The Future of APIs: APIs aren’t the endgame they won't stay forever • Hacker News Board

Re: The Future of APIs: APIs aren’t the endgame they won't stay forever

#61

Post by codingmyway » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

Since learning it I've thought that REST is really aimed at humans. It's all well being able to navigate state but unless it knows what to do with a given state beforehand it's not much use to a machine, other than perhaps to gather data, in which case that data won't mean anything unless an intelligence interprets it.

Since written code will only ever do a defined set of operations most web Apis are fine being written in RPC style.

The only time I've advocated a RESTful approach is when there was a lot of public data being exposed and human developers may well have explored the data.

When an AI can navigate an interpret data that it hasn't seen before then things will get interesting

Re: The Future of APIs: APIs aren’t the endgame they won't stay forever

#62

Post by jbpetersen » Thu, Dec 22, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

urvader wrote: post #19

The only prediction I have regarding autonomous API:s is: neuronstreams. If an API exposes a set of input channels and output channels where data can be sent between neural nets, they will be able to adapt to whatever format they see fit without having to make sense to us humans. It is a scary thought but if we want to remove humans in this process we shouldn't even be able to understand the communication.

Seems like you'd want to just have the users running the neural nets to avoid issues of either a single neural net being trained by all the users and converging to a single standard (still quite interesting but not a solution to the problem at hand) or having to run a separate instance for each individual user to train as desired.

Thoughts?

Re: The Future of APIs: APIs aren’t the endgame they won't stay forever

#63

Post by romaniv » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #51

patkai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"distributed Prolog on the global scale. Systems would exchange constraints until they reach a mutually agreeable solution" - wow, I'm impressed, but not sure I fully get this. Any pointers or writeups on this or something similar?

I simply verbalized something that I think is imminently possible. Prolog operates on rules and facts, both of which involve symbols. If you fix the meaning of some symbols globally, you can run queries that will (potentially) derive semantically meaningful information. There is nothing stopping two systems from exchanging rules. If you keep track of which symbol belongs to which machine (or the global repository) yo…

Also: https://www7.in.tum.de/tools/dahl/iclp2010.pdf