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Comment by sbr464 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related to the original project intent;

Is there a place where common things in the dev world like this are accumulated? For example, a list of all countries or list of the US states, for use with an HTML dropdown. I know there are various repos on Github that maintain these types of lists, such as English stop words, profanity word lists etc, but is there a service that accumulates these in a familiar, structured api?

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Look at Wikipedia's lists of things. For your particular examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state

Some of them are quite meta, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

For a more structured source, Wikidata aims to be that, but I cannot comment on its completeness.

Often times instead of the list of US Sates, you actually want to list of US States and Territories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

For example when the intent is "list of place where the USPS ships" or "list of state-level political jurisdictions where US residents live"

Let’s move this tidbit to a structered api of common knowledge! Dewey decimal for data, not just a generic search engine for datasets in different formats (like the recent google datasets site), but a familiar, goto resource.

Um...why not https://www.wikidata.org/ ?

Have you ever used wikidata? It's kind of a shitshow.

Yes! Surprisingly often I am unable to complete a form because there is no option in the State field for Washington, DC.

Structured, maintained API though, not general knowledge. I personally see an issue that someone has to accumulate their own stash of structured data for common knowledge (random examples) like: countries, zip codes, valid HTML5 element names, css properties, hex colors, common naming prefix/suffixes/professional titles, etc. A growing list of work repeated by each dev team/company for really no reason. No complaint about this repo, at all, just seeking if a solution exists.

There is Corpora: https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/tree/master/data

> Corpora is a collection of small files. It is not meant to be an exhaustive source of anything: a list of resources should contain somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 items.

Thanks, will check it out.

Here's a platform specific example. https://github.com/SmileyChris/django-countries/

Wikidata has a SPARQL API though

I've used faker [0] for stuff like this. I think originally a perl package, has similar packages in other languages as well. I've used the python implementation and enjoy it, along with it's localization feature.

It looks like 1.0 was just released as well :D

[0] https://github.com/joke2k/faker/releases

SecLists (https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists) contains a wealth of security-related lists of this sort, including a useful section containing the most common passwords.

That's a cool idea. I've seen individual packages for things like US states and HTTP status codes but I don't think I've ever seen them all packaged together.

Would it essentially be like a graph with multiple nested nodes with different strands of info?

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