Readit Newswelanes commented on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data qcontinuum.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/qcontinuum1
welanes commented on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data qcontinuum.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/qcontinuum1
Made a quick tool so you can check if your extensions are on the list: https://extensioncheck.val.run
1. Go to chrome://extensions and toggle Developer mode on (so IDs are visible)
2. Select all text on the page with your mouse and copy
3. Paste it into the tool
It parses the IDs and warns you if any are among the 287 spyware extensions.
welanes commented on Show HN: A MCP server and client implementing the latest spec github.com/hemanth/paws-o... · Posted by u/init0
This guide may be useful for anyone interested in building their own spec-compliant MCP server: https://simplescraper.io/blog/how-to-mcp.
Albeit, it's a few weeks old so already in need of an update!
> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?
Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.
Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).
A few things are likely to happen:
Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.
People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.
People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.
Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.
Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.
welanes commented on Scraperr – A Self Hosted Webscraper github.com/jaypyles/Scrap... · Posted by u/jpyles
I used to scrape back in the day when it was easy (literally just make a request and parse html). Seems cloudflare checkboxes / human verification are very commonplace nowdays. Curious how(/if) web scrapers get around those?
1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent
2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better
3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best
I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.
[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.
Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
A project that I launched on HN that became a business. Simplescraper rode the no-code wave of a few years back ('instant structured data without parsing html').
Now working on increasing the surface area for AI agents: MCP support, screenshots API, and (experimentally) x402[1]
[1] https://simplescraper.io/blog/x402-payment-protocol/