Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#31

Post by shafqat » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:25 AM UTC

ulf wrote: post #21

mattdennewitz wrote: post #6

mlb game data, within 24 hours of each game

i wrote a parser for NBA games, get the data straight from yahoo. Using Python and BeautifulSoup, piece of cake. I would think MLB could work the same.

Care to share? Sounds awesome.

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#32

Post by jonknee » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:26 AM UTC

mattdennewitz wrote: post #6

mlb game data, within 24 hours of each game

Isn't that already done? You can even get raw Pitch F/X data.

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/

Here's an example day's scoreboard in JSON:

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/month_07/da...

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#33

Post by tvon » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:28 AM UTC

raghus wrote: post #27

Real-estate API (open homes, home sales by zip etc)

Funny, I came to say the same thing.

Definite business opportunity there, the two services I have found (in this case I'm looking for Texas data) both consider using an iframe "integration".

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#34

Post by moron4hire » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:28 AM UTC

An semantic equivalent to an "#include" or "using" statement that looked for the library on a central repository instead the local disk, automatically managing caching and versioning.

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#35

Post by arjunb » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:29 AM UTC

raghus wrote: post #27

Real-estate API (open homes, home sales by zip etc)

zillow has a pretty decent api

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#36

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:32 AM UTC

flannelcatering wrote: post #20

systemtrigger wrote: post #14

My body, starting with my brain. Please provide clear documentation.

The UI layer of an app is more or less a (primitive) API into the human mind. Though, I think you're right. The documentation is quite poor.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#37

Post by omakase » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:32 AM UTC

btucker wrote: post #23

shafqat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting... what would be the application of this? Any ideas you can share?

Lots of possibilities, but think backtweets.com as an example of something which would be much easier to accomplish if such an API existed.

We opened up an API for backtweets a while ago: http://backtweets.com/api

What would you build with it? Some people are using it in cool ways right now, e.g. hype machine uses it to power a twitter music chart.

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#38

Post by harpastum » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:37 AM UTC

nanexcool wrote: post #15

lamnk wrote: post #4

IMDB's API

Have you tried TMDb? http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/ I've played with it and seems good enough.

TMDb is pretty decent (I use it to keep track of my personal movie collection [1]), but a lot of the data is missing/incomplete.

It's a whole lot better than nothing, but it's far from perfect.

[1] http://moviedb.samwarmuth.com

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#39

Post by mpk » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:39 AM UTC

shafqat wrote: post #2

I'll start. Wish there was an API that: 1) Allowed me to find high quality, license free images easily. 2) Let me access LinkedIn data. I know LinkedIn has an API, but its not open.

Second that LinkedIn API request.

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#40

Post by dkasper » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 12:41 AM UTC

shafqat wrote: post #2

I'll start. Wish there was an API that: 1) Allowed me to find high quality, license free images easily. 2) Let me access LinkedIn data. I know LinkedIn has an API, but its not open.

On flickr there is an option to search for commercially usable images. To do it from the API you need "prior arrangement" though.