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A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

freepublicapis.com

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Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#61
post #27

An API for polling data would be cool, one can dream

Not so much for polling data, but some governments do allow access to coarse election data.

Australia's was enough that the unfortunately complicated math of their election system was repeatable and verifiable (Can't find the post about it, however)

Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#62
post #27

An API for polling data would be cool, one can dream

Polling is a fool's errand, in my experience, since I'd guess a ton of the "how about now?" responses are "nope"

IMHO sitemap.xml and/or ActivityPub are sleeper approaches to helping the sites with the adversarial relationship they have with scrapers. In my experience, there are two schools of thought: play the very expensive game of cat and mouse (expensive for BOTH sides) of trying to verify the human-ness of visitors, or make it so the inevitable bots don't eat up very expensive and valuable resources that can be spent serving actual humans

Imagine how much less nonsense would have to go on if Amazon had ActivityPub that CamelCamelCamel could subscribe to, or similar for Craigslist

I'm not saying "all information wants to be free," so if Amazon wants to focus its energies on hoarding the review content, since that's arguably its moat, fantastic - let the bot and anti-bot people war over that content, instead of arguably factual data found on the product listing pages

Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#64
post #10

Whatever happened to programmable web?

Honestly, Web3 is partially it now. If you remove the hype and buzzwords, you are left with a bunch of individually addressable contracts that can all be composed and integrated together seamlessly under a single web frontend.

I remember years ago doing something as simple as getting a coin onto an alt-chain was a 20 step process. Get the gas coin on the target chain, find the right contract address, bridge the assets over, do a bunch of conversions, finally to get the token on the chain I wanted.

These days its a single click. Different tools or companies have sprung up, and while they use the same exact contracts I would have manually interacted with before, they script them all together into one transaction to save time and gas fees. A simple UI to select destination chain and coin and it handles all the swaps, gas, bridging, etc needed.

You don't need permission and a lot of standards have developed to keep things running smooth.

It's not just coins and crypto either. No reason not to develop other things off the chain too.

I've been working on my own PIM (personal information management) suite and using web3 has been amazing. No need to worry about a server or a database. Just deploy my code to the chain and store all my data encrypted on chain as well. The altchains are extremely cheap and this storage is already backed up, replicated, distributed, and can be local with a self-ran node. I will never lose it and I can bootstrap my data from scratch anywhere in the world as long as I can sync the chain or reach an API. I have todo lists, notes, contact management, and more in the pipeline and I've never felt so safe about my infrastructure or data before.

Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#67
post #50

Tangentially, what APIs do you guys actually pay for? (Personally or through work)

AWS is arguably an API, and I shovel a ton of money their way. Stripe is another one, though that ends with me getting paid, so I guess that technically doesn't count unless I start losing money using it. There's also the APIs backing all the apps I pay for, since I don't talk to them via a webpage. But then, if we look at every web page that hits an API to get a list of items to display, instead of that list coming over on the html itself, that'd be an API, technically. ChatGPT is an API I hit a bunch via non-web browser clients that I pay for.

Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#69
post #62
post #27

An API for polling data would be cool, one can dream

Polling is a fool's errand, in my experience, since I'd guess a ton of the "how about now?" responses are "nope" IMHO sitemap.xml and/or ActivityPub are sleeper approaches to helping the sites with the adversarial relationship they have with scrapers. In my experience, there are two schools of thought: play the very expensive game of cat and mouse (expensive for BOTH sides) of trying to verify the human-ness of visit…

Maybe there is a language issue here. In Australia, a full on election is also called a poll. The government electoral commission does the polling, the voters do the voting.

I think you getting confused with opinion polling.

Re: A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

#70
I tried to build something years ago on a similar foundation, and I found maintaining the API list to be impossible as a solo dev. In a pool of say 30 APIs, at least one would break their "contract" as a public resource daily. Shifting endpoints, revoked public tokens, changing outputs.

I was quite disappointed because I loved the product, a dashboard for arbitrary live data sourced from APIs, but the cost of maintaining it was too high.

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