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Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

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Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#11

Post by dlg »

- US & State Government tax information. The tax code is amazingly complex. It would be good if you could figure out the tax implications of various events. Better if they simplified the tax code to where this was possible. Moreover, data.gov so far is a disappointment. Maybe they'll improve it. But I'd love to dig in to purchasing and personnel costs for every branch of government.

- Good stock market historical tick data (and streaming data). Opentick tried for a time, but mostly you need to contact expensive services. This makes it hard to mess around.

- A good local event API. Lots of companies have tried, few have good results.

- LinkedIn: They've been promising an open contact book API since 2007, but have kept it closed. If they had an open API (that lets you actually store data/invite), it would mean a lot of sites would be building on them.

- My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried.

- Anyone you have an account with (Financial firms, banks, vendors) would have a standard commerce API. Sure, today you can export stuff in Quicken, etc formats, but Mint had to do a big deal with Yodlee to get the data in a uniform, queryable way.

And, mad props to Microsoft for opening the Bing API with pretty good terms. Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it. Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#18

Post by zyb09 »

Subway. On the stations here they have displays, that show in how many minutes the next train will arrive (which is real-time data). Would be cool if they broadcast this information on the net, you could see if you need to hurry to the station or not.

Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

#19

Post by camccann »

dlg wrote: post #11

- US & State Government tax information. The tax code is amazingly complex. It would be good if you could figure out the tax implications of various events. Better if they simplified the tax code to where this was possible. Moreover, data.gov so far is a disappointment. Maybe they'll improve it. But I'd love to dig in to purchasing and personnel costs for every branch of government. - Good stock market historical tic…

Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

Anyone who's done Microsoft-based development? MS is incredibly developer-friendly compared to many platform vendors. It's a point of business strategy for them (if memory serves me, that's what Ballmer's infamous "developers, developers, developers, developers" thing was about in context).

Just don't try and mix in any technology from one of MS's competitors and you'll be fine.

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