An 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.
This 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.
Product 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.
Yes, 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.
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)
Sounds 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.
Hey, 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.
So, 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.
Cool. 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.
How 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.
I think this is a really cool idea, but I feel like it could be described in a better way.
'Machine learning-based app configuration' is very techie and vague and could mean a LOT of different things in a number of realms. What about something more specific and benefit-focused, like: 'AI that automatically improves your site's design'? To me something like that communicates what the product is more clearly, assuming I understand it correctly of course.
Thanks for the feedback. Working to find the best language has been a hard slog. It's actually not for improving a web site's design but is targeted specifically at mobile apps. I'm using the "configuration" language now so that developers maybe get an idea of how it integrates.
Subscription 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.
These 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.
Easiest solution is to put Cloudflare in front of your site for free and they'll pass in the geo data in the request header. Agreed that playing with binaries that you have to periodically download is horrible.
https://ipinfo.io works well. Alternatively, CloudFlare also works well if you just need the country code, which it can attach as an HTTP header to each request.
I used http://ip-api.com/json, the precision varies but at least the country level is fine. From the limited tests I did I was in the 5 km radios range.
This 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.
The 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.
Works 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.
1. 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)
An 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.
as 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
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?
An 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.)
Not 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.
The 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 ;-)
Instagram 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.
Is that a sanctioned way of doing it though? I don't want this to break later. Their https://api.instagram.com/oembed/?url= endpoint is at least documented but doesn't give full resolution photos and only limited metadata.
A 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.
Reddit/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.
Let 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.
I'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.
When I'm working on tasks like that I like to add a hotkey that just puts the mouse's location on a tooltip for me. Sometimes you can just Tab to whatever you're trying to click, too, which is robust to window position.
When I'm working on tasks like that I like to add a hotkey that just puts the mouse's location on a tooltip for me. Sometimes you can just Tab to whatever you're trying to click, too, which is robust to window position.
A 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.
Not 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/
150 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadBut 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.
You can checkout Open Food Facts though the amount of data is sparse.
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)
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.
https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/
Disclaimer: I used to work for BDNA, and on this product, but have since left the company.
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.
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
that's not to say I haven't had some super weird "how do they know..." moments with Facebook ads lately...
'Machine learning-based app configuration' is very techie and vague and could mean a LOT of different things in a number of realms. What about something more specific and benefit-focused, like: 'AI that automatically improves your site's design'? To me something like that communicates what the product is more clearly, assuming I understand it correctly of course.
They're better than nothing, but be careful when relying on them for anything you need accurate Geo-IP info for.
For customers that live on the borders it is very important that correct country is selected.
Edit: Great question by the way!
https://vimeo.com/71278954#t=14m
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.
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)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_process_chain
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.
relocated a developer to spent some hours writing a restful services, now paying ~$0.030 per GB
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?
https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/reference/res...
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.
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.
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?
We just wanted to know so that we wouldn't charge the new owner for things the old owner ordered etc.
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.
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.
Eventually I want to wrap it in an Angular interface.