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Ask HN: As a Developer, what API would you like to use, but does not exist?

23 points by rubythis ↗ HN
I would like to create an API for developers, but not sure what API is needed at this time.

Can you share any requests that you have for an API that would be helpful to you? It could make your life easier or be more convenient than existing solutions (such as a gem or library).

It could be something difficult such as Face Recognition. Or something simple such as converting from feet to meters or getting current time in UTC.

Alternately, it could be an API that is useful to you, but is too expensive or does not offer a free tier.

And yes, this API will offer a free tier. (And, it will be completely free for a while.)

36 comments

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mabynogy
A parsing API handling common forms like "strings", parens, {blocks}, key:value ...
rubythis
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Can you explain? What would you send, a string? What would the response be? Can you please provide an example?

mabynogy
> What would you send, a string?

Yes (or an URL).

> What would the response be?

JSON or CSV with options to allow filtering on certain types of tokens (only numbers or strings for example).

The output could be a tree (with children for a block) or flat.

I'm on freenode (see my profile) if you want to talk about that.

rubythis
I'm still not clear on what this would do. Can you provide a few examples?
sqln00b
A remote git API, showing me the output of (chained) git commands on arbitrary remote repositories and so allowing me to analyze them (much like GitHub already does for their repositories).
billconan
an api to control gdb, bash. a real time stock price api.
rubythis
Do you mean GNU Debugger? Is the debugger running on your machine? How would the API work?

How would an API control Bash? Is the Bash shell running on your machine?

Regarding a real time stock price API, I thought of this as well. I will look into it. If I can find a good source of data this seems like a great feature.

billconan
because I'm creating a terminal emulator for bash. and I realized that there is no way to communicate with bash other than sending and receiving text.

if bash supports an api to send and execute command and query for states. that will make many things easier.

for example, query for the current location "pwd". many terminal emulator just send this command and parse the returned string and hide it from the user.

if bash supports an api for you to directly query for this information, the terminal enumerator can be implemented cleanly.

for gdb, I want to understand a code by generating flame graph like execution history.

for that I want to step over each line of the program and dump a call stack. gdb has python support within it, but it doesn't seem to provide an api to control it from the outside.

soulchild37
API to check if today/certain date is a public holiday
rubythis
Is this for the US, or any arbitrary country? Does it take the country as a param?
redmaple
if you have to ask - you won't get far.

They told you what they want - now go build something in your vision. Once you have users they will tell you what they want.

jazoom
Seems far more sensible to me to gather more information from the original idea giver before going off to build something.
rubythis
Thanks. I thought that is the job of a developer or even a "hacker", as the case may be.
rubythis
What are you talking about? I am just finding out what people want.

It's not my vision.

And, besides that, I already launched the service. That's pretty far for 1 day.

soulchild37
Good question, multiple country support would be an awesome addition. Yes, can pass country as a param.

Difficulty of the implementation would be gathering public holiday info for different country as it would change every year.

sagarghai
A real time stock market API.
rubythis
This seems like a good choice, as it was mentioned by someone else, and I have consumed a few recently.

I'll look for a source...

jetti
The Investor's Exchange (IEX) offers the ability to resell their data stream for free, so that would be a good place to start. Getting real time stock quotes from other exchanges is going to be expensive.
FourSigma
Food classification API that has only two responses: Hotdog or Not Hotdog.
rubythis
What about "Is it a vegetable?" Pizza is a vegetable.
bjourne
Re-encode my videos? Scrape web pages? I supply an url and get back plain text from the page.
rubythis
I had the same idea about Web Page Scraping...may be good...
remyp
There used to be a product called Kimono that did scraping well, but they were acquired by Palantir and shut down.
logn
> supply an url and get back plain text from the page

I would like to have someone (a Java or Kotlin developer) take over https://github.com/MachinePublishers/ScreenSlicer and rework it. It's a project that intends to do exactly this. You enter a url, it finds a search box, enters the user's search query, uses single-layer neural nets and text munging to extract the search results, and then separates each result into a few fields (url, date, title, summary).

But it was written as a complete app and so is of limited use to most people. If it were remade to be a library it would have much more utility.

Beware there are lots of ugly regexes and terrible hacks. This is html afterall, the Cthulhu way.

Recently re-licensed from AGPL to Apache 2.0.

Also my time is busy on other things. I would be able to answer some questions occasionally but largely I can't provide much help.