are used for verification of phone numbers. I was thinking of starting a similar service but I'm not sure about the legality of such services. I know most of these website gets a lot of traffic, which tells me that...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 3 points | on HN )