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Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?
- ben_jones 9y agoAn asynchronous API that returns a full review of my codebase by dozens of industry specialists with special attention paid to best practices and idiomatic implementation details.
- kagx 9y agoThis one is a really interesting idea. Although It would be quite pricey I guess. It takes time to review properly code base which is new to you and industry specialists know their price.
- onli 9y agoProduct information. Things like "The mainboard named XY from producer ABC has the manufacturer sku 1234567, the EAN-13 00123... and the UPC 01234...". Ideally add to that the custom specs, like "it has that many usb slots and this socket" etc. But I think I miss part of the picture here, there is probably a channel transmitting structured information like this from manufacturers to vendors, I just never found it.
- ziikutv 9y agoA lot of retailers misuse these SKUs and UPCs. there are some that have a many to many relationships. Its horrendous. You can checkout Open Food Facts though the amount of data is sparse.
- jsiepkes 9y agoIcecat (:http://www.icecat.biz http://www.icecat.biz ) seems to come close ?
- onli 9y agoYes, very. Structured specs, and the API docs speak about an EAN/UPC/JAN field. But their free XML service, whatever it entails, seems to be defunct (asking for http auth without having provided those credentials), and it is a "ask us for pricing" service.
- netvarun 9y agoMy startup Semantics3 works on this problem - https://semantics3.com/ https://semantics3.com/ We have a standardized taxonomy and ontology to which we map all our products to. It's a garbage in garbage out problem but as long as the product has the information in some sort of semi-structured or unstructured form, we typically can infer attributes and standardize them based on their ontology (i.e. They have 4 USB ports)
- onli 9y agoSounds great. But you - like the other sites in that space - have no pricing information online, not even after registering and trying to look how it would go on after the free trial. If I can't calculate what it would cost, then I can't use it.
- onli 9y agoHey, that did not work out at all. So, like said in the other comment, there are no pricing information I could find. Then you say "14 day free demo", but I got an email saying the free trial ended two days after registering. The UI says "add a credit card and let us know" when checking on how to pay/prolongue the trial, but does not actually show the price. I asked for pricing via your chat window thing, and got no response. I certainly won't add a credit card to a service that does nor show me pricing information. Guys, I get that the enterprise market is comfortable and the usual target for this kind of thing, but if you don't want to bother with startups/developers, why do you market to them on your website and by answering here? You are completely unuseable like that. Hiding pricing information to sell overpriced services to big enterprices that just don't care is completely unacceptable for everyone else.
- netvarun 9y agoShoot. My apologies about any confusion on the sign up process. I have reached out to you on email.
- bmelton 9y agoTechnopedia (a BDNA product) does exactly this, but might be expensive for a startup. https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/ https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/ Disclaimer: I used to work for BDNA, and on this product, but have since left the company.
- onli 9y agoThere are no prices listed -> they are targeting big enterprises, right?
- bmelton 9y agoSo, it's an enterprisey company, for sure, but for just Technopedia API access, I think that the rates are fairly approachable -- in the order of a couple hundred bucks a month maybe. That said, I no longer work there, and companies often tinker with prices, and to boot, they were reengineering the API that I originally POCed for the company, so it could be substantially cheaper now (or substantially more expensive -- but the goal was to make it more accessible, so I'd guess cheaper.) If you're actually interested in giving it a spin, shoot me an email, and I can probably put you in touch with someone willing to let you do a test-drive. My email's in my profile.
- jtolj 9y agoA cost effective API into whois data that doesn't come across as sketchy or fragile.
- gregable 9y agoMost use cases of APIs into whois data are sketchy (typically email spam).
- cjonas 9y agoI worked on a project for one of the big registars and even they didn't have a proper whois api!
- cdubzzz 9y agoNot an API, but perhaps a good basis for one: https://github.com/secynic/ipwhois https://github.com/secynic/ipwhois
- feistypharit 9y agoWhois data itself is also somewhat suspect in general. It's best effort, not required to be correct in any way.
- neboysa 9y agoCheck out http://whoapi.com http://whoapi.com
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- orasis 9y agoI wanted machine learning-based app configuration. So I built it and spun it out as a separate product: https://improve.ai/ https://improve.ai/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vincentmarle 9y agoAwesome! I was looking for exactly a service like this (was almost going to build it myself) so will definitely try it out!
