My body, starting with my brain. Please provide clear documentation.
On a similar note, I remember reading a comment somewhere requesting a search interface for reality 'so I can find my damn keys when I lose them'.
Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
71–80 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#72A OCR API. The Google Docs OCR API is a good start, but it's tied pretty closely to GDocs. I'd like to post an image and get back text.
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.
For further googling, see terms ICR, OCR, character recognition.
As a user, I have had very good results with Finereader. Have not tried Tesseract. Parascript was good with online character recognition, but that market is small, and I have not looked at them for a while (disclaimer: I used to work in a previous incarnation of the company).
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#73Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#74Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zillow is a start but there is a ton of data that is tied behind MLS licensing and Realtor associations. That data should be free and public.
Yes. I got hired to integrate MLS data and man was that a nightmare. Many are surprisingly low-tech and almost all use different formats. There is a half-assed attempt at standards (RETS), but that's for accessing the data not the data itself. Not to mention getting and presenting the data legally--each MLS group has different rules about what you're allowed to display (and it can be incredibly restricting). tl;dr th…
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats. I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.
Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats. I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.
Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#78Fantasy Football APIs, partuclarly Yahoo's.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#79Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information.
Can't you do that already with a simple scrape?
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.