Show HN: Things to Do API

(thingstodoapi.com)

51 points | by invalidmonk 2 days ago ago

24 comments

  • tokioyoyo 16 hours ago

    Which sources does it support? Discoverability is a huge problem for smaller events, as most get posted on IG, and it’s hard to even find them through IG.

    I started relying on a mix of Muse/ChatGPT/Gemini depended on which data sources I want to combine, as they all seem to have special deals with different sources.

    • avree 9 hours ago

      It seems to use a (probably AI generated) list of common event sites, Instagram, and a few hardcoded ones related to the region (like Makeout Room). There's no de-dupe so you'll see tons of the same event copied across Eventbrite/Tixr/etc.

    • invalidmonk 16 hours ago

      at the moment, there is a fan out across social media accts from a few different platforms, relying mostly on co-posting to discover new accounts.

      any particular events that you'd flag that I could do some eval against?

  • egonschiele a day ago

    This feels hard to maintain and keep up-to-date, but I would definitely use it! Great idea.

    • invalidmonk 18 hours ago

      If an agent maintains it, is it hard? :D

      • TheSamFischer 15 hours ago

        If it’s so easy, then please ask it to make the globe stop glitching out and flashing on scroll.

  • shrinks99 17 hours ago

    This is pretty cool, does it scrape Instagram? A lot of events where I live (Toronto) are posted there and not many other places. It's a real problem if you don't want to spend time on that app.

    • invalidmonk 17 hours ago

      amongst a few other data sources :) is this something you'd use if we added toronto support?

      • shrinks99 16 hours ago

        Personally, I don't have a project that requires it right now, but aspirationally maybe! I agree with another commenter that mentioned this is basically a public service that should exist similar to Wikidata / Musicbrainz.

        I know this is currently a paid service you're trying to make happen and the scraping part is a reasonable amount of effort, but if you wanted to make the data source public, you could publish community.lexicon.calendar.event ATProto records and it would be very cool. At the very least, you could ingest it as a data source!

      • moralestapia 16 hours ago

        x2 for Toronto.

        There's hundreds of events happening every week but finding them takes a lot of time.

  • aleksiy123 17 hours ago

    Cool idea and I really like the design of the landing page.

  • lap248 2 days ago

    super slick! got results quickly and am getting more interesting and in the know kind of events than other tools

    • invalidmonk 18 hours ago

      tysm! are there any geos you would like to see?

  • fellowniusmonk 19 hours ago

    Solving this issue a core problem for humanity, and it goes hand in hand with the need for a public service.

    I'm actually working to do this at ultra low cost as a public service like Wikipedia or musicbrainz.

    I'll be publishing global costs to serve and letting people donate to support.

    • invalidmonk 18 hours ago

      please share!

      • kylecazar 17 hours ago

        Two unrelated monks working on the same thing? What are the odds

        • talon8635 15 hours ago

          I had the same exact thought

        • invalidmonk 17 hours ago

          events apis and green chartreuse

  • xyst 15 hours ago

    I don’t want to be that guy, but why do I need a middleman for something llm do out of the box?

    Forget the API. Even search engines have returned these results for years.

    I can potentially see an angle with SLMs integrating with a self hosted version of this API, but it’s a bit niche.

    • invalidmonk 14 hours ago

      Fine to be that guy! Let’s say you want to build a product that recommends concerts to people based on their music listening history. Do you want to pay for an expensive tool call and several second response time to surface answers back to the user? Yes of course you can build this yourself because SaaS is dead! Or someone else could maintain it for you :)