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Show HN: Kanye.rest – A Free REST API for Random Kanye West Quotes
- docker_up 8y agoI love Kanye West. I think you need brazen, arrogant fearless artists that think and say preposterous things in order to move the thinking of a society for the better or for the worse. He has a dozen songs that I simply love that are older but still on my playlists, and I love that he immerses himself in creativity. Sure, he can be a colossal ass sometimes, but I still think he's an important part of our societal ecosystem. We need people like him in our pop culture just like we need Stephen Hawking, Maya Angelou, Muhammed Ali, etc.
- stochastic_monk 8y agoI think it’s less that our society needs him than that he is the unavoidable product of today’s society. Hari Seldon would have foreseen him.
- tomc1985 8y agoIt makes me sad that so many people let his ego run rampant. If anyone is in need of ego death it is him
- fineIllregister 8y agoIf you listen to Kanye's music, he is highly self-critical and introspective at many times. I think this is a type of fearlessness, specifically the ability to be so publicly vulnerable (though I don't know if that's what GP had in mind). Kanye's public image is reflective more of the pressures of his industry and how our celebrity culture depicts famous artists. However I think it goes beyond that to broader social and economic factors. Consider how many conversations there are on HN about dealing with imposter syndrome; if you compare Kanye's media portrayal and his music, I think there are strong parallels many people here could identify with.
- pkaler 8y agoI fire up either Kanye West or Jay-Z whenever I have that feeling in the pit of my stomach before doing a difficult thing. Sometimes you just need a little bit of brazen, bombast to get started. Added to my .zshrc: curl -s 'https://api.kanye.rest' | jq '.quote'
- Waterluvian 8y agoI think I agree but in a slightly different way. I see people like Kanye as the random noise added to a function to avoid getting stuck in a valley. He just kind of vomits thoughts into the world and some of them get you thinking.
- imperialdrive 8y agoI suppose that works, except then you could say the same thing about the US president. They are friends too no?
- christianjung 8y agoJust curious, how are you providing the free api? R you eating the cost?
- ajzbc 8y agoYeah... I have a small codefund ad on the site, but that doesn't do much because this product is an API. I have a support link, but I don't expect anyone to donate for something they will likely never use seriously.
- dessant 8y agoThe site appears to be hosted by GitHub, and the API is served by Heroku, which has a free tier with a soft bandwidth limit of 2TB/month.
- ajzbc 8y agoHosting the site cost nothing. Using $7/mo Heroku server for API with HTTPS and custom domain. Firebase can quickly start to cost money. Domain around $32/year. So it definitely does cost money to run, but not much at all.
- dessant 8y agoIf you want to reduce your costs, you can have HTTPS with a custom domain on a free Heroku app by using Cloudflare. Why are you using Firebase to serve quotes? I imagine the dataset could number just a couple thousand quotes max, which is fine to serve from memory after loading from a file at startup. Or if you're using Firebase as a convenient interface for adding new quotes, the app could update its internal cache of quotes once a day, without having to pay Firebase for each API call.
- ajzbc 8y agoYeah, I realized that after it started getting a lot of traffic. The problem is I kinda just made this for fun and have no idea what I am doing. Do you want to contribute? https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest
- beardog 8y agoRemember when someone created a joke kanye cryptocurrency and then his lawyers threatened to sue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye
- ajzbc 8y agoHopefully he never finds this :)
- sergiotapia 8y agoThis is awesome now I can build my Kanye as a Service company and pursue my seed round. Thank you.
- ajzbc 8y agoKaaS
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoKaaS is powered by the latest AI on modern blockchains in multi-cloud environments.. we're going to change the world.
- bencollier49 8y agoExcellent. I guess I ought to use this post to plug the Command Riker as a Service (CRaaS?) which I put together a while back, which operates in a similar vein. http://www.bencollier.info/fun/programming/python/2016/01/09/riker-service.html http://www.bencollier.info/fun/programming/python/2016/01/09... I suppose someone should put together a directory of these things at some point. Give it twenty years and we'll have a full universe of personality imprints (a la the McCoy Pauley) talking to each other over REST.
- mitchtbaum 8y ago"Don't HATEOAS the player. HATEOAS the game." - Kanye dot REST
- tomc1985 8y agoWhy all this infra to draw random lines from a text file?
- ajzbc 8y agoUsing Firebase to more easily add quotes. However, I did not anticipate this much traffic. As another user pointed out, I am probably going to need to cache the quotes to prevent an enormous amount of reads to the database. Feel free to contribute if you have good ideas :) https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest
- tomc1985 8y agoHonestly a four-line PHP script that reads a text file or calls `fortune` is probably going to be way more efficient
- dewey 8y agoFun? It's probably not OPs next serious SaaS startup.
- tomc1985 8y agoThen don't show it off on HN :/
- dewey 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. > A Show HN needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago(Potential copyright issue aside) It should do loops of KW beats as well. Talib Kweli's "Get By" for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVtpXvzzXiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVtpXvzzXiA
- chiefalchemist 8y agoElon Rust can't be that far behind.
- evanscottgray 8y agoI love this. Thank you :)
- ajzbc 8y agoOf course!