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Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

157 points| afinemonkey | 8 years ago | reply

141 comments

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[+] onli|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] netvarun|8 years ago|reply
My startup Semantics3 works on this problem - https://semantics3.com/

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)

[+] ziikutv|8 years ago|reply
A lot of retailers misuse these SKUs and UPCs. there are some that have a many to many relationships. Its horrendous.

You can checkout Open Food Facts though the amount of data is sparse.

[+] bmelton|8 years ago|reply
Technopedia (a BDNA product) does exactly this, but might be expensive for a startup.

https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/

Disclaimer: I used to work for BDNA, and on this product, but have since left the company.

[+] ForrestN|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] bgdkbtv|8 years ago|reply
https://uploadcare.com/ is great for image processing and allows you to specify your own storage option as well, including S3. Give them a look!
[+] hartator|8 years ago|reply
Yeah, dealing with images are usually the worst.
[+] ForrestN|8 years ago|reply
Thank you all! Will investigate! Maybe we need an api for finding apis??
[+] tatsuhirosatou|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] BatFastard|8 years ago|reply
I second that, it might exist, but its not easy to find.
[+] reitanqild|8 years ago|reply
A webhook or something that would tell me when a phone number changes owner.

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.

[+] amiller2571|8 years ago|reply
I can understand the positive uses for such an API. For the uses you mentioned it would be great.

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.

[+] andrewfong|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] rocqua|8 years ago|reply
The cron alternative that does something only once is 'at'.
[+] 12s12m|8 years ago|reply
What exactly do you mean by a "task". Just remind you by sending you an email? or actually running a command on your computer?
[+] danenania|8 years ago|reply
I think Zapier and other similar services can do this sort of thing?
[+] mtrimpe|8 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] orasis|8 years ago|reply
I wanted machine learning-based app configuration. So I built it and spun it out as a separate product: https://improve.ai/
[+] nathanken|8 years ago|reply
Sometime back I wished I had a light weight CMS that can serve your content and allow you to program sections of your content so that you can make it more dynamic. For example, I can have something like this as the content:

The sum of @Var1 and @Var2 is #Sum

and then we can program #Sum (we call this an expression) to return the sum of @Var1 and @Var2. Once I pass the values for the variables @Var1 and @Var2 to API, let's say 1 and 2 correspondingly. Then the api would return you the content as:

The sum of 1 and 2 is 3

I couldn't find something that could help me with this so I build one. You can visit https://www.dialoguewise.com/ in case you have a similar requirement. More on expressions here: https://docs.dialoguewise.com/expressions/

[+] mclifton|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] superasn|8 years ago|reply
An API that returns top 100 relevant web results via Javascript (aka the google ajax api which sadly they discontinued).
[+] erikrothoff|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] BatFastard|8 years ago|reply
So a "Low cost" billing API, everyone's dream!
[+] tejasm|8 years ago|reply
Try ChargeBee? Solves a lot of subscription-related problems. It's a product and not API.
[+] whiskers08xmt|8 years ago|reply
What would be an acceptable percentage to pay? Are we talking 10% or 2%?
[+] akcreek|8 years ago|reply
I need an accurate way to count words on a variety of documents, with and without renderable text. Could be an image, pdf, docx, etc. The renderable text isn't an issue, but the non has been for me. I've tried several OCR products and none have worked well as we often have something like an image of a hand written document or a low quality scan of an old document. Maybe something with computer vision instead of OCR is the right solution though as I don't need to know what the text says, I just need a count of the words or characters for languages that use symbols.
[+] b3b0p|8 years ago|reply
Video Games.

There are a few, but none provide some important information or have a reliable, complete data set. In particular, box art, UPC codes. From my research the Giant Bomb and Moby Games API's seem to be the most complete, but neither have the UPC. The only place I can find that is another API which is rather lacking in completeness and data.

[+] ransom1538|8 years ago|reply
Easy way to get geo from ip. I hate a lot of the options: downloading binarys or using google's that just regulates you.
[+] jtolj|8 years ago|reply
A cost effective API into whois data that doesn't come across as sketchy or fragile.
[+] cjonas|8 years ago|reply
I worked on a project for one of the big registars and even they didn't have a proper whois api!
[+] gregable|8 years ago|reply
Most use cases of APIs into whois data are sketchy (typically email spam).
[+] feistypharit|8 years ago|reply
Whois data itself is also somewhat suspect in general. It's best effort, not required to be correct in any way.
[+] seancoleman|8 years ago|reply
A real estate API for active/sold residential and commercial listings.
[+] rgbrgb|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mkilling|8 years ago|reply
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)

[+] wolfgang42|8 years ago|reply
What does EPC stand for?
[+] mistercow|8 years ago|reply
A postgres API to specify query plans directly, bypassing the planner. I usually know exactly what algorithm makes the most sense, and it's not uncommon for the planner to choose something considerably worse, forcing me to break queries up, write them in strange ways, or disable strategies.