Show HN: Kanye.rest – A Free REST API for Random Kanye West Quotes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kanye.rest – A Free REST API for Random Kanye West Quotes

kanye.rest

56 pointsajzbc32 comments

I love Kanye West. I think you need brazen, arrogant fearless artists that think and say preposterous things in order to move the thinking of a society for the better or for the worse. He has a dozen songs that I simply love that are older but still on my playlists, and I love that he immerses himself in creativity.

Sure, he can be a colossal ass sometimes, but I still think he's an important part of our societal ecosystem. We need people like him in our pop culture just like we need Stephen Hawking, Maya Angelou, Muhammed Ali, etc.

I think it’s less that our society needs him than that he is the unavoidable product of today’s society.

Hari Seldon would have foreseen him.

It makes me sad that so many people let his ego run rampant. If anyone is in need of ego death it is him

If you listen to Kanye's music, he is highly self-critical and introspective at many times. I think this is a type of fearlessness, specifically the ability to be so publicly vulnerable (though I don't know if that's what GP had in mind).

Kanye's public image is reflective more of the pressures of his industry and how our celebrity culture depicts famous artists. However I think it goes beyond that to broader social and economic factors. Consider how many conversations there are on HN about dealing with imposter syndrome; if you compare Kanye's media portrayal and his music, I think there are strong parallels many people here could identify with.

I fire up either Kanye West or Jay-Z whenever I have that feeling in the pit of my stomach before doing a difficult thing. Sometimes you just need a little bit of brazen, bombast to get started.

Added to my .zshrc:

  curl -s 'https://api.kanye.rest' | jq '.quote'

I think I agree but in a slightly different way. I see people like Kanye as the random noise added to a function to avoid getting stuck in a valley.

He just kind of vomits thoughts into the world and some of them get you thinking.

I suppose that works, except then you could say the same thing about the US president. They are friends too no?

Remember when someone created a joke kanye cryptocurrency and then his lawyers threatened to sue?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye

Hopefully he never finds this :)

Excellent. I guess I ought to use this post to plug the Command Riker as a Service (CRaaS?) which I put together a while back, which operates in a similar vein.

http://www.bencollier.info/fun/programming/python/2016/01/09...

I suppose someone should put together a directory of these things at some point. Give it twenty years and we'll have a full universe of personality imprints (a la the McCoy Pauley) talking to each other over REST.

"Don't HATEOAS the player. HATEOAS the game."

- Kanye dot REST

This is awesome now I can build my Kanye as a Service company and pursue my seed round. Thank you.

KaaS

KaaS is powered by the latest AI on modern blockchains in multi-cloud environments.. we're going to change the world.

Haha I think Kanye would approve

Imma let you finish, but first I need to tell you about this other blockchain.

(Potential copyright issue aside) It should do loops of KW beats as well.

Talib Kweli's "Get By" for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVtpXvzzXiA

Just curious, how are you providing the free api? R you eating the cost?

Yeah... I have a small codefund ad on the site, but that doesn't do much because this product is an API. I have a support link, but I don't expect anyone to donate for something they will likely never use seriously.

The site appears to be hosted by GitHub, and the API is served by Heroku, which has a free tier with a soft bandwidth limit of 2TB/month.

Hosting the site cost nothing. Using $7/mo Heroku server for API with HTTPS and custom domain. Firebase can quickly start to cost money. Domain around $32/year. So it definitely does cost money to run, but not much at all.

If you want to reduce your costs, you can have HTTPS with a custom domain on a free Heroku app by using Cloudflare. Why are you using Firebase to serve quotes? I imagine the dataset could number just a couple thousand quotes max, which is fine to serve from memory after loading from a file at startup.

Or if you're using Firebase as a convenient interface for adding new quotes, the app could update its internal cache of quotes once a day, without having to pay Firebase for each API call.

Yeah, I realized that after it started getting a lot of traffic. The problem is I kinda just made this for fun and have no idea what I am doing. Do you want to contribute? https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest

Why all this infra to draw random lines from a text file?

Using Firebase to more easily add quotes. However, I did not anticipate this much traffic. As another user pointed out, I am probably going to need to cache the quotes to prevent an enormous amount of reads to the database. Feel free to contribute if you have good ideas :) https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest

Honestly a four-line PHP script that reads a text file or calls `fortune` is probably going to be way more efficient

Fun? It's probably not OPs next serious SaaS startup.

Then don't show it off on HN :/

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> A Show HN needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage.

Elon Rust can't be that far behind.

I love this. Thank you :)

Of course!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com