Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

«‹›672 »

denzelcurrypower: Jan 28, 2011

Anyone have experience writing ticket purchasing bots? I have about one year experience with Java and C#, recently started doing some automated data entry with Excel VBA using an IBM mainframe library. This seems like a cool side project and the bots seem to sell for a ton of money online. From what I can tell I'll need to write code to screen scrape data and fill out the forms appropriately, incorporate proxies to bypass security, and break captchas (although they sell a subscription based API for this so I might just go with that). Can anyone comment on the difficulty of such a project? My main concern is that it will be difficult to test and I don't want it to accidentally order me a crap load of tickets.

Edit: I'm also curious if this seems like a good learning opportunity and if it would look OK on my resume for applying to junior level software development jobs or internships. Would the questionable ethics be an issue?

denzelcurrypower fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 4, 2016

# ? Jun 4, 2016 16:22

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 8, 2024 08:20

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Ornithology posted:

Anyone have experience writing ticket purchasing bots? I have about one year experience with Java and C#, recently started doing some automated data entry with Excel VBA using an IBM mainframe library. This seems like a cool side project and the bots seem to sell for a ton of money online. From what I can tell I'll need to write code to screen scrape data and fill out the forms appropriately, incorporate proxies to bypass security, and break captchas (although they sell a subscription based API for this so I might just go with that). Can anyone comment on the difficulty of such a project? My main concern is that it will be difficult to test and I don't want it to accidentally order me a crap load of tickets.

Edit: I'm also curious if this seems like a good learning opportunity and if it would look OK on my resume for applying to junior level software development jobs or internships. Would the questionable ethics be an issue?

so... you want to make a bot for a get rich quick scheme after seeing that there are already bots for sale online that are doubtlessly better than whatever you're going to write? and you're willing to pay money to the captcha api to pursue this?

# ? Jun 4, 2016 17:52

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Ornithology posted:

Edit: I'm also curious if this seems like a good learning opportunity and if it would look OK on my resume for applying to junior level software development jobs or internships. Would the questionable ethics be an issue?

A complete ticket vending system with seat booking etc. would most likely look better.

# ? Jun 4, 2016 17:59

denzelcurrypower: Jan 28, 2011

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

so... you want to make a bot for a get rich quick scheme after seeing that there are already bots for sale online that are doubtlessly better than whatever you're going to write? and you're willing to pay money to the captcha api to pursue this?

I was thinking more for a learning experience with the possibility to make a little cash. From what I've read the ones available online didn't work too well so I don't see how they are doubtlessly better than something that hasn't even been designed yet. And I don't know about the captcha thing yet, it seems to be the biggest limitation in the project and I don't know if it is worth incorporating or not.

# ? Jun 4, 2016 20:44

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

what CAPTCHA API can you break with bribery

i must know

# ? Jun 4, 2016 21:28

denzelcurrypower: Jan 28, 2011

Suspicious Dish posted:

what CAPTCHA API can you break with bribery

i must know

Death by captcha API and I guess I meant crack not break

# ? Jun 4, 2016 23:54

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

you said the captcha vendor has a subscription API

# ? Jun 4, 2016 23:57

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Suspicious Dish posted:

you said the captcha vendor has a subscription API

he is going to pay a shady russian for a backdoor through captcha to write a shady app for scalpers to scoop up tickets to something and then try to sell this for money and wants to know if it will look good on his resume.

# ? Jun 5, 2016 01:41

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Yeah...is anyone here actually considering helping this guy? I don't want to encourage ticket scalping!

# ? Jun 5, 2016 01:50

sarehu: Apr 20, 2007; (call/cc call/cc)

Ticket scalping is an essential market function, I'd be happy to encourage it.

# ? Jun 5, 2016 02:48

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Agreed, but I still don't think it'd be widely regarded as a good thing on a resume.

# ? Jun 5, 2016 03:52

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

what is the ibm mainframe used for

# ? Jun 5, 2016 04:36

qntm: Jun 17, 2009

Suspicious Dish posted:

what CAPTCHA API can you break with bribery

i must know

...Amazon Mechanical Turk? Not bribery but it's a monetary solution to the problem I guess.

# ? Jun 5, 2016 09:42

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Yeah...is anyone here actually considering helping this guy? I don't want to encourage ticket scalping!

