Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#41
post #29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realized that’s probably half of the startups and companies out there right?

Most startups and companies (try to) act in good faith and will acquire a license. And, if they did not, they should foresee the legal and operational consequences.

Well YouTube was similar when it first started, no? People were uploading whatever they wanted, and eventually they rolled out DMCA takedown and reporting features for copyright infringement violations.

Over time, the service was setup with a full feature set to handle all of this, but it didn't exist when YouTube first started.

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make it any less true.

Businesses can fail. That is true as well. I guess we should never build businesses.

That's a bit reductionist.

I'm saying we should enter into formal contracts for services that are vital to the running of our businesses. That way there's more protection against getting the rug pulled out from underneath us.

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#45
post #15

They broke functionality on their own pages, yikes. E.g. the export button on the desktop version of https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/MMM,IBM/view/v1?ql=1

You'd think after you take down an API you've be furiously checking the server logs for any referrers coming from inside the house.

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#47
post #5

There's a thread about this on Yahoo!s own forums: https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Yahoo-Finance-help/http-download... I am incredibly amused by the person who refers to himself as a customer of this. If you want to be treated like a customer, find someone who will charge you money in exchange for the service provided.

There's obviously way more nuance to this though. APIs of this nature rarely charge a fee.

You mean APIs that provide market data? Quite the opposite.

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#48
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses can fail. That is true as well. I guess we should never build businesses.

That's a bit reductionist. I'm saying we should enter into formal contracts for services that are vital to the running of our businesses. That way there's more protection against getting the rug pulled out from underneath us.

Thanks to the MVP religion the expectation is now set that for any business should be able to get $2m in revenue with a $5,000 investment from your uncles and cousins. More often than not you’re taking these risks because you don’t have the money or infrastructure to ‘do it propperly’.

Re: Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

#49
post #3

> What violation of TOS? It is against Yahoo's TOS to scrape the data there. So yes its darn entitled to even expect a heads up.

Downloading a csv isn’t scraping.

I don't know if the csv was meant to be an api or just giving the option to someone visiting yahoo finance (and therefore viewing ads) the ability to download data they viewed. If you go straight to the data and bypass the ads, you are sort of scraping.
Post reply on HN