A very simple tool for transferring files between two computers. Linux Windows should just work, uPnP handling, etc - just a crazy simple way to transfer a file without setting up Dropbox, ftp servers or whatnot!
Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#52A tool that checks your broken python/pip install and fixes it properly. https://xkcd.com/1987/
There’s no solution. You gotta have a separate environment (e.g. a docker container) for each project. Each env has its own python version and requirements.txt
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#53Software that enables me to cue and play out video and image output to a projector, without playback controls, the Windows UI, or Windows sounds getting in the way. And which enables me to quickly flick off to a black screen.
Closest I've come is VLC with a split video interface in full screen, but it isn't perfect.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#54Something 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.
As I wrote, it doesn't understand the same things I don't, and that's why it's not directly useful here.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#55A cross-platform command-line tool + C library with permissive license that makes compressed file-deduplicated snapshots of directories with accompanying indexed metadata. It should be foolproof, use a fast compression algorithm like snappy or LZO, and be optimized for fast multicore creation and extraction (but with optional CPU-limiting). Metadata could be stored in an sqlite database.
To what end? I think borg or restic would both match these criteria. Maybe you're hoping for something that does this more online and continuously?
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#56A tool that checks your broken python/pip install and fixes it properly. https://xkcd.com/1987/
Throwback to the time when I accidentally did a `sudo apt remove python` in hopes of cleaning the python mess in my PC and broke my LM installation.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#57Almost every data exploration tool requires a date range to work, and yet there's no standard language for expressing these. I want a parser that:
- Undertands simple ranges (e.g. "2022-04-01 to 2022-05-01").
- Understands relative ranges (e.g. "4 weeks ago to 2 weeks from now").
- Understands ranges to be expressed by omitting components (e.g. "2022" means "2022-01-01 to 2022-12-31").
- Has equivalent parsers for other human languages (e.g. switch to 'es_ES' and parse "hace 2 semanas").
The implementation of this would be programming-language specific, but the grammar of this language isn't even standardized, as far as I know.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#58Stateless, functional XML and XQuery handling functions in C++.
I just want to hand a function a string of the XML, and a string of the XQuery, and get back a string of the answer.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What issues with plain old HTML are you running into?
If you develop on Chrome given that it's the largest, then you have the following issues: - Firefox will render stuff wrong - Safari will render stuff wrong and something will break
Generally browsers these days are pretty good.
There are some dark corners where there are still differences but these are not in the "I just want to build a website"-level of complexity IME, and are more in the "I am building a large XXX,XXX lines-of-code enterprise SPA used for hours at a time for thousands of users as their primary job across varied OS and browser combinations" level of complexity. E.g. I recently had to debug how different browsers handle cookie eviction for more than 100 cookies under the same top-level domain. This is not the sort of issue you you face with a "I just want to build a website" problem.
Re: Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
#60I 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 critica…
This can be approximated by generating a lot of metrics and monitoring executions