Wouldn't this be better suited for #hackerz or #coders on some irc channel

cyperbunk as gently caress

# ? Jun 6, 2016 13:40

ufarn: May 30, 2009

I've been mucking around with my ~/.ssh/config, but I ran into a problem, because my GitHub ssh key is apparently in my GPG keychain - not ~/.ssh.

How do I reference my GitHub key path with `IdentityFile` or add it to id_rsa - short of just creating a new one, of course?

# ? Jun 6, 2016 14:12

tazjin: Jul 24, 2015

ufarn posted:

I've been mucking around with my ~/.ssh/config, but I ran into a problem, because my GitHub ssh key is apparently in my GPG keychain - not ~/.ssh.

How do I reference my GitHub key path with `IdentityFile` or add it to id_rsa - short of just creating a new one, of course?

Not sure what you mean with the key being in your GPG keychain. The gpg-agent has an ssh-agent compatible socket listener, is that what you mean?

In general you may want to look into ssh-agent and set your keys up that way instead of specifying them per connection. If multiple keys are added to an SSH agent, all of them will be tried on connecting until one succeeds.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:20

ufarn: May 30, 2009

tazjin posted:

Not sure what you mean with the key being in your GPG keychain. The gpg-agent has an ssh-agent compatible socket listener, is that what you mean?

In general you may want to look into ssh-agent and set your keys up that way instead of specifying them per connection. If multiple keys are added to an SSH agent, all of them will be tried on connecting until one succeeds.

I figured it out; the config file just has a weird way of parsing cascading rules where you have to put the general rules last.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 07:30

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

Thermopyle posted:

Agreed, but I still don't think it'd be widely regarded as a good thing on a resume.

I'm pretty sure showing a willingness to code ethically dubious software is a big plus for most tech companies.

I was actually thinking about doing something like this, but for personal use to grab tickets to things I know will sell out in minutes. Too bad there's no way for anyone to help with that without also helping someone (or me) make a scalping bot (but no, I swear I will only use it for goood. really!!!).

# ? Jun 7, 2016 15:28

KernelSlanders: May 27, 2013; Rogue operating systems on occasion spread lies and rumors about me.

Ornithology posted:

Anyone have experience writing ticket purchasing bots? I have about one year experience with Java and C#, recently started doing some automated data entry with Excel VBA using an IBM mainframe library. This seems like a cool side project and the bots seem to sell for a ton of money online. From what I can tell I'll need to write code to screen scrape data and fill out the forms appropriately, incorporate proxies to bypass security, and break captchas (although they sell a subscription based API for this so I might just go with that). Can anyone comment on the difficulty of such a project? My main concern is that it will be difficult to test and I don't want it to accidentally order me a crap load of tickets.

Edit: I'm also curious if this seems like a good learning opportunity and if it would look OK on my resume for applying to junior level software development jobs or internships. Would the questionable ethics be an issue?

As much as I hate everything about this, if you're looking for a job in New York, PM me.

# ? Jun 9, 2016 06:09

Essential: Aug 14, 2003

Is there a way to get search information/key words ala Google adwords from facebook? I've been asked if I can do that through an api for marketing purposes. For instance, how many people in a given zip code are searching for veterinary clinic?

I don't actually know much about facebook and not even sure if people use it to search things like that.

# ? Jun 9, 2016 16:16

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Essential posted:

Is there a way to get search information/key words ala Google adwords from facebook? I've been asked if I can do that through an api for marketing purposes. For instance, how many people in a given zip code are searching for veterinary clinic?

I don't actually know much about facebook and not even sure if people use it to search things like that.

I don't know if data like that is directly available either, but you should be able to create an ad campaign on Facebook and target it a a specific geographic area and only for people who (seem to) own pets. You then pay per impression or per click, so campaigns with poor targeting would not be very costly either way.

# ? Jun 9, 2016 16:33

Essential: Aug 14, 2003

nielsm posted:

I don't know if data like that is directly available either, but you should be able to create an ad campaign on Facebook and target it a a specific geographic area and only for people who (seem to) own pets. You then pay per impression or per click, so campaigns with poor targeting would not be very costly either way.

Got it, thanks, that makes sense.

If I understand right, it's sort of reversed from Google. Rather then people searching for vets on facebook, instead it would be how many people click vet ad's when the ad is presented to them (in the normal course of them using facebook)?

