Show HN: Turn any website into an API HackMIT 2013

diziet · on Oct 6, 2013

Surely you are better off doing this locally rather than sending the data to your aws server?

hack37 · on Oct 6, 2013

Source code is available.

See chrome_extension/background.js.

Change post url accordingly.

caffeinetocode · on Oct 6, 2013

Nice! Just got the back end up and running on my OSX machine.pointed the chrome plugin to my localhost. works like charm.

Though this looks similar to eBay's ql.io(open source) , I feel this is much simpler.

justhw · on Oct 6, 2013

Tried to run your extension, but kept getting error. Really neat idea, a beginning of something big. http://imgur.com/slvRZOT

danpalmer · on Oct 6, 2013

This is cool, Import.io started doing a similar thing too a few years ago: http://import.io/.

sbruchmann · on Oct 6, 2013

So, what’s the advantage over YQL? http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

moneyrich4 · on Oct 6, 2013

it looks like yql is only for some sites and you need the sites api key, and this is any site "whether they like it or not" and it takes 2 clicks.

cool project thought about doing this myself, gl!.

sbruchmann · on Oct 8, 2013

No, you can use YQL for any site that you want and even combine multiple queries into a single one. I don’t see any reasons why this project needs to exist…

drakaal · on Oct 6, 2013

"whether they like it or not"

Basically they admit that this is a scraping tool for doing things you shouldn't.

Companies that want to sell you data do. Companies that provide data for free to use how you like do. This is basically automating stealing.

I have really low moral standards but I can see the wrongness of this.

icebraining · on Oct 6, 2013

I haven't read the page, but from the title, I assume it's a scraper

Sure, it can be used for copying data without permission. But not all data is hard to read because they don't want you to copy it. For example, I've built a scraper for a state-run website of company registrations. The data is public, just not in a machine readable format.

gailees · on Oct 6, 2013

This is awesome.

tweeeyjg · on Oct 6, 2013

What was it like? I saw on the HackMIT website that firearms and weapons weren't allowed.