- orasis 9y agoCool. I would love any feedback! In the next couple of weeks I'll be adding a YAML format with the entire configuration in one file. It'll look something like this: properties: buyButtonText: variants: - buy now - free trial! by: property: os for: - ios - android The response would look like: properties: buyButtonText: ios: free trial! android: buy now Using the "by" statement you'll be able to segment the configuration by any other property.
- catshirt 9y agook so, for lack of value, I deleted my previous response to your post: "wow this is super awesome- wish I had a use case for it!" but now that improve.ai ads are starting to pop up in my Facebook feed, thought I could provide some value letting you know about that mistarget. XD
- pritambaral 9y agoHow could anyone have possibly targeted you on Facebook from your comments here? I am genuinely curious. I checked and saw HN doesn't load any Facebook libraries, and I could find no identifiable info about you from your HN profile.
- erikrothoff 9y agoSubscription billing API that deals with reminders, renewals, e-mails/cancellations, etc. Everything related to that. All existing solutions don't work well if revenue per user is a "measley" 2 USD per month.
- BatFastard 9y agoSo a "Low cost" billing API, everyone's dream!
- frenchie4111 9y ago"Low cost" could be 5% of charges. Use stripe under the hood, so you make 2.1%. Not too bad for a stripe wrapper.
- desdiv 9y agoStripe's pricing is 2.9% + 30¢, so the fee for a $2 payment would be 36¢, effectively 18%.
- erikrothoff 9y agoWe're paying the 18% already for our $2 transaction... Another 5% on that sounds doable.
- frenchie4111 9y agoThis is definitely one of those problems that while I was implementing it every day I would think "Why the hell do I have to do this myself"
- tejasm 9y agoTry ChargeBee? Solves a lot of subscription-related problems. It's a product and not API.
- whiskers08xmt 9y ago
- ransom1538 9y agoEasy way to get geo from ip. I hate a lot of the options: downloading binarys or using google's that just regulates you.
- nolite 9y agoThere was a solution for this on HN not a week ago..
- ypys 9y agoHere it is: https://ipinfo.io https://ipinfo.io
- avar 9y agoThese free databases are really inaccurate in many cases compared to e.g. Maxmind. E.g. this thinks my IP address is 100 km away near the German border, but Maxmind's commercial DB puts me a 7 minute walk away in the center of Amsterdam. They're better than nothing, but be careful when relying on them for anything you need accurate Geo-IP info for.
- romanovcode 9y agoI also don't recommend free solution for serious business. This can be critical for E-Commerce which uses GEO-Locking. For customers that live on the borders it is very important that correct country is selected.
- superted 9y agoWe are using the geo lookup api fram maxmind, with success. Gets quite expensive though, if you are not careful
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- johns 9y agoMaxMind works great for us.
- seancoleman 9y agoA real estate API for active/sold residential and commercial listings.
- rgbrgb 9y agoThis one would be pretty amazing and we'd pay a lot for it. Unfortunately, beyond the mapping/sanitization, it's an extremely difficult data licensing problem and so we still pay a lot to make an internal residential version we can't vend.
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoAn API providing access to coupons from major retailers in a machine readable format. Edit: Great question by the way!
- kapuru 9y agoCan you tell me more about how you would've integrated the API? I think I could've helped out.
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoThe issue wouldn't have been implementation - it was sourcing the coupons themselves. You'd have to sign agreements with multiple vendors and force them to use your system instead of their own.
- thangalin 9y agoBret Victor's The Future of Programming has intriguing ideas on APIs that are tangentially related to this topic. https://vimeo.com/71278954#t=14m https://vimeo.com/71278954#t=14m
- koala_man 9y agoA reverse pastebin, where you give it a pastebin URL and it returns the plaintext.
- edaemon 9y agoCan't you use the /raw/ URL for that? E.g. https://pastebin.com/raw/AC3FGHBX https://pastebin.com/raw/AC3FGHBX
- koala_man 9y agoWorks for pastebin.com, but not dpaste.com, sprunge.us, ix.io, fpaste.org, ideone.com, paste.fedoraproject.org, hastebin.com, termbin.com, paste.debian.net, gist.github.com, bpaste.net, lpaste.net, pastee.com, irccloud.com, codepad.org or susepaste.org. I currently have ~40 lines of regex for this, plus some custom logic for a few that don't have raw URLs at all. A service would be very convenient.
