Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API? What does it do? Make you money? Solve your crucial pain point? |
Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API? What does it do? Make you money? Solve your crucial pain point? |
Helps me automate stuff around my life with a few small apps that connect to Telegram message threads. Summaries from other APIs, smart home functionality, family errands and shopping list reminders with my spouse and more.
Made Hacker News Alerts bot - https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot. Basically using it as a personal feed of stories and for keywords monitoring (Like "telegram" for example :) )
Does everything you want it to.
Has a few fun surprises that you didn't expect that make it even more fun to make things with.
Simple to use.
Well documented.
Test playground at your fingertips to experiment with any call you like.
One of the first APIs ever released and you can still count the number of other available APIs that positively compare on one hand.
flickr.places.findByLatLon returns a placesId based on a supplied lat/long of somewhere you might be interested in.
You can then use that placeId to get photos around that location with a call to flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic
Even more amusing is that you can get the actual shape co-ordinates for that place (for example the shape values or the polyline values of your local suburb or city).
I can tell you that I didn't expect to be able to access the shapefiles, bounding boxes and polylines for essentially every suburb I needed for a location based app I was building 10 years ago from a photo app API.
... but they have a magnificent 'context' problem: Qt is complicated and you never really know where you are in the architecture. There are 8 'Window' classes and you don't know if it's for Widgets, QML/Quick, QGraphics, or legacy or what.
I double-dare you to go and figure out what JS engine they currently use and for what. Because it's evolved so much over the years, and they keep legacy stuff around, StackExchange comments are poorly noted with versioning, it's a labrynth of disinformation.
There are neat articles you can find if you dig, but my god, you shouldn't have to dig.
I learn 'foundational' things about QT all the time, and to add salt they have an article where they dare to indicate it's 'our' problem for their incoherent documentation, they literally state 'Dunning-Kolberg' effect on one of their pages! Total gaslighting.
The desperately need 'overview' documentation that are accessible and put everything in context - and especially it needs to be just presented in an organized way - literally the Left Hand Menu of their docs jumps around and you have no context. You're looking at Qt5 classes, search for something and only Qt6 variations come up, you have to flip to Google etc..
Some Qt classes are well documented, but there are serious problems. I honestly think Qt would be 25% more popular if they just explained things more clearly.
- Get a list of your 10 most listened artists
- For each artist get 5 similar artists
- Now make an new playlists, and for the 50 similar artists, get their most popular song and insert it into the playlist
If a service collects my data, but doesn’t have an API, then I just have to wait to find a comparable service that does.
Cloudflare Workers are awesome to work with.