The company that wants this is looking into opening up a new vet clinic and they are trying to figure out where they should open it. They want info on google searches and facebook data. I don't think they'll want to run ad's themselves to gather the data. Any idea if historical ad information is available for ad's meeting a certain criteria? Seems like a longshot as I would assume companies don't want to give away their advantage.

While I'm at it, I'll ask and make sure the google data is available as well. I've looked into the adwords api and I'm assuming that is what I can use to check a pre-defined set of keywords and how often per zip code they are searched. Does that sound feasible?

Edit: Kind of answered my Google question: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/targeting-idea-service
That's the api for getting keyword data.

Essential fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jun 9, 2016

# ? Jun 9, 2016 17:31

Mecharasputin: May 30, 2009; Ultra Carp

So I've been teaching myself C# from the Headfirst C# book with hopes of eventually taking what I learned into Unity and faffing about there. Are there any comprehensive goon approved resources to get me startes with unity?

# ? Jun 11, 2016 21:09

22 Eargesplitten: Oct 10, 2010

Smart casting is where an object is told what type of object it is later, right? I'm trying to google but apparently smartcasting is a thing in League of Legends so that's all I'm getting.

# ? Jun 11, 2016 22:47

Sedro: Dec 31, 2008

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Smart casting is where an object is told what type of object it is later, right? I'm trying to google but apparently smartcasting is a thing in League of Legends so that's all I'm getting.

I've seen that term in kotlin for this kind of situation:

code:

if (obj instanceof string) {
  obj.trim() // we know that obj is a string now
}

# ? Jun 11, 2016 23:18

22 Eargesplitten: Oct 10, 2010

Okay, that makes sense. After drilling into the definition and looking at the surrounding code, it looks like they homebrewed something in C++ to change an "entity" object into a specific type of entity, like monster / npc / player. Looking around it seems like there's some similar-ish stuff now, but maybe there wasn't in 2001 when they started working on this.

# ? Jun 11, 2016 23:26

mobby_6kl: Aug 9, 2009; by Fluffdaddy

Is there a generally accepted solution for clustering nearby items on a map at various zoom levels? Basically to only show one item per cluster to avoid overcrowding the map. I whipped out a quick K-means but it's kind of janky like things not getting clustered consistently or quite how I'd like them to be. I'm sure it could be improved by dicking around with parameters sufficiently but maybe there's a better way already.

# ? Jun 14, 2016 21:55

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

You could set up a quadtree to do spatial partitioning of the items in the map, and select your maximum tree depth based on the current zoom level. You'd still need to have logic to decide which item in a given quad gets displayed, though. And you could potentially have issues if two items are close to the borders of their quads.

EDIT: though that issue could be ameliorated by pushing items towards the centers of their quads. It's less representative, of course, but may not be a problem depending on your use case.

TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jun 14, 2016

# ? Jun 14, 2016 22:06

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Look into affinity propagation. I've been playing around with it a bit, and I like the results it gives on my problems.

# ? Jun 15, 2016 00:20

mobby_6kl: Aug 9, 2009; by Fluffdaddy

Thanks, haven't considered using a quadtree for this, might be worth trying. Affinity propagation looks quite promising as well, did it perform/scale well in your experience? Even the improved algorithm seems a bit slow at 2k items in this paper, which could be an issue if I need to update the clustering depending on filtering, for example.

# ? Jun 15, 2016 20:54

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The applications I have in mind aren't particularly time-intensive, so that wasn't really an issue for me.

# ? Jun 16, 2016 00:39

lord funk: Feb 16, 2004

Does anyone use the Google Drive API? Is it possible to list / download the files in a shared folder of other users?

I want my app to list shared folders of many users, and download local copies of the contents. No uploading. All the examples I see are about listing / viewing the logged-in user's account, which I'm not interested in.

edit: you know, never mind. I think just iterating through the user's drive for shared folders should be good enough. Puts the task of gathering shared links squarely on the user, but whatever.

lord funk fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jun 16, 2016

# ? Jun 16, 2016 16:08

Tea Bone: Feb 18, 2011; I'm going for gasps.

In PHP is there a way to break a multi-dimensional array into separate arrays by key?