- avh02 9y agoSome would say you're half way to building what you want... Launch and sell!
- ice109 9y agowhat in the world do you need this for?
- OJFord 9y ago"Guys - we don't need to pay for S3 when we can just use pastebin et al. - I'll get someone on HN to build the reverse service."
- neosilky_ 9y agoHey! I just made https://reversepaste.com/ https://reversepaste.com/ for you :)
- thunderrabbit 9y ago
- superasn 9y agoAn API that returns top 100 relevant web results via Javascript (aka the google ajax api which sadly they discontinued).
- edoceo 9y agoDuckDuckGo and Yandex have one
- mkilling 9y ago1. A process engine that can execute a process given as an EPC (ideally with an embeddable gui editor). The app notifies the API of event completions and the API allows you to query the current state of the process. 2. An embeddable survey tool like SurveyGizmo, but completely whitelabelable, including the survey editor 3. An API for benchmark scores for iOS and Android devices (give me all devices that are as fast or faster than a Samsung Galaxy S6) 4. An embeddable private commenting tool (like Disqus, but for the back-office parts of the website)
- wolfgang42 9y agoWhat does EPC stand for?
- mkilling 9y agoEvent-driven process chain[1]. In fact, any executable process modelling language would do. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_process_chain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_process_chain
- ForrestN 9y agoAn API for handling image processing/uploading to S3: Use 1: Send a high-res image in any format (like, say, tiff), the original, a web-optimal jpg at full resolution, and any sizes that might be needed in various contexts (thumbnail, inline display at any screen density) are put into the right place in my S3 bucket. Use 2: Using ids or original file names, point the API to an image or array of images, uploaded via Use 1, and give it a set of dimensions/conditions, and have it return links to the correct images for me.
- mtrimpe 9y agoSounds like https://transloadit.com https://transloadit.com could've served you well there.
- conwaytwitty 9y agohttps://www.imgix.com/ https://www.imgix.com/ has worked fine for us, it's essentially a proxy for an S3 bucket and you can parameterize image requests for scaling, dpi etc
- kevinflo 9y agoWe've had an excellent experience with http://cloudinary.com/ http://cloudinary.com/ for pretty much what you describe.
- netdur 9y agoas a consultant, I picked up cloudinary for a client, promised "75,000 Total Images & Videos" then a team of four people used the free data shortly, they contact us saying to either pay $44 per month or shutdown, why? we are over free bandwidth... relocated a developer to spent some hours writing a restful services, now paying ~$0.030 per GB
- thirdsun 9y ago> why? we are over free bandwidth... I don't have any experience with cloudinary, but to be fair, their pricing table mentions each plan's limitations pretty clearly. Is it really their fault that you underestimated the customer's requirements?
- frenchie4111 9y agoPoint of Sale integration API. This exists for Restaurant POS systems: http://omnivore.io/ http://omnivore.io/ but I want one for all POS systems.
- mtrimpe 9y agoAn API where I could point end user video uploads to and have them processed, transcoded and playable on all platforms. One that also works at the RTMP/WebRTC layer (i.e. not just an all-in-one JS library with it's own idea of a 'good UI') and doesn't require me to do an API call first to set up the stream for the user (i.e. encode 'upload rights' using expiring HMAC-signed blobs including restrictions such as maximum length and/or file-size to prevent people having me transcode movies for them for free.)
- boredprogrammer 9y agoNot sure if it quite fits the bill, but if your end user video uploads are stored on S3 or similar then zencoder does most of what you are looking for.
- revicon 9y agoAWS has it's own internal one too... https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/ https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/
- mtrimpe 9y agoThe hard part is the ingestion services; which aren't as easy to set up as they seem since a proper one is essentially a reverse CDN (content ingestion network if you'd like ;-)
- tarr11 9y agoNatural Language API with a well-defined ontology
- matthewayne 9y agoHave you checked out Google's Natural Language API? https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/reference/rest/ https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/reference/res...
- seanwilson 9y agoInstagram API that didn't require approval for basic things like downloading the image for a given Instagram URL. :P They've made it incredibly restrictive now.
