Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? by la_fayette on Saturday May 31, 2025 @11:45AM (#44145014)

For customer projects I am happily using paid "text to speech" APIs from several vendors.

Privately, I would like to use an API, which gets my Lego bricks inventory and returns all sets which I could build. Further it should show me sets, which I almost can build and show me missing pieces. Also e.g. it should show me sets with slight color differences, e.g. I have bricks in yellow but originally it requires orange. Things like that...

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Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? by alfons_foobar on Saturday May 31, 2025 @11:54AM (#44145080)

That's a funny idea :)

I think the first one should be very much doable, but I am not sure how I would build the "almost complete" and the "similar colors" features.

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Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? by yesbabyyes on Saturday May 31, 2025 @01:31PM (#44145764)

I guess calculating the Levenshtein distance between the sets would work somehow?

Edit: scratch that, just intersect the set of available pieces with each set. If there are fewer than n--or m%--missing pieces, suggest those.

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Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? by kingbob000 on Saturday May 31, 2025 @12:50PM (#44145485)

Sounds a lot like rebrickable. I'm not sure if they have an API though

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Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? by Suppafly on Sunday June 01, 2025 @02:53AM (#44149102)

not sure if there are APIs, but there are a couple of websites that do that for Lego already.

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