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

by ajzbc • 7 years ago

56 32 7 years ago

docker_up• 7 years ago

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.

stochastic_monk• 7 years ago

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.

tomc19854• 7 years ago

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

fineIllregister• 7 years ago

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.

pkaler• 7 years ago

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'

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

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.

imperialdrive• 7 years ago

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

christianjung• 7 years ago

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

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

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.

dessant2• 7 years ago

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.

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

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.

beardog• 7 years ago

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

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

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

Hopefully he never finds this :)

sergiotapia• 7 years ago

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

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

KaaS

WrtCdEvrydy• 7 years ago

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

bencollier49• 7 years ago

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.

mitchtbaum• 7 years ago

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

- Kanye dot REST

tomc19854• 7 years ago

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

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

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

tomc19854• 7 years ago

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

dewey2• 7 years ago

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

tomc19854• 7 years ago

Then don't show it off on HN :/

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

(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

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

Elon Rust can't be that far behind.

evanscottgray• 7 years ago

I love this. Thank you :)

ajzbc8• 7 years ago

Of course!

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

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