Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API?

27 pointsavadhoot22 comments

What does it do? Make you money? Solve your crucial pain point?

I really like Telegram's bot API. https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

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 :) )

This sounds interesting. What does it look like in reality? For example, the errands and shopping list reminders.

Using the Todoist API, I fetch all the open tasks with a certain tag and post to a group I share with my spouse when requested. Another bot I have is everyday at 8:30am to summarize the completed goals from the previous day.

Probably pthreads. Makes otherwise very tedious things straightforward and uses predicable naming conventions. For longer justification of it being well done, see https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2010/04/05/pthreads-as-a-case-...

Flickr's API is still the best.

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.

Can you give examples of those fun surprises? I'm curious. Thanks!

One of the fun things you can do is using the set of places API methods.

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.

QT5.. It's so well documented, and just a pleasure to work in. I'm almost never using it though.. I mostly work with the Node API, and some of the larger libraries in the infrastructure, it's fairly okay too.

It's interesting how many people say this. Much of it is great compared to an abysmal baseline of terrible APIs often in C++ ...

... 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.

Spotify API - well documented, straight foward to use, and has made it easier for manage my library and make playlists for myself.

As someone who doesn't use APIs frequently, how does your interaction with Spotify's API differ from interacting with the app?

Example:

- 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

I love the Mastodon API because it lets me write fun bots without having to go through too much toil.

All of them since it allows me a way to easily interact with my data.

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.

Discord, specifically discord.js. maybe its just that I know it well but I like what and how it does it, and it has had everything I've ever needed.

Pythons concurrency module has an as far as possible consistent API between multiprocessing, multithreading and asyncio.

Github's API solves a crucial pain point of being both consistent and stable when I am trying to teach APIs to students.

Twilio's. The level to entry is low and things typically work as you would expect, plus docs are on point.

Imgix is really fun to use.

Cloudflare Workers are awesome to work with.

S3 and Mapbox

cURL's API is the best out there.

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