
Show HN: A new general-purpose API solving common and complex problems - NeutrinoAPI
https://www.neutrinoapi.com/
======
neilellis
This is brilliant, keep up the good work. Honestly I can't think why none of
us thought of this before (or so I believe).

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Thank you neilellis! its been a long time in the making..

~~~
JusticeJuice
It looks great as!

The only suggestion I would have is spend a little bit more time on the design
of the landing page. Space out the header, and center the blocks.

I know its usually the last thing to do, but it simply inspires more
confidence for your potential users.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Thanks for the feedback JusticeJuice! We have definitely focused more on the
API side of things more than the website at this stage but lots of website
updates are in the works

------
Rinum
Good idea, but it's difficult to justify building any commercial or mission
critical applications that depends on it out of fear that it'll disappear the
next day (bought out, given up, network issues, etc.). For that reason I can't
see myself using it beyond a hobby app or one off script... even then I
probably wouldn't use it.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
You could say that about any PaaS, SaaS or API. But most of us have to depend
on web APIs at some level. Most internet connected apps need some external
services or APIs to keep them running properly. Also, because of the nature of
some of the APIs, building and maintaining them in-house would not be viable
or worth the effort therefor it saves you significant time and money by
outsourcing these (that's why APIs for email and SMS etc are so popular)

~~~
michaelmior
One of the issues here is that there's no obvious alternative to switch to in
most cases. Plus depending on a well-established company like Heroku
(Salesforce) or Amazon is different then depending on something brand new.

Not to diminish the work put into this though. It looks great! :)

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Well we all have to start somewhere! =) Plus we already have loads of happy
customers that have been using some of our older APIs for more than a year
now. Further to this, defensive programming goes a long way when working with
APIs (both local and remote APIs). You should design your app in a way that it
can continue to function even if an API malfunctions.

------
luisrudge
Damn... This is A W E S O M E! Congratz to the team! Feedback: It should be
easier to change between apis. Doing this using <select> is terrible for the
user. It really should be a sidebar or something like this.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Cheers luisrudge! I agree about the menu, we do have plans to change the
layout to make it more like a traditional API docs page with the left hand
contents/index panel type thing..

------
Raed667
I love this, but I as some people already said I'm not ready yet to use this
in a production project.

I would have liked to see some web-based example on each API with static
and/or user input data to test quickly the result.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
We have something like that already! If you signup for an account you can
login and use our "API tools". No coding required, just a simple web based
form you can enter data into and test out all the APIs =)

~~~
Raed667
Oh great, this wasn't obvious from a visitor's perspective.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Yeah I agree, thinking of making that more obvious on the website as the API
tools are super useful for testing and for one-off / manual jobs as well

------
Fannon
Great idea!

I would love if this would be something like a independend, modular micro-
services architecture you can easily and selectively deploy within your own
network. Docker might be a good way to manage it.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Thanks Fannon, we have been thinking about this quite a bit however the main
issue is with data updates (which happen at a minimum on a daily basis). So if
we did release something like this it would only be a suitable solution for
online environments.

------
denniskane
For the purpose of solving serious general programming problems like these on
the server, most developers would probably rather want to use something like
google app engine because it hosts code as well as static files for free, up
to certain quota limits. That way, they can just play around with one of the
zillions of open source python libraries, and then integrate it into their
projects. Making third-party API calls is honestly something that developers
want to avoid if at all possible.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
While this can be true for some problems i'm not sure you have really thought
about the details of the problems we solve other than a cursory glance.

Firstly, although python has loads of great open source libraries, you wont
find any that can do all the things we can do.

Secondly, the volume of data that needs to be maintained and updated (on daily
basis) is massive and way out of the scope of most projects (e.g. we maintain
databases with more than 5 billion records which have to be updated daily).

Finally, although some of the APIs could run in a 100% local environment (we
are looking into some ways to distribute this way) most either require a
constant fresh data feed or need to connect to external systems e.g. to make
and HLR query you must connect to the SS7 network which is not easily obtained
and simply something most developers don't want to have to deal with.

------
iLoch
This is interesting, but many of these problems are sufficiently complex in
their own right. Isn't this a bit of a jack of all trades type deal?

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Some of the APIs solve very complex problems indeed, which require constant
maintenance and development on our part. However, this is the accumulation of
about 15 years of software development across various projects and programming
languages. The underlying API functions are already battle hardened so to
speak

------
destroyer998
Some DNS stuff would be baddass, e.g. to what does something resolve, what are
the nameservers