- raverbashing 9y agoWell, this is web scraping, not necessary an API problem (depends on their tos as well, of course)
- motyar 9y agoJust add ?__a=1 with any instagram URL read -> https://medium.com/@motyar/instagrams-public-json-apis-330e4e3f5307 https://medium.com/@motyar/instagrams-public-json-apis-330e4...
- seanwilson 9y agoIs that a sanctioned way of doing it though? I don't want this to break later. Their https://api.instagram.com/oembed/?url= https://api.instagram.com/oembed/?url= endpoint is at least documented but doesn't give full resolution photos and only limited metadata.
- jamespitts 9y agoThis is probably too general of a question.
- RingoBear 9y agoA LinkedIn API that allows you to get a list of a user's contacts. This used to exist until they made it available only to "approved partners" a couple years ago.
- reitanqild 9y agoA webhook or something that would tell me when a phone number changes owner. I.e.: when we bill someone weekly for something and then the phone number changes owner we want to stop immediately. Same if you send sms-es that you don’t want delivered to anyone but the intended recipient.
- amiller2571 9y agoI can understand the positive uses for such an API. For the uses you mentioned it would be great. However, I hope nothing like that is ever made! It would get abused to no end. I've personally changed number multiple times for privacy reasons.
- reitanqild 9y agoI see your point but as long as the 1. You only get notifications for numbers you sign up to watch 2. The webhook only notifies me that <number> will be transferred <at> (using some data format) then it shouldn't be a problem, should it?
- amiller2571 9y agoI think it would be ok as long as it didn't tell you what the person's new number is or who now owns <number> if it gets reassigned.
- reitanqild 9y agoOk, then we agree :-) We just wanted to know so that we wouldn't charge the new owner for things the old owner ordered etc.
- tatsuhirosatou 9y agoReddit/HN like forum as an API. I want a forum for my site, using my own templates and integrated into my app, but without having to code the forum myself. What buttercms does for blogs, but for forums.
- BatFastard 9y agoI second that, it might exist, but its not easy to find.
- gwintrob 9y agoDiscourse has an API: http://docs.discourse.org/ http://docs.discourse.org/
- OJFord 9y agoWould you really describe Discourse as "Reddit/HN like" though?
- Boxxed 9y agoI wish AWS autoscaling groups had a "recycle every machine" operation.
- frenchie4111 9y agoI agree with this. Currently it is super annoying to upgrade a group to a new launch config
- frenchie4111 9y agoJust found this: https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools
- andrewfong 9y agoLet me programmatically schedule a task to run at a specific time, just once. E.g. if my user tells me to remind them about something in a day, I want to schedule a task to do that exactly 24 hours from now. I'm sure this exists already but it's hard to find because searching usually points me to a cronjob service. But what I'm looking for is distinct from a that. I don't want to run something every minute or hour or checking if there's any work to do. I just want a given task to run as a pre-determined time, scaled to any arbitrary number of tasks.
- rocqua 9y agoThe cron alternative that does something only once is 'at'.
- Ao7bei3s 9y agoThe modern at alternative is: systemd-run --user --on-calendar=23:20 notify-send Example Or relative with --on-active=60. And you automatically get the normal systemd tooling, e.g. systemctl list-timers.
- merb 9y agowell this works fine for a single host. but if you deal with a cluster or inside a cloud you better use kubernetes for that.
- bkovacev 9y agoCelery?
- megamindbrian 9y agoI am building a set of Nodejs ipy notebooks to do this kind of stuff: https://github.com/megamindbrian/jupytangular https://github.com/megamindbrian/jupytangular Eventually I want to wrap it in an Angular interface.
- Phenomabomb 9y agoI've heard good things about Autohotkey, but every time I try to do even the simplest of tasks it becomes a hassle. Like even just clicking on a specific point on your screen you have to know the exact coordinates of the place you want clicked. It seems like it'd be very easy just to record where you want to click.
- mclifton 9y agoA generic communication API (this might exist). When I want to communicate with my customer, it handles how they receive the message - whether that's SMS, Email, IM, slack, etc.
- thunderrabbit 9y agoYep. I thought of this too. The recipient can specify which way to receive notifications from whom.
- buckhx 9y agoFront https://frontapp.com/ https://frontapp.com/ might be what youre looking for. If you want to do the plumbing yourself, Smooch is more at the API level.
