Ask HN: Which company do you wish had a developer API?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471777

by rokhayakebe • 17 years ago

21 68 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There is an abundance of data that could be useful to developers, but that is not available yet. Which company do you wish had an API?

aneesh• 17 years ago

My doctor. Or my hospital. Or pretty much anyone in healthcare.

TomOfTTB4• 17 years ago

Heh...Good Luck with that.

I work in a facility that provides mental health care to clients. I am in charge of the computers and all the technology. Unfortunately, our primary customer is the county government and they simply will not budge on anything.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I recently made a very simple proposal which was that we assign clients a confidential number (given to them in person) and have them generate their own password. They could then view their records online using that number and password. But...and this was the important part... no identifying information (such as name, SSN, etc...) would ever be transmitted over the web. None.

The number would be transmitted to us, matched up internally, and then treatment data would be sent back without any identifying pieces of info. No name, SSN, etc... would ever leave our firewall. In addition we’d still use secure connections through SSL, valid certificates, etc...

As you can probably guess I was shot down cold by the county. Transmitting data over the internet to private clients is not secure under any circumstances according to HIPAA (so they said, I don’t agree).

These kinds of policies are why every medical professional fears transmitting data in any way. I mean, if the government says it’s insecure than you’re just opening yourself up for a lawsuit if you ever try to give access.

Privacy is important and I’m not against err-ing on the side of caution to a certain extent. But when fear of lawyers and fear of the Government over power common sense it’s a tragedy and that is exactly where we are now.

jgilliam2• 17 years ago

Screw privacy, I'd rather the whole world know what's wrong with me... maybe they can fix it! Make it searchable and put my email address at the bottom.

sam_in_nyc6• 17 years ago

You have to understand that unless you've got a name like Bill Gates, they're probably not going to put in the effort to understand what you're pitching. You might describe the most perfect system, but all they hear is "complicated computer stuff that might get me in trouble later on"

tptacek5• 17 years ago

I think your employer is making the right call.

First, assigning a confidential number is a step in the right direction, but it isn't secure; simple traffic analysis (for instance, via a database flaw) will correlate IDs to recent activity, or to a specific visit (say by a tailed car).

Second, any number of other vulnerabilities anywhere on the Internet could coerce a browser to give up the unique IDs assigned to your site, as would any physical compromise of a user's computer, however brief (like, 5 seconds with a malicious USB stick).

Third, your employer would face almost unlimited liability in the event of a mass compromise; they've probably insured themselves against HIPAA violations, but compromise of stigmatizing mental health information is easy to tie to material harm --- far more so than a credit card number, which can at least be revoked.

Using SSL and firewalls doesn't mitigate the core problem, which is that any false step with the application that serves this information cost cost them tens of millions of dollars.

This is a rare instance where I see a draconian regulation actually working to the benefit of consumers.

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

Transmitting data over the internet to private clients is not secure under any circumstances according to HIPAA (so they said, I don’t agree).

Kaiser Permanente must not be worried about it, since I can see all my blood test results, appointments, correspondence with my doctor, prescriptions, etc when I log into members.kp.org.

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

My hospital has an online portal where you can access test results and message doctors... so surely HIPAA doesn't completely prohibit such things?

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

Good luck... ever head of HIPAA?

freejoe76• 17 years ago

My employer, The Denver Post. My bank. My library.

natrius2• 17 years ago

Wesabe has an API, so if it supports your bank, then you already have an indirect API for it.

https://www.wesabe.com/page/api/examples

shafqat• 17 years ago

+1 for newspapers having good APIs and using some of the great APIs available out there.

BTW, would love to get in touch to ask some hackerish questions about your paper. Do you do technology stuff there? If you don't mind, drop me one line and i'll respond (didn't see your address in your profile). My e-mail is shafqat at newscred dot com.

lux• 17 years ago

Most public services ought to have them. Not just APIs, but even simple stuff like an RSS or ical export for garbage/recycling days so I can throw it in my calendar. It's about usable data formats too.

Great question, by the way :)

mtrimpe• 17 years ago

Albert Heijn, or any other supermarket.

tptacek5• 17 years ago

My municipal government.

mwerty• 17 years ago

imdb

arjunb3• 17 years ago

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

ev0• 17 years ago

Unfortunately these are by no means the modern web APIs as we know and very limited in uses due to their nature. A RESTful API to the imdb online database would be hugely popular.

vaksel• 17 years ago

traffic lights system

rokhayakebe4• 17 years ago

I am hoping this would be "read-only".

liangzan• 17 years ago

dropbox

smanek• 17 years ago

why? You have the files, which is pretty much the best API you could want, isn't it?

natrius2• 17 years ago

Most gyms make you swipe a card to get in, so they have a pretty good idea of how many people are in the gym at a given time. If they anonymized that data and made it public, I could go when I know it's not going to be crowded.

slavingia• 17 years ago

Wouldn't others go at the same time because they realize it's not crowded, hence making it crowded. Catch-22.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

I doubt few people would be so anal to hook up to the gym's API and analyze the data to figure that out. In that sense, someone who does spend the time to do that will reap the reward for their ingenuity :)

(That said, when it comes to gyms it's pretty easy to figure out anyway. People don't tend to generally go during or immediately after mealtimes, there are fewer women during school-run times, etc.)

sam_in_nyc6• 17 years ago

Depends on how long it takes people to get to the gym.

