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Ask HN: Which sites/platforms do you wish had an API?
One can build cool projects on top of APIs like those of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Which sites do you wish had an API?
- AznHisoka 9y agoHere are the data-related API's I wish existed: 1. Indeed.com - analytics on how many job ads mentioned a specific brand or keyword. 2. Yelp - analytics on how many checkins a restaurant or chain got every month. 3. Apple Store - analytics on how many downloads an app got every month. 4. Amazon Reviews - an API to retrieve reviews for a product. 5. Google Trends - API to retrieve historical trends for a keyword 6. Google Search API - API to get search results for a keyword 7. Linkedin Company Page API - API to get the feed for any company page 8. Instagram API - API to get the feed for any instagram user or search results for any keyword Here are the non-data API's I wished exist (that could be potential low-hanging fruit startup ideas): ....None
- ReedJessen 9y agoI think some of those already exist but I might be misunderstanding your needs. For example, here is the Amazon Reviews API: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/EX_RetrievingCustomerReviews.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/EX...
- AznHisoka 9y agoThat gives me the iframe URL. I want the actual review text. Amazon deprecated that back in 2010 or so making that API virtually useless.
- james2doyle 9y agoYou can query Google search using the Firefox search bar endpoint: https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=a+query https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=fir... This returns an array of 10 of matches for the term in `q`. This is how the AnyComplete command for Hammerspoon works: https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete
- saamm 9y agoFor #1, it's not an API, but you may find this interesting: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/category-trends https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/category-trends
- djbeadle 9y agoGaiaGPS - I wish there was an easy way to query my GPS tracks!
- pedalpete 9y agoWhat does it mean to "query my GPS tracks"?? Do you mean query points within the track? Or search for tracks? Or something else?
- djbeadle 9y agoI would really like to programmatically download my tracks. I guess I could make all tracks public and then scrape the my feed page, but a more elegant solution would be nice.
- rmprescott 9y agoMint
- kqr 9y agoCan I say all of them? Actually, something that may be even more important is free and open access to APIs. I'm okay with registration procedures for larger volumes, but not for hobby use. It seems to me an unnecessary obstacle. If the hit rates are similar to what a user with a web browser would produce why is my script forced to register when the web user is not?
- setr 9y agoThe problem is you can usually just get around the limiter pretty easily, isn't it? Like one site I was scraping did rate limiting by ip; I just spawned 5 aws boxes to do the scraping. And with aws pricing model, there was no real reason to stop at only 5 boxes, since each request was independent.. If I were planning to make a profit on that data, I might well have spawned 1000 boxes to speed things up (took 2 weeks of 24/7 scraping on 5)
- MoBattah 9y agoCan you elaborate?
- setr 9y agoIf you do non-registration rate limiting on an api, then you still need some identifier to calculate api usage; its not hard to find an identifier for a single machine (ie IP address, which isn't actually but close enough), But without registration, theres no way I can think of to associate multiple machines with a single person. And presumably if you're rate-limiting on individual users of the api (and not the total usage across all users), then you're trying to maximize the number of users accessing the api simultaneously (ie you don't want 1 user maxing out resources, denying all other users). But with things like cloud computing, its trivial for a single user to have an absurd number of machines (legally). AWS charges on compute-hour, not number of machines. Running 1 instance for 50 hours and 50 instances for 1 hour has the same cost. But for the server, that difference is significant; you apply rate limiting because you don't want to be hammered for a short duration followed by nothing, at least not from one user. Registration can also be bypassed somewhat trivially (temporary emails and aliases), but its a good deal more effort than bypassing non-registration rate limiting. And presumably most people who want to scrape a dataset large enough to bother bypassing the limiter are nautrally, by their job, aware of what I've described. Bypassing registration takes a good deal more work, and more specific tooling So tl;dr Rate limiting by ip only affects 1 machine, but not necessarily 1 user Rate limiting by registration affects n machines, with 1 user Before cloud vps, 1 machine basically correlated to 1 user. Now its trivial for n machines to correlate to 1 user.
