Till

Dev tools

web scraping proxy

SHOW HN2021

Till

Unblock and scale your web scrapers, with minimal code changes

github.com

#web scraping#proxy rotation#user agent rotation#scraper blocking

209points
58comments
#215of 2,533 in 2021
Top 9%of 2021 by points

How HN took it

RoastedHalf or more of the comments are critical

2 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 6 critical, out of 11 comments about the project. Thread score -0.20.

Idea: 2 for, 5 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for scraping

    From 1 comment
    • Looks extremely useful. Starred for if I ever need to do scraping
      awestroke on HN

Objections

  • Circumvents robots.txt and site defenses, ethically dubious

    From 3 comments
    • > Till helps you circumvent detected as a web scraper by identifying your scraper as a real web browser. It does this by generating random user-agent headers and randomizing…
      cube00 on HN
    • But what when there are separate interfaces specifically designed for real users and machines? Case in point: OpenStreetMap (run by volunteer sysadmins) provides completely open,…
      Doctor_Fegg on HN
    • > Till was architected to follow best practices that DataHen has accumulated over the years of scraping at a massive scale. The best practice is not to build a business that's…
      JeremyBanks on HN
  • Source code not public, unclear if runnable locally

    From 1 comment
    • Why is this on Github if I still need an API and cannot run it locally since the actual code is not public? Or is this some sort of „source available“ content marketing nonsense?
      axiosgunnar on HN
  • Sign-up required

    From 1 comment
    • This sounds technically interesting but ethically dubious; also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. If you are able to show how…
      mellosouls on HN

Requests

  • Clarify difference between repo and hosted service

    From 1 comment
    • What's the difference between the linked repo and the hosted service at https://till.datahen.com/api/v1 ? Why do I need to sign up for a token if I am hosting my own server? Or…
      aftbit on HN

Questions

  • Can it bypass Cloudflare?

    From 1 comment
  • Is there a decent source of proxies?

    From 1 comment
    • This looks really interesting, I'm going to bookmark it! > Proxy IP address rotation I wonder where you would get a decent proxy list nowadays. In the late 90s, you could find…
      captainmuon on HN

Alternatives named

  • microlink.io

    From 1 comment
    • These guys bypass cloudflare https://microlink.io it's open source but it's just more convenient to pay and forget about it.
      new_guy on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/28059291)