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

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141–150 of 151 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point but as long as the 1. You only get notifications for numbers you sign up to watch 2. The webhook only notifies me that will be transferred (using some data format) then it shouldn't be a problem, should it?

I think it would be ok as long as it didn't tell you what the person's new number is or who now owns if it gets reassigned.

Ok, then we agree :-)

We just wanted to know so that we wouldn't charge the new owner for things the old owner ordered etc.

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

#143

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.

Not quite what you're asking for, but here is a service that provides the opposite side of that - all customer messages come into a single queue on your side and can then be processed by customer service and/or answered by a bot https://hubtype.com/

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

#144

Reddit/HN like forum as an API. I want a forum for my site, using my own templates and integrated into my app, but without having to code the forum myself. What buttercms does for blogs, but for forums.

Discourse has an API: http://docs.discourse.org/

Would you really describe Discourse as "Reddit/HN like" though?

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

#145
post #38

A reverse pastebin, where you give it a pastebin URL and it returns the plaintext.

what in the world do you need this for?

"Guys - we don't need to pay for S3 when we can just use pastebin et al. - I'll get someone on HN to build the reverse service."

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

#146
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)

Hey, that did not work out at all. So, like said in the other comment, there are no pricing information I could find. Then you say "14 day free demo", but I got an email saying the free trial ended two days after registering. The UI says "add a credit card and let us know" when checking on how to pay/prolongue the trial, but does not actually show the price. I asked for pricing via your chat window thing, and got no response.

I certainly won't add a credit card to a service that does nor show me pricing information.

Guys, I get that the enterprise market is comfortable and the usual target for this kind of thing, but if you don't want to bother with startups/developers, why do you market to them on your website and by answering here? You are completely unuseable like that. Hiding pricing information to sell overpriced services to big enterprices that just don't care is completely unacceptable for everyone else.

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

#147
post #34

An API where I could point end user video uploads to and have them processed, transcoded and playable on all platforms. One that also works at the RTMP/WebRTC layer (i.e. not just an all-in-one JS library with it's own idea of a 'good UI') and doesn't require me to do an API call first to set up the stream for the user (i.e. encode 'upload rights' using expiring HMAC-signed blobs including restrictions such as maximu…

Not sure if it quite fits the bill, but if your end user video uploads are stored on S3 or similar then zencoder does most of what you are looking for.

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

#148
post #34

An API where I could point end user video uploads to and have them processed, transcoded and playable on all platforms. One that also works at the RTMP/WebRTC layer (i.e. not just an all-in-one JS library with it's own idea of a 'good UI') and doesn't require me to do an API call first to set up the stream for the user (i.e. encode 'upload rights' using expiring HMAC-signed blobs including restrictions such as maximu…

Not sure if it quite fits the bill, but if your end user video uploads are stored on S3 or similar then zencoder does most of what you are looking for.

AWS has it's own internal one too...

https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/

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

#149
post #117

a really good directory / search for APIs. There is so much out there, it's like a needle in a haystack literally

That would be the best thing happening to programming in a while... if it happened. I'd pay for such a service.

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

#150
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Hey, that did not work out at all. So, like said in the other comment, there are no pricing information I could find. Then you say "14 day free demo", but I got an email saying the free trial ended two days after registering. The UI says "add a credit card and let us know" when checking on how to pay/prolongue the trial, but does not actually show the price. I asked for pricing via your chat window thing, and got no…

Shoot. My apologies about any confusion on the sign up process. I have reached out to you on email.
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