
Public APIs: A collective list of free APIs - kumaranvpl
https://github.com/toddmotto/public-apis
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ehnto
There is a version of the internet of APIs that I wish came to fruition, where
it was a series of pipes of raw, live information that you could use to
display interesting things about the world or ingest into your own software.
Think a personal dashboard of easy to set up and reliable tidbits of
information from all around the web.

APIs tend to be hyper specialized and actually far more about using the
platform within the platform boundaries rather than interconnecting different
APIs or interfaces and making a modular program.

I tried to build the "display live information" part of the idea but I found
that it takes a really specific type of information to make it interesting and
there are very few free APIs that provide that kind of thing. It needs to be
"live" data in chronological order, and it needs to be about the world, not
about some platform. For example "Number of astronauts currently in orbit" is
fantastic and fun to show in a live graph. "Stars on my github repo" is kind
of cool too, if you have a popular repository. There just aren't many free
endpoints like that.

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samcday
Aside: why do listicles need a sponsor? According to Github, 452 people have
contributed to the list. Are all of them getting some kind of share of the
sponsorship dollars?

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anomie31
I wondered why too, so I reverted the commit that added the add, pulled in
some PRs, and pushed it here. I plan to keep it up to date if there's any
interest. [https://notabug.org/anomie/public-
apis](https://notabug.org/anomie/public-apis)

~~~
Anthony-G
Thanks for doing something about this. I’ve bookmarked your fork of the
project for future use. That ad was obnoxious and completely gratuitous –
unlike the more tasteful Digital Ocean logo at the bottom of
[https://api.publicapis.org/](https://api.publicapis.org/) and the README page
for [https://github.com/davemachado/public-
api](https://github.com/davemachado/public-api) In this case, it’s justifiable
as it’s clear that Digital Ocean provide hosting for operating the API server.

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EGreg
I used to love the Web and APIs. Still think it’s great.

But I think it’s far superior to download software (Merkle trees) onto your
own computer automatically and run it in a sandbox with your own data, while
doing end to end encryption. That way you don’t worry if the API goes down or
starts charging more or the database is hacked and you don’t have to jump
through holps to get 1000 keys for each new project. Also you can resell your
project to regular people who can host it themselves without them jumping
through all those hoops. And finally, hosting should consist of provisioning
space in a giant abstract cloud that holds encrypted data, no need to set up
Linux instances or whatever.

Which platforms are doing that?

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theamk
If you get rid of "merkle tree" requirement, then you have just described
database files hosted on github.

It does plenty of advantages -- it scales good and if done right, it is immune
to hacking or site going down.

But it has some disadvantages as well -- the biggest is that client needs to
do non-trivial, complex work, so you cannot just insert AJAX call onto your
webpage. Also, you lose all control of data, so a competitor can trivially
clone your service.

~~~
EGreg
Well yeah, I am not talking about Capitalism in the traditional sense anymore
(business builds a moat, provides a service to you and charges fees). I am
talking about a collaboration economy (open source, science style). You may
still be able to sell stuff, but not the stuff whose marginal cost to copy is
zero. Information would be free. Asked who would generate it, the answer is
increasingly “everyone”. News and Maps can be crowdsourced (see openstreetmap
for example). The hard part is in the consensus model, ie data sets will be
honeypots for people who want to alter the “truth as we know it” (like Stephen
Colbert and Elephants on Wikipedia). I am not convinced that a for-profit top-
down corporation is necessarily better for that than a flat, democratic crowd,
provided we have interesting game mechanics built in (like high stakes
challenges where you can lose a significant portion of your accumulated
reputation if you don’t win by a large margin).

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UweSchmidt
Aparently there's no free NFL results API :-(

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cromiium
[https://www.thesportsdb.com/league/4391](https://www.thesportsdb.com/league/4391)

~~~
UweSchmidt
thanks

