During Covid lockdown online food shopping in my area (UK) became increasingly difficult to book delivery slots as they would fill up as soon as they became available. For most people who either owned a car or lived nearby a supermarket this was probably just a mild inconvenience, however at the time I didn't have a car and the nearest store was miles away from my house. Writing a bunch of Python scripts to check for free delivery slots over several of the big supermarkets and then pinging me when one became available was a lifesaver (maybe a bit dramatic, but it helped me secure regular food deliveries without having to spend hours hitting the refresh button). I learned a lot in the process, the lengths at which some online stores go to try and deter automated scripts was quite interesting.
I feel you. I've wondered many times why anti-bot scripts are deployed at all, save some cases like airline booking, where airlines are penalized for abnormal look-book ratios.
Recently I wrote a small firefox extension to scrape only the Hacker News submissions which I upvoted, and also my own submissions, and create browser bookmarks from them.
It also scrapes all my comments I upvoted and if those have links inside them it creates bookmarks from them too.
That's because I often find myself searching for some submission I upvoted but can't find it, especially if there were many similar ones, whereas Firefox bookmarks manager has a nifty search feature...
I had to scrape since the HN API doesn't expose ability to get information about upvoted submissions/comments. The extension assumes you are logged in, it doesn't ask for your username or password.
It's mostly for my own use and not very polished, but it works. I uploaded it to the Firefox extensions gallery, and you can probably find it there, but I don't think it's ready for public consumption yet...
