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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?

#131

Post by Tichy »

nl wrote: post #56
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…

"Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it" It always surprises me when people say this. Apparently it's not widely known that Google do make their search API available: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje (Before anyone says "that's just the AJAX API", please READ THE LINK, and scroll down to see the Java & PHP samples)

What quotas do they have, though? I remember people reporting to be blocked from Google for "looking like a bot". So I thought the search API will only work if the requests come from lots of different IP addresses, as would be the case for use in AJAX applications.

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

#134

Post by Poleris »

brianobush wrote: post #123

a real-world grep. this might be solved in my lifetime, since books, notes, etc are all moving to digital. sometimes i just wish i could grep for x and it would find x in all my books, notebooks, etc.

I'm actually working on this problem. It's remarkable the amount of content we actually generate and the number of services/mediums we generate them on. Simply fetching all the data and hosting it centrally is a large enough problem, let alone indexing all of it.

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

#135

Post by philwelch »

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.

You know how sportscasters always have some sort of weird statistic to pull out of their ass, like "Brett Favre has never lost a game, at home, with the temperature less than 34 degrees"? Is there some sort of API or query system so someone at the networks can throw this shit together out of the raw data in real time?

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

#136

Post by fauigerzigerk »

camccann wrote: post #19
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'…

True, they are developer friendly. .NET is a good platform. It's extensive and well documented. There is innovation in C# as well. But the purpose of all that goodness is to make you sell their licenses. Where Oracle has their salesforce, Microsoft has their developers to do the selling for them.

Unfortunately their licensing is from an era that has come and gone. Building software that uses things like Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint or Office means to limit your scale to what they call "Micro ISV". You provide that package to your client and 95% of your revenues go straight to Microsoft.

You can build on their stuff but you won't scale and you won't grow, not because their technology doesn't scale, but because their licensing doesn't scale.

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

#137

Post by korch »

bigbang wrote: post #69

Craigslist

I've always wanted to break into CL's space due to their utter disregard for the garden of web APIs growing up around them. They could be doing so much more with their service for the community, and I don't mean going the big time corporate route obsessed with short-term revenue.

There have been many CL clones(kijiji), but none gained enough eyeballs to make an interoperating API work. I suspect these attempts failed because they didn't pay attention to the community and instead acted liked closed corporations right out the starting gate. I thought the CL killer would appear on Facebook, but that hasn't happened because of totally different dynamics in Facebook's ecosystem.

Actually, I'm surprised that I haven't seen someone one here posting a hacked up API wrapper around Craigslist as a mini-startup.

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

#138

Post by arnorhs »

ajaimk wrote: post #46

Hacker News API?

I would love to be able to get my upvotes (stories/comments separate) in an RSS feed somehow...

Not at all an API, but since we're on the subject.

I like reddit's format, where you can add .rss to almost any url and it returns the same result as an RSS feed

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

#139

Post by shafqat »

grumpycanuck wrote: post #98
brandnewlow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link?

Sure. http://www.xmlteam.com We offer stuff ranging from simple on-demand calls to our web service (you purchase credits, docs cost you X credits per access) to a Perl-based app that captures an XML feed and parses and inserts the data into a DB for you to use as you will at your end, usually MySQL but we support MS-SQL too. We've got some pretty big clients: ESPN, USA Today are amongst them. We supplied Google with…

Fascinating. Can I drop you an email? Didn't see it in your profile. I'm shafqat at newscred dot com.

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

#140

Post by pyre »

moron4hire wrote: post #127
pyre wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, HTML scraping ESPN.com is not very hard. I've seen a few people respond with this "you can just html scrape that." Sure you can HTML-scrape for the information, but the topic of this "Ask HN" is about what APIs you would like to see. Maybe he already HTML-scrapes ESPN.com, but would prefer that there was an official API for it, no?

Yeah, but I prefer real solutions, regardless of how ugly they are, rather than wishful thinking for so-called "elegant" solutions.

No offense, but isn't this wrong discussion for you then?
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