
Show HN: Kanye.rest – A Free REST API for Random Kanye West Quotes - ajzbc
https://kanye.rest
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docker_up
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.

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tomc1985
It makes me sad that so many people let his ego run rampant. If anyone is in
need of ego death it is him

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fineIllregister
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.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye)

~~~
ajzbc
Hopefully he never finds this :)

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bencollier49
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...](http://www.bencollier.info/fun/programming/python/2016/01/09/riker-
service.html)

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.

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

\- Kanye dot REST

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

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ajzbc
KaaS

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

~~~
cestith
Imma let you finish, but first I need to tell you about this other blockchain.

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chiefalchemist
(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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVtpXvzzXiA)

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

~~~
dessant
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.

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ajzbc
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.

~~~
dessant
If you want to reduce your costs, you can have HTTPS with a custom domain on a
free Heroku app by using Cloudflare. Why are you using Firebase to serve
quotes? I imagine the dataset could number just a couple thousand quotes max,
which is fine to serve from memory after loading from a file at startup.

Or if you're using Firebase as a convenient interface for adding new quotes,
the app could update its internal cache of quotes once a day, without having
to pay Firebase for each API call.

~~~
ajzbc
Yeah, I realized that after it started getting a lot of traffic. The problem
is I kinda just made this for fun and have no idea what I am doing. Do you
want to contribute?
[https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest](https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest)

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tomc1985
Why all this infra to draw random lines from a text file?

~~~
ajzbc
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](https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest)

~~~
tomc1985
Honestly a four-line PHP script that reads a text file or calls `fortune` is
probably going to be way more efficient

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chiefalchemist
Elon Rust can't be that far behind.

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evanscottgray
I love this. Thank you :)

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ajzbc
Of course!

