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Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

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11–20 of 118 posts

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#12
Using:

- rot13/rotN

- hex to ascii conversion

- multiple timers at the same time (one in 5 minutes, one in 7, one in 10, one in 15 for example)

- translation, mostly for japanese/english. I use google translate and deepl

- REPLs/playgrounds, when I want to test something in a programming language without installing it

- specific video conversion, usually to post a .mp4 on Twitter. This could and should be a shell script

- Google Sheets, for record keeping from my phone/computer or sometimes graphs

- Regex101.com

Can be improved:

I'd like something like Excel tables for Google Sheets.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#13
Bayesian filtering for news sites. Say I follow a news site, but I'm not interested in all published articles. Only in some topics not covered by existing categories, or hard to specify by keyword search. It would be helpful to have a filter, analogous to a spam filter, that I would train presenting examples of what I like or not, and it would eventually learn what interests me, saving me the effort of sifting through articles periodically.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#14
post #2

I find myself using Rubular ( https://rubular.com/ ) quite often for experimenting with regular expressions.

I was working on a (FOSS) regex tester for desktop OSes using GTK and sourceview. Might pick the project back up soon, just gotta make sure that staying on GTK3 doesn't break my sourceview lib.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#15

There are many tools mostly scripts for converting IP addresses, CIDR blocks, aggregating CIDR blocks and ranges, calculating netmasks and much more. Most of those tools are written for IPv4. I have not seen many of them written to calculate the same things for IPv6 or even convert existing IPv4 networks to fit into IPv6 networks. If someone went back and forked or rewrote all those C, Perl and Python scripts into mo…

Python's standard library has an ipaddress module that does these things for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#16
I'd like web browsers to allow user-controlled privacy deviation where a website in a sidebar is allowed to know the URL in the main pane. The sidebar website can run a group chat, run their own spam and comment moderation, and allow for discussion on the main window. I'm sure it's ripe for abuse, but my base case is a less biased place for people to talk about what's on a website on the main pane. Friends, companies, any tribal alliance can run their own service for the sidebar in a standard way to keep it easy to swap around. Basically it's a way to steal the comment section from websites.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#18
post #15

There are many tools mostly scripts for converting IP addresses, CIDR blocks, aggregating CIDR blocks and ranges, calculating netmasks and much more. Most of those tools are written for IPv4. I have not seen many of them written to calculate the same things for IPv6 or even convert existing IPv4 networks to fit into IPv6 networks. If someone went back and forked or rewrote all those C, Perl and Python scripts into mo…

Python's standard library has an ipaddress module that does these things for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Nice. That's a good starting point for porting all the existing scripts to support both ipv4 and ipv6.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#19
The tool that disappeared, and that REALLY pissed me off, is spotifynewmusic.com. It was a curation of the most notable music news websites, that delivered a fantastic panel of new music. Nothing replaced this in the Spotify offer yet. (in term of quality and diversity).

Re: Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

#20
I don't know if this fits the criteria, but I'd like fuzzy search[1] functionality in the browser, to search page contents. I know there's an old extension[2] that does this, but I think it has a few bugs.

I also use Find & Replace for Text Editing[3] that also searches/replaces regex, but it's not the same as a quick fuzzy search.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching
  [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fuzbal/lidjpicdkcgjdkgifmmpalkibjeppdof
  [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/find-replace-for-text-edi/jajhdmnpiocpbpnlpejbgmpijgmoknnl
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