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Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

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41–50 of 145 posts

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#41

A tool that checks your broken python/pip install and fixes it properly. https://xkcd.com/1987/

I was just setting up a new Mac the other day, only to be surprised that this is _still_ an issue. All I had was XCode and Homebrew - everything fell apart when I tried to install ansible.

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#42
I wish I had a tool which measures the trend of every line code in my codebase in production, and shows me on IDE on the background of each line of code which code is mostly used (dark green background or such) and which code is barely used (in light green), and in gray unused code in production (based on the trend of last few months.

The benefits :

- I will understand during development which code is mission critical, and I should be careful with it, as well as invest more time in optimizing this code and document it better.

- I will understand what the customers do, which flows they use and which flows they avoid, so seeing code which I've developed recently but not used yet - will help me understanding that I'm wasting my time on writing unused features or we did not really understood the customers expectations.

- I will be able to cleanup dead code easily on the go.

It's like a theme park manager walking around in the park and watches which rides has long lines of people and which rides have no lines.. helps the manager understand where to put effort and which rides to remove / replace.

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#43
I was looking for a tool to post video tweet threads. I couldn't find any so I built my own https://clippost.io/. Currently, its very basic tool to convert YouTube, Instagram, TikTok videos to twitter video tweet thread. If I get some users i will definitely add more features to it.

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#45
post #40

I would love a small conversion tool to read in medical imaging dicom files and output a volumetric vdb dataset. I've nearly written this on several occasions. Most, but not all, dicom files encode a 2d or a 3d scalar field and vdb files are the graphical effects industry standard format for those, usually used for fog, fire, or similar effects. They can also usually be converted to polygon meshes through a variety o…

Can you link a VDB spec?

Sure! The details are on OpenVDB's website [1] and technical guide [2] and githup repo [3].

It's not as mature as the dicom standard (which is very...mature) and they do change it occasionally, but it is stable.

[1] https://www.openvdb.org/documentation/ [2] https://academysoftwarefoundation.github.io/openvdb/ [3] https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#46
A simple app (e.g. a wordpress plugin) that would load some nice elements of a web page above the fold ... then load the rest of the web page after ... something that would lower time to first byte, first contentful paint and time to interactive.

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#48
Something to convert from one date to other, but with timezone names used by humans. For example:

"today 17:00 Pacific in UTC" should be accepted.

There are other time zones too: I've seen "PDT", "Mountain", and so on. The `date` tool doesn't always understand what those are. That's a bummer because neither do I, and that's why I need this tool.

Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?

#50
post #48

Something to convert from one date to other, but with timezone names used by humans. For example: "today 17:00 Pacific in UTC" should be accepted. There are other time zones too: I've seen "PDT", "Mountain", and so on. The `date` tool doesn't always understand what those are. That's a bummer because neither do I, and that's why I need this tool.

date(1) is very close to doing this.

/ You already mentioned it.

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