Show HN: Things to Do API
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?
27 points by invalidmonk - 16 comments
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.
any particular events that you'd flag that I could do some eval against?
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!
There's hundreds of events happening every week but finding them takes a lot of time.
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.