Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unofficial APIs

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–75 of 75 posts

Re: Unofficial APIs

#71

Post by Alupis »

tsukurimashou wrote: post #70
Alupis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be lost then. The python code is an implementation of a program that uses the Coinbase API to make trades, fetch market data, etc. In my day, we'd call that a Program, Library or an SDK. Definitely wouldn't call that an "Unofficial API". When I think of "Unofficial API", I think of an API that wasn't intended for public use and is undocumented and supported by the company. Like the Pandora API some music playe…

Coinbase may have an official API, doesn't mean they support the Python implementation of their API, hence the 'unofficial' as in 'not maintained by the coinbase dev team' These implementations are there for devs to save time and simply import the API implementation as a module and use already made functions to do the API calls

OK, but what you described isn't an API then. It's a library.

The Coinbase team, to my knowledge, doesn't maintain any implementation... making all implementations "Unofficial" in that sense.

I still fail to see how this python code is considered an "Unofficial API".

Re: Unofficial APIs

#72

Post by tsukurimashou »

Alupis wrote: post #71
tsukurimashou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase may have an official API, doesn't mean they support the Python implementation of their API, hence the 'unofficial' as in 'not maintained by the coinbase dev team' These implementations are there for devs to save time and simply import the API implementation as a module and use already made functions to do the API calls

OK, but what you described isn't an API then. It's a library. The Coinbase team, to my knowledge, doesn't maintain any implementation... making all implementations "Unofficial" in that sense. I still fail to see how this python code is considered an "Unofficial API".

I agree it's a library but these days anything is being called an 'app' it's kind of the same with API and API implementation (library). It makes it confusing

Re: Unofficial APIs

#73

Post by fulldecent2 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #27

No offense to the people who built this, but sharing your username and password with random packages on the internet seems like a bad idea, especially for finance apps.

Sharing your username and password is considered "high security" nowadays whereas merely "standard security" would be installing a root kit or running shell code each time you want to install something.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#74

Post by fulldecent2 »

chpmrc wrote: post #24

Does using an unofficial API authenticated with someone else (e.g. a customer)'s account count as a violation of the ToS? In other words: who gets reprimanded/sued? The final user or the messenger?

Considering that Plaid, which is "please enter your bank username and password so we can validate you are who you say you are" is very common, just assume nobody cares about anything
Post reply on HN