Health insurance
Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
111–120 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#112Gmail.
But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#113IMDB's API
Freebase? It has data on most movies in IMDB. And an open API.
I really want an API that provides info on TV shows. Ever since I heard about the Tommyverse[1] I've wanted to build an application that automatically maps it and lets you play around with the connections between shows, and while it's technically possible to do it with the data IMDB does make available, you can't easily make it public and it's a real hassle.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#114Earlier 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.
to teach me what I'm missing
You're being annoying. Nobody wants to screenscrape, it's awkward and fiddly and fragile and verbose and requires reverse engineering and is wasteful of bandwidth.
It really doesn't matter if you can get the information by screenscraping. The thread topic is "what would you like an API for?", not "scorn people about what they want an API for."
Care to explain why I'm being downvoted?
Because I want less of this sort of thing on HN. I want it to fall to the bottom of the page, and to discourage it in future. I cannot articulate precisely what it is that I want less of, it's a big vague fuzzy blob of things, some of which I even agree with, and your few posts here and above here are within it, so down they go.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#115Gmail. But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.
GMail has APIs - POP3 and IMAP.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#116Earlier 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.
I think it would be a fantastic idea be able to hold up a cameraphone, take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, send it to the cloud and have the text recognised and Google-translated.
"Not perfect" would be fine for many non-life-or-death signs.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#117Local movie times. It's stupid this isn't available from someone. The only thing it's going to do is increase the number of people going to see a movie. Maybe there's one now but 3 years ago there wasn't one and I had to build a scraper for Yahoo movies to build the product I wanted.
There's one for the iPhone http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/wiki/NowPlaying
(From a Microsoft C# compiler/parser guy, no less).
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#118doWhatIMean("parse a bunch of names and sort") This is from the same framework that has winTheGame() and doMyHomework()
and justMagicallyWork(), the call that papers over leaky abstractions, off-by-one errors, misunderstandings, logical errors in your thinking and just does whatever it is you were trying to do.
>>> data = urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/') YetAnotherException: [...]
It needs some kind of web form cookie login non-standard authentication. Aaargh I can't spend any more time on this sub-project it was only supposed to take two minutes!
>>> import bigGuns Warning, Universe enters a fragile state. Tread carefully. >>> data = justMagicallyWork(urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/')) Success. Cost: 12 Karma. >>> del bigGuns normality restored
Phew!
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#119Any and all data from the Federal Government. There cannot possibly be enough structured data coming from there.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#120Pandora - Music Genome Project. I've been working on a media player, AuraMP, for a number of years and I've really wanted to plug into sites like Pandora.