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Show HN: Things to Do API

thingstodoapi.com

57 pointsinvalidmonk32 comments

I built an api/mcp for local events: pop-ups, one-off events, concerts, etc. currently covering the SF bay area.

I've been building a bunch of consumer apps lately around personalization and recommendation and have had a hard time finding this data in one spot. agents can find useful stuff through tool calls / web search, but slow.

you can scrape on demand too, but i wanted a faster data set and couldn't find an existing provider for the mix of event types I was searching for.

the methodology for it is to find influential accounts/posters/etc. and do a fan out across things that they co-post with.

mcp: `claude mcp add --transport http thingstodo https://api.thingstodoapi.com/mcp`

I'm considering adding other cities. If you're building something that needs local event data, would something like this be useful and where would you want coverage?

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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.

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?

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.

there is indeed a dedupe implemented! if there are specific bugs with it, please send them my way :)

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

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

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

yessir!

any update? It’s still glitching. I thought it was easy.

I'm building a global classical music concerts database, I can offer you the data for your locations, feel free to connect :)

https://classicalbot.com/?city=San+Francisco,US

I would definitely use this for https://littledaily.me

I think it would be a nice addition once you get a larger spread of data! Great idea

Awesome. What geos would be most useful?

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.

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

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!

x2 for Toronto.

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

queuing this up!

There have been some good attempts to aggregate things, https://toronto-event-generator.pages.dev comes to mind.

Heya I’m building something and nearly ended up building this on the side bc we need it. Great job. Would love to battle test it for you here.

That would be awesome - what geos do you need? Currently only have SF bay but easy for us to spin up other locales!

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.

please share!

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

events apis and green chartreuse

I had the same exact thought

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

thanks!

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

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

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.

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 :)

>why do I need a middleman for something llm do out of the box?

Why use a token-burning middleman when someone has already done it for you?

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