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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?

#44
Appliances: stove, oven, coffee maker, refrigerator. Various other household items: garage doors, locks, etc. This overly expensive, yet dumb, flat panel TV we just bought. Extending out to the driveway...my car. The energy meter on the side of the house (read-only access, obviously, just to keep the power co. happy). The most mundane stuff could use an API, if you ask me!

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

#45
A solid global small business geo data API.

Fortunately there are a few different startups working on this, and a rudimentary way to hack it with Google AJAX API but there's still nobody who can allow me to simply punch in name+city search and give me the address, geocode meta reliably for any city in the world and without cache restrictions.

Google has it all but needs to open this data up better.

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

#47
post #41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zillow has a pretty decent api

Zillow is a start but there is a ton of data that is tied behind MLS licensing and Realtor associations. That data should be free and public.

Yes. I got hired to integrate MLS data and man was that a nightmare. Many are surprisingly low-tech and almost all use different formats. There is a half-assed attempt at standards (RETS), but that's for accessing the data not the data itself. Not to mention getting and presenting the data legally--each MLS group has different rules about what you're allowed to display (and it can be incredibly restricting). tl;dr the project went down in flames.

I'd love to see Google get ahold of the data and make it available through Base.

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

#49
post #18

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.

Petition your local system to get on it. BART makes the data available which is pretty slick:

http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx

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