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Unofficial APIs

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21–30 of 75 posts

Re: Unofficial APIs

#23

I'm actually the current owner of this repo!! I started it because I love working with unofficial APIs for fun hacks that improve my life. During college, I had an alert that told me when the Krispy Kreme donuts were fresh built off an unofficial API that promised enjoyable donuts. If you're interested, I have a newsletter to update you when new repos are added https://forms.gle/e8nCivpTBNftNtgGA and to feature inter…

Please don't use multiple accounts to promote things on HN. The community feels extremely strongly about this and will bring out the Searzalls and use much less kind words than "using multiple accounts to promote things".

I'm going to leave the submission up because it struck a genuine chord with people, but that's a lucky escape. Normally, the likelier outcome is bannage.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#24
Does using an unofficial API authenticated with someone else (e.g. a customer)'s account count as a violation of the ToS? In other words: who gets reprimanded/sued? The final user or the messenger?

Re: Unofficial APIs

#25
post #24

Does using an unofficial API authenticated with someone else (e.g. a customer)'s account count as a violation of the ToS? In other words: who gets reprimanded/sued? The final user or the messenger?

Someone please correct me (and someone for sure will), but I don't think you can get sued in most places for breaking the terms of service. The only thing (which is hinted in the name) they can effectively do is boot you off the platform.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#26
post #10

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data w…

I had a friend that ran some of that software. The trick was to just make a bunch of accounts and just fake them walking all across the map to gather the locations. Basically crowd sourcing it, but with fake people.

The number of fake accounts was a function of how large of an area you wanted to cover and how often you wanted it to update.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#28
Tangentially related, but I've been working on something for merchant websites (Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc) that you can feed a product url, and get back product information (image, title, price, availability, etc). It takes ~10 lines of code to write a driver for a merchant, and they are fairly stable if written properly.

My goal is to open source this, and allow anyone to contribute new / update existing drivers. Would there be interest in something like this?

Re: Unofficial APIs

#29

Domino's Pizza has an unofficial API as well: https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-dominos-pizza-api and https://pypi.org/project/dominos/

Shameless plug, but here's a website I created for April Fool's Day a while back that uses node-dominos-pizza-api: https://ryankoval.pizza/ (source at https://github.com/rkoval/order-me-pizza)

The package works pretty well in my experience. Something that I found mildly interesting though is that Dominos has not changed their API since I implemented it. Since this is unsupported (and honestly, probably frowned upon), I was expecting this to break early/often; thankfully, that has not been the case.

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