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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?

#101

Post by abentspoon »

nl wrote: post #91
dylanz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that even possible at the moment? Most software I've tried just isn't ready for something like that (granted, I haven't tried any of the commercial products). Tesseract is pretty good, but definitely not perfect.

"Not perfect" is good enough for me. There's a whole class of applications where being able to take a photo of some words and have at least a few of them understood would be useful. I'd like to be able to index against the words that can be understood, and present the original image as the search result.

You can do this with the Evernote API. It was designed for search, and does a good job with both print and handwriting.

http://www.evernote.com/about/developer/api/evernote-api.htm...

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

paloalto80 wrote: post #86
paloalto80 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"scrape != API" No kidding. He's looking to get "comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information", which you can use an HTML parser (like Hpricot if you're using Rails) to retrieve any info you need.

Care to explain why I'm being downvoted? EDIT: If you're going to downvote, please leave an explanation to teach me what I'm missing. I'd sincerely appreciate that. Thank you.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by failrate »

andreshb wrote: post #92
failrate wrote: post #87

College class schedules (as well as registration schedules). Currently, even the best are buggy, slow and cumbersome. I have to take certain classes at different schools in order to fulfill my degree requirements and keep working full time. So, I often need to search for a single class across multiple institutions for the time that fits.

I had the same problem, worked over-time (startup life), and took classes at two institutions as a way around the bureaucracy for pre-reqs. I ended up automating the class look up process using selenium on Firefox. But then they called me in because my account was making requests every second, and were worried more students would try what I was doing and crash the system. (The DID tell me to keep checking for open sp…

Ouch, polling every second? How often did the data actually change?

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

#109

Post by amandle »

grumpycanuck wrote: post #67
flannelcatering wrote: post #26

Sports statistics. NFL, MLB, NBA, etc.

I work for a sports data integration company, so you can get this data easily. Oh, you mean for free? Yeah, that's not gonna happen any time soon. Someone has to pay people to collect those statistics and then make them available.

A lot of people really enjoy keeping track of sports stats. Maybe some sort of a wiki would work well for this purpose?

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

#110

Post by sunir »

pilate wrote: post #66

Banks. Online payment processing is a mess.

Interestingly, since the failure of OFX, many many banks in North America prefer screen scraping because they can guarantee the web interface has accurate data since their actual customers use it. Conversely, these banks find supporting APIs to be highly fragile since no one is watching them.

I find that logic amazing, but considering how old the online banking software is and the high risk of changing it wholesale, I don't think they are in a position to fix it in the short term.

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