by komali2 on 5/20/20, 5:32 PM
Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data we were just yanking back from requests to the API... I think some point in the authentication phase? So we saw that python library, saw that
they had solved the problem, but it was using something we had absolutely no idea how to transcribe to Node, and this is like, a bunch of 3 month old freshfaced Javascript devs. Figuring out Python was kinda out of the question (better to focus on pitching ourselves as hardcore Node/Javascript devs in the upcoming job search).
And then, like, three days after we started the journey, someone had not only beat us to the punch, they had done so at a professional level. I don't remember which site it was, but not only did it work perfectly, it didn't require the "crowd sourced" solution to mapping out pokemon that we were counting on. The developer/s had somehow figured out how to just yank all pokemon locations. And on top of that the app was functional, gorgeous, even had its own URL (we were still in the "all our apps are laughinggiraffe.herokuapp.com domains" phase).
All in all, great experience. A nice fresh slap in the face to how much work we had ahead of us, and good fun had anyway.
by jjice on 5/20/20, 5:55 PM
> Designed to inspire your next Friday night hack.
I've been hit with some burnout recently, and this is the kind of inspiration I need. Small, fun, short term project to get some juices flowing, as opposed to forcing myself to work on personal projects I currently don't have passion for, but feel I need to work on out of some weird sense of obligation.
Thanks, this is actually a really great help.
by billme on 5/20/20, 7:24 PM
by fenwick67 on 5/20/20, 5:34 PM
by cschneid on 5/20/20, 5:09 PM
Awesome! I was just looking at integrating Omnifocus and Notion to keep better notes and history of tasks, letting Omnifocus focus on just the task management side of the world.
It'd be cool to link up a script that takes a new task in Omnifocus under the right tag, and push a template into Notion for the note taking, and sync a link back into the notes field of Omnifocus for quick access.
by darth_avocado on 5/20/20, 6:28 PM
No offense to the people who built this, but sharing your username and password with random packages on the internet seems like a bad idea, especially for finance apps.
by xur17 on 5/20/20, 6:33 PM
Tangentially related, but I've been working on something for merchant websites (Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc) that you can feed a product url, and get back product information (image, title, price, availability, etc). It takes ~10 lines of code to write a driver for a merchant, and they are fairly stable if written properly.
My goal is to open source this, and allow anyone to contribute new / update existing drivers. Would there be interest in something like this?
by dhruvkar on 5/20/20, 5:15 PM
Awesome!
I tried writing a CLI tool for ordering Chipotle, but I ran into some dynamically generated headers, that made it near impossible to authenticate. In the end, I gave up.
Would love to see more examples and see how issues like this can be handled!
by FanaHOVA on 5/20/20, 6:52 PM
I wrote a Ruby one for the NBA.com API but not sure if it still works though as I haven't used it in a while (and also slightly embarrassed at some of the code I wrote back then, which I guess is good!)
http://github.com/FanaHOVA/nba_rb/
by philshem on 5/20/20, 7:48 PM
“Anything can be an API - if you are stubborn enough.”
by eska on 5/20/20, 11:59 PM
I tried playing Final Fantasy XI on a private server for a week, but found the game to involve too much grinding. Then I noticed an SQL injection in their auction house web page, which allowed me to dump prices of items at various times and build a private API. I used this to inform my investment, got quite wealthy and bought equipment for my toon, then quit the game shortly after.
by BillinghamJ on 5/20/20, 7:40 PM
by me551ah on 5/20/20, 11:13 PM
I love the tinder API. A few years ago I was planing to shift to another locality in my city but couldn't figure out where. I eventually decided to move to an area with the best looking women. Used the python tinder API to move around the whole city with GPS coordinates while setting the shortest possible radius and saved profile pictures tagging them with geo location. The end result was a database of geolocation mapped to profile pictures of women in that area.
by charlieegan3 on 5/20/20, 9:10 PM
Personally I’ve found using ‘private’ web APIs to be a bit of a mixed blessing. Having side projects break with no notice is very frustrating, at the same time they’re a huge improvement on scraping for ad-hoc tasks.
by chpmrc on 5/20/20, 6:24 PM
Does using an unofficial API authenticated with someone else (e.g. a customer)'s account count as a violation of the ToS? In other words: who gets reprimanded/sued? The final user or the messenger?
by doc_gunthrop on 5/20/20, 5:20 PM
by bootcat on 5/20/20, 5:19 PM
by imedadel on 5/20/20, 7:27 PM
If too many people are using the unofficial API for a product, is it right to assume that building a competing product offering a better official API, would be successful?
by hmhrex on 5/20/20, 5:56 PM
That Notion API is pretty slick. His example of using it for task management and dashboards is wild. May have to give that a whirl.
by Alupis on 5/20/20, 8:08 PM
Strange they list Coinbase as an "Unofficial API".
The trading API is very much so official, and dates back to the GDAX days.
by xoxoy on 5/20/20, 6:11 PM
Been meaning to do something with the Robinhood one
by raj_khare on 5/22/20, 11:18 AM
How does this work? Using scrapping?
by tylerjrichards on 5/20/20, 6:11 PM
oh this is awesome! would be great for new data scientists as well
by minimaxir on 5/20/20, 6:10 PM
From a practicality standpoint, I strongly discourage using unofficial APIs, as tech companies nowadays are very prone to sending out C&Ds. If you have a use case where the official API doesn't suffice, then do not redistribute anything obtained from the unofficial API, and definitely do not attempt to commercialize it.
by rolstenhouse on 5/20/20, 5:26 PM
I'm actually the current owner of this repo!! I started it because I love working with unofficial APIs for fun hacks that improve my life. During college, I had an alert that told me when the Krispy Kreme donuts were fresh built off an unofficial API that promised enjoyable donuts.
If you're interested, I have a newsletter to update you when new repos are added https://forms.gle/e8nCivpTBNftNtgGA and to feature interesting stories from the community.