- psoots 9y agoI would like to see software producers provide an API to download the latest release and a list of previous releases. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to automate the installation of (primarily desktop) software (Slack, IntelliJ, etc.)
- RunningDroid 9y agoI think a Metalink* file would work for this as long as the software can figure out the versioning scheme in use. *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink
- ivanfon 9y agoLinux package managers are a beautiful thing.
- billconan 9y agoI hope some major stock trading website can have api for 1. historical data 2. real-time data 3. trading api credit card usage/history data (only for myself) that is across all credit card brand.
- raquo 9y agoI'm pretty sure APIs #1/2/3 do exist, although access costs thousands of dollars, making hobbyist usage impractical.
- lkowalcz 9y agoI think IEX has a free API with historical and real-time stock info: https://iextrading.com/developer/docs/ https://iextrading.com/developer/docs/
- lvturner 9y agotiingo.com has 1 & 2 (via IEX) and the prices (iirc) are not prohibitively expensive.
- ken 9y agoiWork files. There's been at least two completely different (and completely undocumented) formats so far, with not even a proprietary library for accessing them. I really wish I could provide integration with Numbers.app, but as a one-man shop I can't afford to get distracted with maintaining a reverse-engineered file format for one use case.
- jacquesc 9y agoGoogle Keep. We have been asking them for years, and Google hasnt done anything. Probably never should have started using it in the first place.
- ken 9y agoIs it too snarky to say I wish there were a usable API for Google Sheets? I spent a week reading documentation, downloading sample code, searching StackOverflow, digging through mailing list archives, and trying to debug what was happening on my test account, but I simply could not get their OAuth workflow to work at all. None of the {documentation, setup screens, sample code, observed behavior} match with any of the others. I mentioned this on HN once before and got a "I thought it was just me!" response.
- 66d8kk 9y agoAny online based computer game. GTA Online and Rocket League are two that spring to mind. The stuff we could create with that data!
- nasso 9y agoEve online has tons of APIs, and the entire game is very data driven with an open market, industry and more. Its kind of a developers wet dream if you like that kind of stuff. :)
- ezekg 9y agoAmazon. I'd love to be able to place orders without using a third-party that needs to know your CC/login credentials. So much automation could happen.
- noamrubin 9y agoWe do this! You can even do it without opening an Amazon account. https://zincapi.com/ https://zincapi.com/ Disclaimer: I work at Zinc.
- MoBattah 9y agoAll my banks, credit cards, investment accounts, etc.
- nulagrithom 9y agoI'm eagerly awaiting a US bank that lets me review transactions and things programmatically. Even better would be webhooks for transactions, or in front of transactions for custom verification. Oh the things I would build...
- sjtgraham 9y agoWe build this in the UK: https://teller.io/developer https://teller.io/developer
- dzek69 9y agoIt will be forced in Europe soon. Banks will be obligated to provide an API.
- vinylkey 9y agoNetflix would be nice. I'd love to be able to create playlists, or even play random things. Trying to watch through Arrow / Flash / Legends of Tomorrow / Supergirl in chronological order is a real pain in the butt.
- drspacemonkey 9y agoThe ability to create and share a netflix playlist, effectively user-created "TV networks", would be absolutely awesome. Most would be crap, but the same can be said for youtube playlists.
- fenwick67 9y agoEven better - if all the streaming services had an API that I could query to see who has what shows / movies. I'm sick of searching 3 catalogs (hulu, netflix, amazon) and finding out none of them have what I'm looking for.
- kaniskode 9y agoYou can use https://www.justwatch.com https://www.justwatch.com for that. It's really useful for finding shows on services you use.
- m_samuel_l 9y agoPFSense
- i_am_nobody 9y agoXBox
- travmatt 9y agoAmazon wishlist api
- fgandiya 9y agoSome of my college’s websites (dining services, course catalog). With an API, my senior project would be so much easier. Unfortunately, I had to scape the information needed which isn’t ideal.
- giza182 9y agoThe google popular hours API.
- MonkoftheFunk 9y agoGasBuddy for displaying on my magic mirror