~~~
stevekemp
I hacked up a simple lookup service here:

[http://dns-api.org/](http://dns-api.org/)

That might be useful, at least to pin down what kind of API you do/don't want.

~~~
destroyer998
That's awesome, thanks!

------
andrewmcwatters
While this is cute, from an infrastructural point of view, only people with
small projects would ever want to use this.

Even then, I see little incentive when anyone can roll solutions to these
particular problems.

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
We already have large commercial customers pushing more than a million data
sets per hour for bulk processing.. its a fairly common use-case for us.

Also, you are greatly over simplifying these problems with a "I could build
that" type statement. In my experience (more than 15 years as as professional
software developer) this is something junior developers say all the time...

While i'm sure you might be able to roll some of these yourself in most cases
its a waste of time and money and the constant maintenance of data is a real
problem (as well as the quality of data). Some of our methods have taken a
long time to perfect and test (years!) while other methods you would just not
be able to implement yourself (e.g. HLR)

Lets examine one of the more simple APIs: IP Info (IP Geolocation). So you
wan't to roll this yourself and run on your own gear. OK first, the data
source. You need to find a quality source of IP geo data and load that into
your database of choice. Great it works well, job done. Not quite, IP geo data
is changing rapidly these days (mostly due to IPv4 exhaustion) so you have to
keep downloading (and most likely paying for) database updates. The provider
doesn't provide an automated way to do this, so you have to build that as
well. They also seem to charge a lot of money for the "full" database. Later
it turns out some of their data is highly inaccurate, so you have to find
other suppliers, they use a totally different format so you have to re-
implement that as well.. I think you can see where this is going..

That's just a trivial example. Most of our APIs are far more complex than IP
info is and require much more work and maintenance to keep running.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Glad to know 15 years as a "professional" told you to build libraries-as-a-
service. You really showed me!

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
LOL... can give it, but just can't take it eh... what kind of response did you
expect by making such a comment?

------
mingyeow
is it too much to ask for facial recognition? :)

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Added it to the list =P

------
lappa
What is the benefit of using this when a local, unlimited-use library without
latency issues can be used?

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Most of the APIs require data to be gathered, analysed and updated on a daily
or weekly basis (e.g. BIN lookup, IP Info, Geocode, IP blocklist, User-agent
Info, Phone validate). Some need to connect directly to other networks (e.g.
Phone verify, SMS verify, HLR lookup, Host Reputation, Currency Convert).
These would be either impossible or quite difficult to implement in a library
/ local only environment. Others can just be a pain to implement (depending on
your setup). Additionally, you gain the advantage of automatically inheriting
updates to our algorithms and data sources.

~~~
lappa
Ah, I didn't realize that these were updated, I thought it just used a regex
to verify the email, phone number, filter bad words, etc.

A lot of these seem useful and having APIs that need to be updated is a good
VP, however for things like HTML to PDF, there are libraries that already do
this.

People will likely use the HTML -> PDF API, but in terms of the new APIs you
are developing, I think you will attract more customers with things that
cannot be implemented simply with a library and instead need to be managed by
you.

Just my two cents, good luck!

~~~
NeutrinoAPI
Thanks lappa, good points. That's definitely what we are focusing more on
(stuff that you can't simply use a standard software library for)

