Ask HN: What's an API that you wish existed?

8 points by tornikeo a day ago

15 comments

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Here are some APIs that I personally wish existed:

1. A public Google Trends API. It's currently in Beta, and I can't access it.

2. I'd pay a pretty penny for an API for OpenAI trends (or Anthropic trends), etc. To discover what people are talking about.

3. I'd also love a discord 'trends' API. Again, the main question I'm looking to answer is 'what topic are people talking about right now?'.

What's an API that you wish existed?

y42 a day ago

1. Open API for rental/real estate stuff at immoscout24...

There's an API but you have to pay for it. Which I understand on one side, but then: immoscout24 is basicly the biggest player and this is not about consumer goods but one essential good: flats, space to live. So I think it should be mandatory to offer data to everyone who wants to research house & flat pricing/demand data.

2. A generic API for governmental financial transaction data! This would make research so much easiere. There are couple of open data platforms, but look at how scrambled the data is. What is a "financial transaction"? It's basically nothing else then "from, to, amount, reason, category" - I know there's more, but you can break it down, if you want. So, right now every city, district and government is maintaining their own "database". I once tried to analyse EFRE data. Turns out, while this data is basically open and free, every party offers their own weird format, XLSX, CSV and you name it.

I don't see why no one ever tooks the effort to "normalize" such a simple thing - again: I know there's more. But the big picture should simply allow you to create a generic protocol/stream for that kind of data.

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dlcarrier 5 hours ago

A free Reddit API for third party tools to increase usability (sometimes also called accessibility)

Then again, I probably make much better use of my time, because that doesn't exist.

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  • chistev 4 hours ago

    I made a comment before seeing yours.

    This was what I said - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702864

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    • dlcarrier 4 hours ago

      There's several Reddit scraper libraries that could be useful. Most popular YouTube clients use scraping, despite Google's active attempts to evade them, and considering Reddit's extremely slow development cadence and poor software quality, I'd expect Reddit scrapers to be pretty stable.

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tmtvl 11 hours ago

An itch.io API which ticks all the boxes for the Heroic Games Launcher. The Itch app is pretty terrible and Heroic is fairly okay, so it'd be nice if I could manage my collection like I do my GOG collection.

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sockbot 13 hours ago

API to interface with my telecom companies to start and stop service, manage my account, book service techs, create billing reports

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chistev 4 hours ago

Reddit keeps banning my account despite all my best attempts at evading. It's spooky.

So an API that let's me post and comment on Reddit (I can't use the official Reddit API because I get banned as I said before)

I don't even know if this is possible. But I'd pay for the service.

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KellyCriterion a day ago

You are basicly looking for an API to tell you where to place your stock bets then, right? :-D

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  • hahahahhaah 2 hours ago

    I like the current stock apis but they limit the end date / time to now.

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