Show HN: Bungholio – Get text messages when a product is available on Amazon

Best program name ever. We can all use some Beavis humor these days.

This reminds me of a little Visual Basic program I hacked together about 20 years ago when I wanted to buy a PlayStation 2 but there was a shortage after it launched.<p>Every 5 minutes, my program would make a request to the product page on Amazon and look for the text &quot;out of stock&quot;. If it didn&#x27;t find it, the program would sound off an alarm bell.<p>I still remember sitting nearby, watching TV one night when the alarm went off. I jumped up and ran over to my computer and bought myself a PS2.<p>As silly as it sounds, what I remember most fondly about the PlayStation 2 was making and using this little program to help buy it.

I&#x27;m not trying to troll, so please hear me out.<p>But has Javascript become so universally liked that it&#x27;s the go-to tool for quick one-off scripts like this? Is it really much better or easier that you would choose it over, say Python or just a shell script?<p>Or is it that Javascript happens to be the best tool for this particular job?<p>I guess what I&#x27;m asking is, do <i>most</i> people reach for JS&#x2F;Node over other languages for this type of thing? I suppose I still don&#x27;t see it outside of the browser environment but maybe it&#x27;s time to change that view.

The Amazon app lets me register for push messages when products become available. Why wouldn&#x27;t I just use that?

i need this except for delivery windows on wholefoods and amazon fresh

I wish i saw more of these one-off creative creations on a regular basis. Is there a reason why this is not a &quot;Show:hn&quot;?

Truly we needed this in these times of TP shortage.

Does it use an API or it scrapes the Amazon website? If it&#x27;s the latter how do you avoid being blocked?

Are you the owner of bunghol.io?

Obligatory: <i>Shut-up, Beavis.</i>

I&#x27;m not normally one to carp about product names—there was a semi-jokey discussion about calling a shared-viewing product &#x27;Covideo&#x27; that bothered some people, but I didn&#x27;t think it was such a big deal—but surely we can do better than this?<p>Oh, well. As always with open source, it&#x27;s my place to be grateful for the work you share (thank you!), not to complain about your not doing it on my terms.