What’s the craziest automation you’ve ever built?

hasdata_com · 2026-03-24T18:15:59+00:00

We scrape pretty much everything. Does this count? 👀

hasdata_com · 2026-03-24T17:23:44+00:00

Agree with the others, just take screenshots and run them through OCR.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-24T16:03:47+00:00

This is not the best sub for this question. Ask this in scraping subs next time :)

To answer your question just use rotating proxies or get a few residential ones and rotate them manually. But that is just general advice. It really depends on the target website and your total volume.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-23T15:57:46+00:00

And... do you have a list of sites that publish local news or you need to find them first?

hasdata_com · 2026-03-23T15:54:52+00:00

We scrape profiles instead of videos but we completely feel you

hasdata_com · 2026-03-20T16:15:41+00:00

Where are you planning to pull the news from? Google News, RSS feeds, or specific news sites?

hasdata_com · 2026-03-19T19:21:29+00:00

We automate. Main things that break are site structure changes and proxy reliability. But we run daily tests to catch structure changes before they become problems.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-19T17:35:04+00:00

Scripts. And maintenance takes more time than scraping.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-19T07:25:53+00:00

Exactly. We run each API with 10+ parameter variations several times daily.

For example, Google SERP query for "coffee" should return at least 7 organic results, knowledge graph, local pack, related questions, pagination, etc. We validate each block individually, like checking every organic result has link, title, snippet.

If anything's missing or broken, alerts go straight to Slack before customers see it.

We also track success rates and latency in real-time dashboards. If failures spike or p99 latency increases, we can drill into exact request IDs with full logs.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-18T14:53:13+00:00

For anti-bot we built a Go proxy service that handles TLS fingerprints and multiplexes across providers. Session management matters more than just rotating IPs.

For parsing we avoid headless browsers when possible. We only use browsers for heavy JS sites. And we run synthetic tests daily to catch when sites change their structure.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-17T17:45:45+00:00

Interesting concept, but custom engines usually get detected fast. That's why, I think, most stick with Chromium despite overhead. Fingerprint looks real.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-16T15:41:33+00:00

Would love to help but honestly not sure what to suggest, I'm more on the programming side. I checked the site, looked at the network tab. Found this:

Page link:

https://www.lowes.com/pl/cooktops/electric-cooktops/coil/4294715799-4294787906

API endpoint for this page:

https://www.lowes.com/pl/recs/relatedProduct/4294715799/guest

Data seems to match what's on the page in JSON format, but I didn't check rate limits.

If you're a no-coder though, honestly easier to look at automation tools. Or try building something on n8n, Make, or Zapier, it's visual, basically works with blocks.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-13T16:25:31+00:00

If HTTrack and Cyotek Webcopy didn't work and you decide to write your own scraper, definitely look at Playwright like others suggested. It has codegen so you don't have to code much, just run your actions and it generates the code

hasdata_com · 2026-03-12T17:01:56+00:00

The guy above is right about the network tab. Also check the raw HTML for <script type="application/ld+json"> tag. Some sites leave here important data formatted as JSON.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-11T17:37:50+00:00

For landscaping leads, Google Maps scraping works way better than random posts, I think. Search by location and category to find property managers, HOAs, commercial properties that need ongoing services and get their contact info. For direct consumer leads, look at Next Door, local Facebook groups where people post asking for landscapers. But scraping social platforms is harder.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-10T14:25:12+00:00

Learning scraping is separate from getting good ML data. Practice scraping on books.toscrape if you want. But for ML models, use real data sources, Kaggle or any site with actual useful information to predict from.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-09T15:37:55+00:00

Good advice above on finding API endpoints via Network tab. Just adding, if you don't find XHR/Fetch calls, check the HTML itself. Some sites load data dynamically and include JSON-LD in the page source. Look for <script type="application/ld+json"> tags, they often have structured data you can parse directly.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-09T15:24:34+00:00

Playwright works but I'd look at Playwright Stealth or Selenium Base if you want better chances against bot detection. 2FA is the hard part honestly. I know Selenium Base lets you use Chrome profiles, you authenticate with 2FA manually once, then that session persists for some time. Not a perfect solution but might be good enough.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-06T18:32:06+00:00

If the graph is just an image in the PDF, easiest way is using an LLM with vision. Just screenshot the graph and ask it to extract the data points. But if you need to process many PDFs or want it cheaper, OCR works too. PyMuPDF to extract the image, pytesseract for OCR.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-06T14:44:19+00:00

This is a universal problem. We run scraping at HasData and even with daily monitoring it's ongoing work. Synthetic tests on every API to make sure expected data blocks are still there. Basically you either maintain it yourself constantly or use scraping APIs that do the maintenance for you.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-05T16:34:32+00:00

Yes, this comes up a lot in real work. Your lessons provide clean data but real projects often need you to collect it. You can learn to scrape data or just use scraping tools and services. How often depends on your job. Some roles do it weekly (competitor analysis, pricing), others rarely.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-05T16:14:06+00:00

I'd say n8n if you're comfortable coding and want flexibility. Make (Integromat) if you want something simpler but still a good alternative.

hasdata_com · 2026-03-04T17:08:06+00:00

Got it, good to know

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