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by dragonwriter 882 days ago
> NPS has to pay for every call to the API. That’s not cheap.

I am perfectly fine with it being considered part of the basic, taxpayer-supported functions of government agencies to be providing the public with relevant data.

If there is a concrete abuse or wildly disproportionate cost problem in particular areas, that may need to be addressed with charges for particular kinds or patterns of access.
2 comments
aiauthoritydev 882 days ago
You might be fine but any taxpayer expense must be justified and cheaper alternatives explored. This is someone else's money so it is very easy to feel entitled but every penny saved here can go into other better things like conservation, infra in parks etc.
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tonymet 882 days ago
At what cost? Rest APIs are very expensive ways for the government to make CSV data available to the public.
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dragonwriter 882 days ago
They are a whole lot less expensive than tracking customer usage and billing for it, and a whole lot more useful to the public than having the data nominally publicly accessible but only "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard." [0]

[0] Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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tonymet 882 days ago
not in this case that's my whole point . they are choosing the most expensive (and riskiest) way to make csv files available to the public
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everforward 882 days ago
There's likely some truth that CSV would work well here, and would likely be cheaper to operate. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of clients are or could be doing full transfers of the data and doing their own queries.

I'd be pretty happy with sqlite dumps too.

I don't really have an issue with the REST, though. I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a standard and cheap to set up Django+REST libraries stack. Yeah, the compute costs are higher than transferring static files, but I'd be shocked if this was taking enough QPS for the difference in cost to make a meaningful difference.

I get wanting the government to be responsible, but this veers a bit too far into Brutalist architecture as an organizational principle.

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