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

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61–70 of 118 posts

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

#61
1) An online code editor that's good for a smallish smartphone. I don't usually code on my phone, but when I do it's usually unpleasant.

Either I use hacker's keyboard or gboard, and with both I constantly misspell things and miss the keys. In online IDEs which do have some sort of autocomplete it tends to cover up half the screen. And with the other half is covered by the keyboard I can't see what I'm picking or writing or the context.

Something like an auto complete with an auto-zoom in and out when I type or choose something from the autocomplete would be nice.

Also some conveniences for copying and pasting lines of code around, not by using gestures (I'm clumsly...) but through a combination of keyboard and/or on-screen prompting.

This is a rather niche, since like I said I usually don't code on my phone. The only time I felt it was missing was when 2 years ago I did Advent of Code on my phone during commutes, and the only site that worked for me was ideone.com because their text entry is essentially just a simple no-frills textbox. So I didn't have autocomplete but I could bang up a reasonable solution in a reasonable time (I tried to get a semi-decent score).

2) I wish there was an easier way to view forks / branches of a given repo, across all popular sites. This would help finding forks with fixes of a repo which looks abandoned.

3) A site which aggregates book reviews from various sites, similar to RottenTomatoes but for novels.

Currently when I'm searching for book reviews when considering to buy or listen to a book, I first read (non-spoiler-y) reviews on Amazon, then on GoodReads, then google for reviews on various online outlets, then google for blogs, and maybe even search Youtube if I have the patience to listen.

There's https://bookmarks.reviews but it doesn't have too many reviews on it and of course doesn't include Amazon's ratings.

Something semi-automated would have been nice. For children's books it would also be nice if it included reviews from the CommonSenseMedia and Children's Book Council of Australia sites.

4) A way to browse all comments for a youtube video.

There's https://youtubextras.com but it doesn't seem to work for me.

Jump to a certain time and view comments from that time period.

Not just download them, browse them in the browser.

I know many people don't like youtube comments but I sometimes find them hilarious or even insightful (especially on popular dev-related videos), and I don't like youtube's interface for browsing them.

Something HN-like would have been nice, something that will figure out who is replying to whom in the flat second-level hierarchy and nest them. Possibly a browser add-on.

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

#62
post #55
post #46

Google Sheets, but self-hosted and document-oriented like Jupyter notebooks, not spreadsheet-oriented.

Wonder if dockerized cocalc + sageworksheets / jupyter lab is what you're looking for

Regular Jupyter notebooks are missing two important things:

1. Sheets hide formulas most of the time

2. Formulas in sheets are reactive, updating one cell immediately updates all the cells that depend on the first

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

#63
An audio (possibly also video) chat app with a configurable fixed delay. Ninjam (https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/ ) implements the basic idea but the open-source client is fiddly to get working and the recommended paid client is a DAW so is also pretty daunting. It would be nice to have something in the browser.

It would be nice to have something similar that worked as a website, and even could be sort of a cloud version of the A Capella app where you can collaborate on looping harmonies in realtime.

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

#67

I use a JSON formatting tool a lot ( https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/ ). I do wonder sometimes about pasting sensitive data into sites like this, and what they might be doing with it. Strange in a way, that companies spend so much effort restricting how we handle sensitive data, and then you copy and paste it into any website with an input box and no one seems to care. Fingers crossed and all that. These sit…

pbpaste | jq | pbcopy

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

#68
post #57

Filtering tool for Twitter. For example, if I'm following someone for their knowledge in software engineering, I don't want to see their political Tweets. I would pay for an extension like this.

Yes. This is a stuff Twitter should solve:

> Follow @somerandomperson's

> - Political tweets

> - Funny tweets

> - Research tweets

> - Everything

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