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Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

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Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#102
post #3

Product information. Things like "The mainboard named XY from producer ABC has the manufacturer sku 1234567, the EAN-13 00123... and the UPC 01234...". Ideally add to that the custom specs, like "it has that many usb slots and this socket" etc. But I think I miss part of the picture here, there is probably a channel transmitting structured information like this from manufacturers to vendors, I just never found it.

Icecat (: http://www.icecat.biz ) seems to come close ?

Yes, very. Structured specs, and the API docs speak about an EAN/UPC/JAN field. But their free XML service, whatever it entails, seems to be defunct (asking for http auth without having provided those credentials), and it is a "ask us for pricing" service.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#103
post #3

Product information. Things like "The mainboard named XY from producer ABC has the manufacturer sku 1234567, the EAN-13 00123... and the UPC 01234...". Ideally add to that the custom specs, like "it has that many usb slots and this socket" etc. But I think I miss part of the picture here, there is probably a channel transmitting structured information like this from manufacturers to vendors, I just never found it.

My startup Semantics3 works on this problem - https://semantics3.com/ We have a standardized taxonomy and ontology to which we map all our products to. It's a garbage in garbage out problem but as long as the product has the information in some sort of semi-structured or unstructured form, we typically can infer attributes and standardize them based on their ontology (i.e. They have 4 USB ports)

Sounds great. But you - like the other sites in that space - have no pricing information online, not even after registering and trying to look how it would go on after the free trial. If I can't calculate what it would cost, then I can't use it.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#104

A generic communication API (this might exist). When I want to communicate with my customer, it handles how they receive the message - whether that's SMS, Email, IM, slack, etc.

Front https://frontapp.com/ might be what youre looking for. If you want to do the plumbing yourself, Smooch is more at the API level.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#106
post #100
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technopedia (a BDNA product) does exactly this, but might be expensive for a startup. https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/ Disclaimer: I used to work for BDNA, and on this product, but have since left the company.

There are no prices listed -> they are targeting big enterprises, right?

So, it's an enterprisey company, for sure, but for just Technopedia API access, I think that the rates are fairly approachable -- in the order of a couple hundred bucks a month maybe.

That said, I no longer work there, and companies often tinker with prices, and to boot, they were reengineering the API that I originally POCed for the company, so it could be substantially cheaper now (or substantially more expensive -- but the goal was to make it more accessible, so I'd guess cheaper.)

If you're actually interested in giving it a spin, shoot me an email, and I can probably put you in touch with someone willing to let you do a test-drive. My email's in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#108
Sometime back I wished I had a light weight CMS that can serve your content and allow you to program sections of your content so that you can make it more dynamic. For example, I can have something like this as the content:

The sum of @Var1 and @Var2 is #Sum

and then we can program #Sum (we call this an expression) to return the sum of @Var1 and @Var2. Once I pass the values for the variables @Var1 and @Var2 to API, let's say 1 and 2 correspondingly. Then the api would return you the content as:

The sum of 1 and 2 is 3

I couldn't find something that could help me with this so I build one. You can visit https://www.dialoguewise.com/ in case you have a similar requirement. More on expressions here: https://docs.dialoguewise.com/expressions/

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#109

A real estate API for active/sold residential and commercial listings.

This one would be pretty amazing and we'd pay a lot for it. Unfortunately, beyond the mapping/sanitization, it's an extremely difficult data licensing problem and so we still pay a lot to make an internal residential version we can't vend.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#110

An API for handling image processing/uploading to S3: Use 1: Send a high-res image in any format (like, say, tiff), the original, a web-optimal jpg at full resolution, and any sizes that might be needed in various contexts (thumbnail, inline display at any screen density) are put into the right place in my S3 bucket. Use 2: Using ids or original file names, point the API to an image or array of images, uploaded via U…

https://pixlab.io/#/cmdls is shipped with a lot of media processing API endpoints such as blur, scale, grayscale, and so on plus being an S3 proxy.
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