Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by nl » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:15 AM UTC

dylanz wrote: post #65

nl wrote: post #58

A 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.

"Not perfect" is good enough for me. There's a whole class of applications where being able to take a photo of some words and have at least a few of them understood would be useful. I'd like to be able to index against the words that can be understood, and present the original image as the search result.

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

#92

Post by andreshb » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:17 AM UTC

failrate wrote: post #87

College class schedules (as well as registration schedules). Currently, even the best are buggy, slow and cumbersome. I have to take certain classes at different schools in order to fulfill my degree requirements and keep working full time. So, I often need to search for a single class across multiple institutions for the time that fits.

I had the same problem, worked over-time (startup life), and took classes at two institutions as a way around the bureaucracy for pre-reqs. I ended up automating the class look up process using selenium on Firefox. But then they called me in because my account was making requests every second, and were worried more students would try what I was doing and crash the system. (The DID tell me to keep checking for open spots, they never said to not use scripts)

This was the only way I could get the classes I needed to graduate on time

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

#93

Post by 10ren » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:17 AM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #88

barredo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like: storeNewBrainMemory(); and saveBrainToDisk();

I think brain.serialize() would be pretty cool...

thoughts are to writing as data structures are to serialization stream

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

#94

Post by md7 » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:22 AM UTC

Centralized Spam filter API with an access to Gmail spam filter, Yahoo Mail spam filter, etc. to report spam and check emails for spam.

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

#95

Post by 7a1c9427 » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:23 AM UTC

lamnk wrote: post #4

IMDB's API

Freebase? It has data on most movies in IMDB. And an open API.

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

#96

Post by pyre » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:27 AM UTC

svjunkie wrote: post #73

Disclaimer: I'm an amateur in every sense of the word but eager to learn. A Craigslist API could make for some really cool mashups but many of those could probably also be created using the RSS feeds they provide. Do you see any substantial advantage to a distinct Craigslist API?

There was a mashup that did something with Craigslist and photos, but Craigslist shut them down. I think it allowed you to view the listing with the photos in it (rather than needing to click on each listing to see the photos).

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

#97

Post by pyre » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:28 AM UTC

md7 wrote: post #94

Centralized Spam filter API with an access to Gmail spam filter, Yahoo Mail spam filter, etc. to report spam and check emails for spam.

Why centralized? Why not just make it decentralized with peering?

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

#98

Post by grumpycanuck » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:28 AM UTC

brandnewlow wrote: post #77

grumpycanuck wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Olympic content during the Beijing Olympics.

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

#99

Post by pyre » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:30 AM UTC

10ren wrote: post #93

steveklabnik wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think brain.serialize() would be pretty cool...

thoughts are to writing as data structures are to serialization stream

I'm thinking that an electronic interface could greatly increase transfer speeds though.

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

#100

Post by pyre » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 3:36 AM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #29

ulf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wrote a parser for NBA games, get the data straight from yahoo. Using Python and BeautifulSoup, piece of cake. I would think MLB could work the same.

Yeah, HTML scraping ESPN.com is not very hard. I did it for college basketball once in a strange sort of database that attempted to predict March Madness brackets. It worked really well for teams that had encountered each other during the season... except only 2 or 3 pairs of teams had ever played each other during the regular season. Works much better on NBA and NFL games, where there are far fewer teams, they see e…

> 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?