I can write a function for it, but it seems like something that would already exist?

ie
Change this:

code:


Array(
    Array
    (
        [name] => dave
        [eyes] => blue
    )

    Array
    (
        [name] => steve
        [eyes] => green
    )

    Array
    (
        [name] => jim
        [eyes] => brown
    )
)

into this:

code:


Array(
    Array
    (
        [0]=>dave
        [1]=>steve
        [2]=>jim
    )
    Array
    (
        [0]=>blue
        [1]=>green
        [2]=>brown
    )
)

# ? Jun 17, 2016 14:14

carry on then: Jul 10, 2010; by VideoGames
(and can't post for 10 years!)

Tea Bone posted:

In PHP is there a way to break a multi-dimensional array into separate arrays by key?

I can write a function for it, but it seems like something that would already exist?

ie
Change this:
code:
Array(
    Array
    (
        [name] => dave
        [eyes] => blue
    )

    Array
    (
        [name] => steve
        [eyes] => green
    )

    Array
    (
        [name] => jim
        [eyes] => brown
    )
)
into this:
code:
Array(
    Array
    (
        [0]=>dave
        [1]=>steve
        [2]=>jim
    )
    Array
    (
        [0]=>blue
        [1]=>green
        [2]=>brown
    )
)

The term you're looking for is keyset I think. Googling that led me to: http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-keys.php Surprisingly for PHP, a consistently and logically named http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-values.php also exists.

# ? Jun 17, 2016 14:16

Tea Bone: Feb 18, 2011; I'm going for gasps.

carry on then posted:

The term you're looking for is keyset I think. Googling that led me to: http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-keys.php Surprisingly for PHP, a consistently and logically named http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-values.php also exists.

Thanks, ended up quicker to write my own function than keep googling, but the array_keys() came in useful.

# ? Jun 17, 2016 14:59

Uhh Nope: May 20, 2016

Using .NET 4.5.2, How can I stream a large text file via .NET Remoting? I want to be able to view a very large log file (~2GB) on a remote server. Transferring the whole file is out of the question.

I have a few requirements though. I need to stream from the bottom of the file to the top and the file will also be being written to as I try to read it so I don't want to block writes. On the client I was thinking it would stream as the user scrolls up and down in the log viewer form. I don't need to show live updates as the file is being writtent to if I'm scrolled all the way to the bottom though.

# ? Jun 20, 2016 15:39

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Uhh Nope posted:

Using .NET 4.5.2, How can I stream a large text file via .NET Remoting? I want to be able to view a very large log file (~2GB) on a remote server. Transferring the whole file is out of the question.

I have a few requirements though. I need to stream from the bottom of the file to the top and the file will also be being written to as I try to read it so I don't want to block writes. On the client I was thinking it would stream as the user scrolls up and down in the log viewer form. I don't need to show live updates as the file is being writtent to if I'm scrolled all the way to the bottom though.

The .NET megathread might be able to help.

# ? Jun 20, 2016 20:26

PRADA SLUT: Mar 14, 2006; Inexperienced,
heartless,
but even so

I have a text file with lines of data. I want a script that will enter the first line into a text box on a website, hit enter, wait 5 seconds, enter the second line, wait, etc.

What's the best way going about this, and how would I learn to code such a thing? I know basic C++ but am unsure what the best option is.

# ? Jun 21, 2016 16:49

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

PRADA SLUT posted:

I have a text file with lines of data. I want a script that will enter the first line into a text box on a website, hit enter, wait 5 seconds, enter the second line, wait, etc.

What's the best way going about this, and how would I learn to code such a thing? I know basic C++ but am unsure what the best option is.

I've done similar things in C#; it's pretty simple, just look up the API for emulating mouse/keyboard events on the MSDN. You can "type" by passing strings, etc.

Depending on what you're actually doing, it may make more sense to just use curl to directly send web requests though.

# ? Jun 21, 2016 17:02

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 8, 2024 08:20

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

PRADA SLUT posted:

I have a text file with lines of data. I want a script that will enter the first line into a text box on a website, hit enter, wait 5 seconds, enter the second line, wait, etc.

What's the best way going about this, and how would I learn to code such a thing? I know basic C++ but am unsure what the best option is.

One way is with AutoIT (assuming Windows).

A more robust way way is figuring out how the form on the site works and just doing that. For example, if each text box is on its own page/form, you might have to do a HTTP POST request to an url with each line of text.

# ? Jun 21, 2016 17:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

«‹›672 »