- freyfogle 9y agoNot quite what you're asking for, but here is a service that provides the opposite side of that - all customer messages come into a single queue on your side and can then be processed by customer service and/or answered by a bot https://hubtype.com/ https://hubtype.com/
- 5_minutes 9y agoA dead-easy scraper API
- ieb 9y agoAn API that had close to real time feed of all closed captioning for news sites and those who were speaking.
- urlbox 9y agoMultiple choice question and answer API for an e-learning site, for mini-tests and full exams. Ended up using classmarker, but wasn't able to customise it to the look and feel of the rest of the site.
- mistercow 9y agoA postgres API to specify query plans directly, bypassing the planner. I usually know exactly what algorithm makes the most sense, and it's not uncommon for the planner to choose something considerably worse, forcing me to break queries up, write them in strange ways, or disable strategies.
- b3b0p 9y agoVideo Games. There are a few, but none provide some important information or have a reliable, complete data set. In particular, box art, UPC codes. From my research the Giant Bomb and Moby Games API's seem to be the most complete, but neither have the UPC. The only place I can find that is another API which is rather lacking in completeness and data.
- taysic 9y agoA language API- finding synonyms or categories to words
- artpar 9y agoYou can use nltk/wordnet bindings ? checkout hypernymn and holonym.
- akcreek 9y agoI need an accurate way to count words on a variety of documents, with and without renderable text. Could be an image, pdf, docx, etc. The renderable text isn't an issue, but the non has been for me. I've tried several OCR products and none have worked well as we often have something like an image of a hand written document or a low quality scan of an old document. Maybe something with computer vision instead of OCR is the right solution though as I don't need to know what the text says, I just need a count of the words or characters for languages that use symbols.
- flylib 9y ago1) an API around freight shipping 2) an API to connect with insurance carriers as a broker
- fancy_pantser 9y agoShipRush does freight and LTL via API. On the downside, it's not as clean/easy to use as EasyPost. https://shiprush.com/developer https://shiprush.com/developer
- abootstrapper 9y agoA simple AB testing API.
- afinemonkey 9y agowhat would that look like? Is this kind of what you mean https://conductrics.com/features/ https://conductrics.com/features/ ?
- armis 9y agoYears ago I've created embeddable A/B testing platform (but only for PHP projects). It's super simple to implement and relevant to your wish http://www.binpress.com/app/multivariate-ab-testing-for-php/1897 http://www.binpress.com/app/multivariate-ab-testing-for-php/...
- vyrotek 9y agoAn affordable API or platform to build live streaming communities such as twitch.tv
- ozzmotik 9y agoone that did all the hard work of coming up with a product to build, as that's generally the part I fail at :c
- nathanken 9y agoSometime back I wished I had a light weight CMS that can serve your content and allow you to program sections of your content so that you can make it more dynamic. For example, I can have something like this as the content: The sum of @Var1 and @Var2 is #Sum and then we can program #Sum (we call this an expression) to return the sum of @Var1 and @Var2. Once I pass the values for the variables @Var1 and @Var2 to API, let's say 1 and 2 correspondingly. Then the api would return you the content as: The sum of 1 and 2 is 3 I couldn't find something that could help me with this so I build one. You can visit https://www.dialoguewise.com/ https://www.dialoguewise.com/ in case you have a similar requirement. More on expressions here: https://docs.dialoguewise.com/expressions/ https://docs.dialoguewise.com/expressions/
- michaeloblak 9y agoNot exactly this, but https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com is a lightweight CMS from Google Spreadsheets.
- tmaly 9y agoa really good directory / search for APIs. There is so much out there, it's like a needle in a haystack literally
- pdimitar 9y agoThat would be the best thing happening to programming in a while... if it happened. I'd pay for such a service.
- diehell 9y agoAPI for musical instruments, gear, equipment and its info? If anyone know a good one, please do share.
- SirLJ 9y agounlimited stock market API
- sharemywin 9y agovar MarketingCost = 0; var customer = api.getNewCustomer(MarketingCost); var BankAccount = api.Sell(customer);
- kidproquo 9y agoAn easy way to get a webpage's image/thumbnail. For e.g. get the the main product image from an Amazon URL.
- Old_Thrashbarg 9y agoA good affordable https API to determine location from IP address.