Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

[shafqat]

Are there APIs that you wish existed to help make your work easier? Help your startup? Or just allow you to build cool products?

[dlg]

- US & State Government tax information. The tax code is amazingly complex. It would be good if you could figure out the tax implications of various events. Better if they simplified the tax code to where this was possible. Moreover, data.gov so far is a disappointment. Maybe they'll improve it. But I'd love to dig in to purchasing and personnel costs for every branch of government.

- Good stock market historical tick data (and streaming data). Opentick tried for a time, but mostly you need to contact expensive services. This makes it hard to mess around.

- A good local event API. Lots of companies have tried, few have good results.

- LinkedIn: They've been promising an open contact book API since 2007, but have kept it closed. If they had an open API (that lets you actually store data/invite), it would mean a lot of sites would be building on them.

- My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried.

- Anyone you have an account with (Financial firms, banks, vendors) would have a standard commerce API. Sure, today you can export stuff in Quicken, etc formats, but Mint had to do a big deal with Yodlee to get the data in a uniform, queryable way.

And, mad props to Microsoft for opening the Bing API with pretty good terms. Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it. Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

[camccann]

Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

Anyone who's done Microsoft-based development? MS is incredibly developer-friendly compared to many platform vendors. It's a point of business strategy for them (if memory serves me, that's what Ballmer's infamous "developers, developers, developers, developers" thing was about in context).

Just don't try and mix in any technology from one of MS's competitors and you'll be fine.

[jimbokun]

"My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried."

I work on a site that's trying to do that for the learning sciences.

http://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/

Most of the data so far is from various studies in the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, because the head of the PSLC can tell the researchers to put their data in there, but we'd like to convince others to share, too.

I also happen to be working on a web services API to this data at work right now.

[nl]

"Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it"

It always surprises me when people say this. Apparently it's not widely known that Google do make their search API available: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje

(Before anyone says "that's just the AJAX API", please READ THE LINK, and scroll down to see the Java & PHP samples)

[leif]

Tax information would be HUGE. I would also like to see an API for general government records.

For example, if we had voting records, we could finally stop hearing all this "but you voted on -----" "no I didn't go back and check the record" "no look you voted on ----- which is basically the same" "shut up I served in the war" "yay war" stuff every election. We could just look it up and say "hey look you did". The Times "Congress API" is on its way to this, but last I checked, all it had was the attendance records.

[systemtrigger]

My body, starting with my brain. Please provide clear documentation.

[ksowocki]

The UI layer of an app is more or less a (primitive) API into the human mind.

Though, I think you're right. The documentation is quite poor.

[mpk]

On a similar note, I remember reading a comment somewhere requesting a search interface for reality 'so I can find my damn keys when I lose them'.

[sp332]

You're not the only one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578999

[caffeine]

Also a GNU screen implementation would be nice. ^A-D during certain interminable lectures, particularly.

[cloudkj]

Amen. I've always wanted a way to "diff" the different states that my body has been in.

[barredo]

I would like:

  storeNewBrainMemory();

and

  saveBrainToDisk();

[Jim_Neath]

I need cmd + z for my brain.

[pilate]

Banks. Online payment processing is a mess.

[sunir]

Interestingly, since the failure of OFX, many many banks in North America prefer screen scraping because they can guarantee the web interface has accurate data since their actual customers use it. Conversely, these banks find supporting APIs to be highly fragile since no one is watching them.

I find that logic amazing, but considering how old the online banking software is and the high risk of changing it wholesale, I don't think they are in a position to fix it in the short term.

[msie]

Free or low-cost tv schedule api. Currently one has to pay about $500 per market/region per month.

[yellowbkpk]

Not exactly an API (just data), but it's cheap (USD20/year):

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

[kbalsen2001]

Check out http://www.cruxle.com. It recommends movies and TV shows available on TV you might love to watch. We are planning to open our TV guide recommendations via XML-based API. Please send us an email at [email protected], if you would like to access our APIs.

[gsiener]

++

[ahlatimer]

Generally: I wish practically everything had an open API. It's incredible what people can build when they have decent access to an API.

