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Comment by asciident | Hacker News Reader

I tried 6 numbers of friends and only one returned a result. Are many numbers not callerid-able, or is the api just bogged down?

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Hi there. So, I'm the author of this article. Anyhow, for our free-tier users we don't provide realtime lookups.

Basically, we'll only return a result if we have a caller ID in our cache. So, if you get a 404 (no output), then try again a few seconds later after we've had time to do the lookup via our backend.

Sorry about that! Realtime lookups are currently restricted to API key users only.

Is there any way to tell the difference between "try again" and "no data available"?

And you should have made this MUCH more visible on your website. I initially tried your service, got zero results and dismissed it as a failure.

Only after reading here did I realize your service actually does work, I just have to try each query twice.

Hey ars, thanks for the feedback! After reading the comments here on HN (which are incredibly valuable), I'll be making those changes ASAP.

Sorry for the confusion, but thanks again for the feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

> you can't get something working within 5 minutes of vising our website, we've failed our mission.

It took me five minutes on the website ... and I had to come back to HN and read the comments to get this working. Don't want to be discouraging, but maybe you should provide this information in the blog/website otherwise you have failed (for me atleast).

Hey samirahmed, thanks for the comment! I'll definitely be updating my blog post and improving the documentation on the website.

Appreciate the feedback.

You might make this more obvious. Also, you might state how to distinguish between "sorry we need more time to look this up" and an actual 404 or error.

HTTP code 202 Accepted seems appropriate for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes)

504 Gateway Timeout would be the obvious one, since if I'm reading this correctly it's essentially a timeout of zero; 5xx status codes are indicative of retriability later on.

But I think that sort of performance would make the free tier essentially worthless. “All you have to do is hit our API endpoint, and BAM, you get results back.” Except you really don't. Analogy: a caching DNS resolver that returned an instant SERVFAIL if the results weren't already in memory wouldn't be considered acceptable even for demo purposes anywhere that I've seen.

Hey premchai21, thanks for the feedback! You're completely right. I'll be making some adjustments to the way this operates over the coming days to make things much simpler.

Thanks for taking the time to check us out!

I guess I disagree here (but who doesn't with HTTP status codes...). I try to reserve 5XX codes for actual errors. In this case, no error occurred, the response is just delayed.

> But I think that sort of performance would make the free tier essentially worthless.

Not at all. It lets you try out the API, figure out if it works for you, and get back "best effort" results. That seems perfect for a free tier.

I suppose being able to try out the API on the software level is useful, yes. I'm not sure how one is supposed to figure out whether results are likely to be good enough for a given application if they're so unpredictably degraded. I do suspect my perception is being colored by the website text, as quoted above.

Hey mike, thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on this tomorrow to get a fix out.

After all the feedback here, I realize how crazy it is to be returning a 404.

Thanks for checking us out, and thanks for the feedback!

I can see why you want to do this, but this just makes people send 2 requests instead of 1 for each number they look up.

Not sure if this is the better way.

I had to refresh the page a few seconds later to get my ID information to show up after the first request.

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