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Re: This Video Has X Views

#141

Post by johannes1234321 »

cortesoft wrote: post #78
cjhopman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 big problems with open APIs 1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).

I think you are missing what is probably the biggest factor: they can be very expensive to run if successful. If you create a popular API, people are going to find creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that many users. There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on, because the people writing apps that consume the API have no i…

Also the API forms a committed interface you are stuck with. Whatever way you want to "improve" your offering you have to make sure it's compatible with the old API, at least for a while. Especially as you can't reach your consumers.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#142

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ericflo wrote: post #73
cjhopman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 big problems with open APIs 1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).

The framing of open APIs disappearing because of bad actors doesn't ring true to me. In my view, the golden age of APIs disappeared one-by-one as tech companies realized they won their respective markets and consolidated their power.

I think what you said, yes, but also bad actors. Basically they disappeared because what business purpose did they serve, they were a cost center not a profit center - bad actors just increase the cost.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#143

Post by GrumpyNl »

duxup wrote: post #46
donatj wrote: post #7

I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I still long for this time. I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of all of my data. I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before ba…

It reminds me distantly of an earlier time when just the web was sort of owned ... by the web folk. In the sense that even corporate sites if you found it would have a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic. Some sort of character or tidbit before any of the branding drones were really aware of the web. All just because the 'webmaster' was the only one…

Thats the web we love.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#144

Post by albertzeyer »

wil421 wrote: post #29
djhworld wrote: post #11

I really liked this video, it highlights that a lot of software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working. The frequently updating title thing is cute, it'll be interesting to see what dies first - YouTube pulling the "title update API" or Tom's script running wherever he's put it

I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy. Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them. Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

The developer of the game has the responsibility for it. It's very simple: He/she can just release the code and game assets. That will make sure that the game lives on forever. Anyone interested in it will pick it up and port it over to new platforms.

Even if the developer does not do this, it's still possible. Some people will get the game assets and reverse engineer the game. There are countless examples for this. Unfortunately sharing the game assets will be illegal (at least for a while, until the copyright ends), so this will make it harder for the game to survive.

Also, there will be emulators at some later point, where you can play the original game binaries.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#145

Post by matthewheath »

smcl wrote: post #133
Lammy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks. For a while it was common to find SEO-spam sites composed entirely of posts generated this way. They would translate from a source language back to it in a roundabout way and end up with an article that was "different enough" to count as unique content to Googl…

A British MP (I cannot for the life of me remember who) came under fire for owning a company made its money doing this - take existing content, shuffle the language round a bit and publish it with loads of ads.

Likely to be Grant Shapps

> In 2012, Google blacklisted 19 of the Shapps's business websites for violating rules on copyright infringement related to the web scraping-based TrafficPayMaster software sold by them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps#Business_ventures

Re: This Video Has X Views

#146

Post by OwlsParlay »

romwell wrote: post #83
travisjungroth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the software we write is ephemeral and will one day either be retired or stop working.

You can say that about anything we do. However, at my previous job I integrated an LFBGS[1] implementation into our production code. That was written in the early 80s in Fortran '77. The code outlived all hardware that it ran on when it was first written (we ran it on an OpenMP cluster for a scientific-computing problem related to lithographic mask optimization), if not its authors. It will continue to exist, and run…

Wow, I'm actually using some of the C++ code based off of MINPACK for one of our current projects at work. It is quite humbling to realise this dates back so far.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#147

Post by xu_ituairo »

ajayyy wrote: post #126
Sargos wrote: post #116

This "open APIs" feeling where you can build and mash up all kinds of services together to build cool things is how writing apps on Ethereum feels right now. All of the data and functions of other people's contracts are on chain and available to you for use in whatever way you want to use it. It's very powerful and makes developing fun again for me. As an example there is a project called Maker which produces a stabl…

I guess one big difference is who is paying the fee. In an ethereum "app", the code stays dormant until a user interacts with it and pays a transaction fee.

Yeah, interaction with Ethereum APIs costs a little bit instead of being completely free, but that’s what makes it sustainable, I think.

As a result Ethereum apps/platforms don’t need to be centrally owned or become ad-supported and won’t die when its maintainers vanish. This also serves to stop abuse like spam, which would become too expensive to perpetrate.

Free apps and APIs were a good way to bootstrap wide internet adoption, but I think users might now be comfortable paying fair nominal fees for interactions instead of dealing with free ad-filled, privacy-invading services.

Re: This Video Has X Views

#148

Post by Der_Einzige »

hugs wrote: post #39

As the founder of one of the screen-scraping tools he alluded to in the video (Selenium), I just want to say the video has one of the best explanations for the difference between automating a process through a user interface vs an API. In the end, entropy always gets you, but you can push it off a little bit longer if there's an API.

Selenium is awesome, but the browser GUI for it in Firefox seemed to... Regress heavily from where it was a few years ago? It used to allow you to export a script as any type of code and now that's no longer possible. The newer gui based tools have maybe a fraction of the features that the selenium GUI used to have

What happened?

Re: This Video Has X Views

#149

Post by ric2b »

adrianN wrote: post #137
joshspankit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprises me that we don’t have crypto-based API micro-transactions yet. Even if you had to pay 1 satoshi for 10 queries, it would go a long way towards making APIs viable long-term.

What's the transaction rate for bitcoin these days? Is it still a handful of transactions per hour? What are the transaction costs?

There's a layer 2 technology called Lightning Network that lets you transfer Bitcoin almost for free and in seconds, no transaction number limit. The biggest issue is liquidity, it's not easy to move large sums in a single transaction, but that shouldn't matter much for micro-payments.

There's even ongoing work on making paid API's work seamlessly by adding some middleware, using the HTTP 402 (payment required) status code, no usernames/e-mails/passwords involved: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/

(And yes, LN is open source, non-custodial and moves real Bitcoin, not IOU's or other tokens. It's actually an open spec with at least 3 major implementations in 3 different languages.)

Re: This Video Has X Views

#150

Post by Nextgrid »

cortesoft wrote: post #78
cjhopman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 big problems with open APIs 1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done 2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens 3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).

I think you are missing what is probably the biggest factor: they can be very expensive to run if successful. If you create a popular API, people are going to find creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that many users. There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on, because the people writing apps that consume the API have no i…

Is it actually expensive, or is it just a result of everyone moving to cloud providers that charge an arm and a leg for performance equivalent to a cheap laptop (when you account for "CPU credits" and all that) and try to nickel & dime you on everything, including bandwidth (despite bare-metal providers somehow being able to stay in business by offering unmetered 1Gbps bandwidth)?
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