Specifically:

TuneCore, as it would make my startup idea a whole lot easier.

School registrations. I really wish there was some standardized API for universities. That'd make it possible to plug in the classes you want to take along with when you want to take them and get back a personalized schedule. As it is now (at least for my school), you pretty much have to write down on paper the classes you want to take along with when they're available and do it all yourself. I'd prefer something like this be standardized so one could make one website that would serve all universities and their students.

[siong1987]

+1 for school registrations. My school only provides READ access to the courses catalog but not WRITE access to actually register courses.

http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.h... http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.x...

I really wish that they will provide one in future.

[tiffani]

Appliances: stove, oven, coffee maker, refrigerator. Various other household items: garage doors, locks, etc. This overly expensive, yet dumb, flat panel TV we just bought. Extending out to the driveway...my car. The energy meter on the side of the house (read-only access, obviously, just to keep the power co. happy). The most mundane stuff could use an API, if you ask me!

[thorsview]

have you heard of http://www.pachube.com?

[nir]

Gmail.

But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.

[jodrellblank]

GMail has APIs - POP3 and IMAP.

[raghus]

Real-estate API (open homes, home sales by zip etc)

[tvon]

Funny, I came to say the same thing.

Definite business opportunity there, the two services I have found (in this case I'm looking for Texas data) both consider using an iframe "integration".

[arjunb]

zillow has a pretty decent api

[ksowocki]

Sports statistics. NFL, MLB, NBA, etc.

[grumpycanuck]

I work for a sports data integration company, so you can get this data easily. Oh, you mean for free? Yeah, that's not gonna happen any time soon. Someone has to pay people to collect those statistics and then make them available.

[shafqat]

Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats.

I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.

[petervandijck]

An API into the postal system of every country.

[baran]

APIs into hospitals medical data.

[shafqat]

I'll start. Wish there was an API that:

1) Allowed me to find high quality, license free images easily.

2) Let me access LinkedIn data. I know LinkedIn has an API, but its not open.

[dkasper]

On flickr there is an option to search for commercially usable images. To do it from the API you need "prior arrangement" though.

[mpk]

Second that LinkedIn API request.

[paloalto80]

Try Photos8 for public domain photos

[svjunkie]

Disclaimer: I'm an amateur in every sense of the word but eager to learn. A Craigslist API could make for some really cool mashups but many of those could probably also be created using the RSS feeds they provide. Do you see any substantial advantage to a distinct Craigslist API?

[pyre]

There was a mashup that did something with Craigslist and photos, but Craigslist shut them down. I think it allowed you to view the listing with the photos in it (rather than needing to click on each listing to see the photos).

[ajaimk]

Hacker News API?

[zyb09]

Subway. On the stations here they have displays, that show in how many minutes the next train will arrive (which is real-time data). Would be cool if they broadcast this information on the net, you could see if you need to hurry to the station or not.

[brianobush]

a real-world grep. this might be solved in my lifetime, since books, notes, etc are all moving to digital. sometimes i just wish i could grep for x and it would find x in all my books, notebooks, etc.

[Poleris]

I'm actually working on this problem. It's remarkable the amount of content we actually generate and the number of services/mediums we generate them on. Simply fetching all the data and hosting it centrally is a large enough problem, let alone indexing all of it.

[lamnk]

IMDB's API

[nanexcool]

Have you tried TMDb? http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/

I've played with it and seems good enough.

[7a1c9427]

Freebase? It has data on most movies in IMDB. And an open API.

[rwhitman]

A solid global small business geo data API.

Fortunately there are a few different startups working on this, and a rudimentary way to hack it with Google AJAX API but there's still nobody who can allow me to simply punch in name+city search and give me the address, geocode meta reliably for any city in the world and without cache restrictions.

Google has it all but needs to open this data up better.

[md7]

Centralized Spam filter API with an access to Gmail spam filter, Yahoo Mail spam filter, etc. to report spam and check emails for spam.

[pyre]

Why centralized? Why not just make it decentralized with peering?