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Possible side-effect is that primarily hackers (by some definition) would do this, so hackers would tend to drift to when the gym is less busy, so the concentration of hackers would rise, making it more likely to find someone interesting to talk with, hang with, or generally get to know.

arjunb3• 17 years ago

interface Energy { getUsage(); setPowerState(outletID, powerState); ... }

I wonder if we could create a developer community oriented around defining interface standards we'd like to consume.

sam_in_nyc6• 17 years ago

Not too many. If they don't I just use Dapper, and then Yahoo Pipes if needed.

Amazing "hack" about Yahoo Pipes... they block usage based on an IP accessing a pipe. Yet, you can make that pipe access the "singleton" version of itself many times. So let's say you want to pull up Delicious tags of 10,000 URLs (something I did to generate very nice marketing data), you could access Delicious yourself 10,000 times (and get blocked very soon) or you can access a pipe (which accesses Delicious) 10,000 times... or you can access a pipe 100 times, each time sending it 100 URLs, and that pipe will just loop through and do it (Yahoo will count 1 access against you rather than 100). Since there are loads of pipes servers, and it's a semi-trusted source (in this case very trusted, since Yahoo owns Delicious), not all the Yahoo pipes servers will get blocked by Delicious. Actually, at the rate I was pinging them, some of them did actually get blocked :)

Another interesting experiment: Make a Dapper App which contacts Yahoo Pipes for an RSS. Make that Yahoo Pipe access the same Dapper App. Fun!

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

If you like Pipes you should play with YQL (http://developer.yahoo.com/yql) it's much more like an API than Pipes given it's SQL-likeness.

While it's actually my job to promote stuff for Y! YQL is one of my all time favourite things we have done and it really very much worth taking a look at. Especially given we just released "open tables" so now you can map any service to it, not just RSS, XML, CSV, etc feeds

Disclaimer: I work for the Yahoo! Developer Network

sam_in_nyc6• 17 years ago

Yahoo! continually comes up with some amazing stuff. XPATH selection of a URL via a SQL like query (http://tinyurl.com/c5jrot)... so awesome! Tell your coworkers that they've impressed me.

And now, I test querying the page for itself. If your servers crash, it was all me.

gibsonf1• 17 years ago

I really wish gmail had an API!

johns• 17 years ago

They do. It's called IMAP

gnaritas• 17 years ago

Google analytics, it'd be really nice to have access to all that data.

davecardwell• 17 years ago

There is their “Data Export API” currently in private beta. See the bottom of this post:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise-class-...

awt• 17 years ago

Craigslist

noblethrasher• 17 years ago

Academic Application Suites like Blackboard and the University IT system - but that's mostly for allowing better interoperability between organizations on campus.

My wireless telephone service provider. I would especially like to be able to query and download my voicemails.

Better ODB (On-Board Diagnostics) API. Every new car should include a webserver and either an ethernet or wireless NIC (and an easy way for the owner to explicitly enable/disable it).

Actually, every high end household item should have an API (which I suppose is what Java was initially going to do).

psadauskas• 17 years ago

Congress

rokhayakebe4• 17 years ago

InfoUSA.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Elevator. I want my iPhone to tell it when I enter the building, and that I'm going to the 6th floor. Ditto for when I'm going back.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

Hacker news doesn't have an API yet...

petercooper3• 17 years ago

eBuyer.com - they're like the NewEgg of the UK. They have some great bargains from time to time but you always have to visit their site to dig around for them.. they have no Twitter feed, no blog, no API for their products, no affiliate program.. it sucks because otherwise they're the best place to buy computer parts/gadgets/techie gear here.

A more general answer is.. ALL e-commerce sites. Preferably with a standardish API so that you can do stuff like put together comparison engines easily without scraping HTML.

timtrueman• 17 years ago

Power grid data would be nice, maybe then devices could start knowing when it best to power down or charge.

pietro2• 17 years ago

Rail, bus and airline companies. It would be useful to query not only the timetable, but also any delays or changes, and of course booking via an API would be awesome.

herval2• 17 years ago

not to mention geolocation, right? :-)

pietro2• 17 years ago

Sure. I want to call the APIs from my iPhone. :-)

herval2• 17 years ago

My Bank. Actually any bank outside USA at all!!

al_• 17 years ago

Gas stations, supermakets

bemmu• 17 years ago

Ad networks should have a standard way for me to query what my CPM was for yesterday, so that I can make an intelligent decision about which ads to show tomorrow. Of course that might not be wise for them to provide...

kubrick• 17 years ago

Paypal could use one.

Stubbs• 17 years ago

The UK government. There's so much information held in their records that would be great to get at through an API.

Can I include all the bodies funded by the government, like the Royal Mail (for their postcode db), Ordnance Survey (for their map data) to name a couple. They're funded by our taxes, so why not allow free access to it?

Ask HN: Which company do you wish had a developer API?

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