A collection of free/public APIs you can use to build stuff | Hacker News Reader

A collection of free/public APIs you can use to build stuff

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288 pointscelue29 comments

Nice list. I looked at a few now. But since these are public/free APIs, I would be careful using them into production work, mainly for stability/scale reasons. Good for research/Prototype etc, IMO.

Some free APIs run by governments provide fairly good stability as they fall under the umbrella of "critical infrastructure".

To help with the real time, could maybe add a layer of hot caching or the user could submit a batch job. if one fails, it's not blowing up the request.

> But since these are public/free APIs, I would be careful using them into production work, mainly for stability/scale reasons.

Many of the ones I saw are "free up to N requests, then $". That is, things that have a free tier.

Which is still valuable, but is very different if you want to be able to scale. Scaling by writing a larger check is a nice safe path forward.

Also see https://public-apis.io for a similar searchable listing of APIs.

Anyone know of a API to fetch high quality music artist and album art? I've been meaning to make something which sniffs whats playing on my Chromecast and display it on a screen but I've had difficulty finding a good source of art.

Thank you for the suggestions :)

Spotify? Or is that not high quality enough? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

(Or there's a bunch of others in the submission under 'music'.)

When querying the chromecast for now playing media when using Spotify Connect, the response contains spotify album art urls. I haven't verified whether its the same as directly querying the spotify api but at first glance the images weren't as big as I'd like them to be.

I'd also like a variety of artist images as a backdrop which is hit and miss.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

I won't speak to the quality, but that's what libmusicbrainz is for: https://github.com/metabrainz/libmusicbrainz

Someone else mentioned Spotify, you could try looking into Last.fm[1] (which queries from a number of different sources - spotify, youtube, soundcloud and user contributed artwork).

1: https://www.last.fm/api/show/album.getInfo - looks like it provides three image resolutions - small, medium and large.

The iTunes has an amazing free API: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...

By default the images it returns are small but you can get the full res ones easily. Here's some example code (not mine): https://github.com/bendodson/itunes-artwork-finder/blob/mast...

I used Deezer for https://audile.app and have been really happy.

The Cover Art Archive[1] is a joint project between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz, whose goal is to make cover art images available to everyone on the Internet in an organised and convenient way.

[1] https://coverartarchive.org/

I usually get mine manually from [0]. A lot of work, but i get to choose the cover i like best.

[0] https://discogs.com

Do you at least use their API or data dump?

http://www.discogs.com/developers/ http://data.discogs.com/

Does anyone know about an API for getting high resolution book covers? Most of the book covers that are publicly out there are terrible.

Nice list! I’ve used one of the art APIs listed, the Rijksmuseum one, to built a website which will show you a random object from their massive collection on each button click:

https://randomrijks.com

rijksroll is right there! (The .com is available)

(Nice work though :))

Anybody know of an API that allows you to generate a temporary static HTML page with custom markup that I can send to it?

Like templating as a service?

Sounds like a free hosting service with FTP

I was thinking something like pastebin. I don’t know if it’s capable of returning html. I think a gist could work however.

Oh yeah, github pages too

Would be nice to see a column with request limit, if any.

Obligatory link to the Tom Scott video on free APIs. There's a lot of common knowledge there, but his discussion on free APIs seems relevant. I've been burned by having hobbyist projects break from free APIs getting turned off.

https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

https://agify.io/

This was in the list. How is this useful at all?

discrimination-as-a-service.

The "Use Cases" are on the bottom of the page. Limited but..

Isn't guessing ages (reliably) valuable to marketers?

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