Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 145 posts

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

#61
post #51

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!

it's not a cli tool but https://snapdrop.net/ is local network file transfer

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

#62
post #52

A 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

Not practical when you need something like ROS with rospy that needs to be global.

Python is putting its fingers in its ears singing "LALALALA USE A VENV" instead of fixing the damn ecosystem. Node and npm proved that a solution exists and it's doable.

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

#63
It wish a tool existed that could keep boilerplate up to date. ie a tool that will find all files it manages and synchronise them with a canonical source.

Use cases include keeping common (CI, Make etc) configurations up to date across multiple Git repos.

Even better if it doesn't require configuration and can identify files it manages using a magic comment eg # Source: http://github.com/my/repo/file.txt

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

#64
post #34

I wish VLC, plex, video players in general had the ability to automatically sync subs to audio. ( automatically , not manually) We have the technology; everything we need to do this exists. It's just not done automatically, and when using slightly off-sync subs, you have to fiddle with sub timing for ages until you find the right sync. Even more so when the subtitles have different off-sync issues for the whole movie…

Try SubSync, open source movie subtitle synchronization app. Build in feature like this in VLC would be awesome. https://subsync.online/ Discussion on HN (4 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794153

Yes I was in that thread hehe :)

Given our capabilities, it's really a straightforward thing to do. YouTube does it automatically (you drop in your script with the video, it auto-syncs everything).

It could even be done for when the language doesn't match, given an auto-translation pass and some heuristics.

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

#65

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

Poetry is almost that. It also takes 99% of the trouble of solving dependencies in pip files

(though the usual way it breaks is your python interpreter gets updated and the venv becomes useless)

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

#66

A 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.

Apt has the big brained move of uninstalling half your system if you try to reinstall a core dependency instead of just setting the dependant packages as disabled while it's missing or something, ffs.

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

#67

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

Poetry is almost that. It also takes 99% of the trouble of solving dependencies in pip files (though the usual way it breaks is your python interpreter gets updated and the venv becomes useless)

This sounds interesting. I'll check it out, thanks :)

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

#68

I wish VLC, plex, video players in general had the ability to automatically sync subs to audio. ( automatically , not manually) We have the technology; everything we need to do this exists. It's just not done automatically, and when using slightly off-sync subs, you have to fiddle with sub timing for ages until you find the right sync. Even more so when the subtitles have different off-sync issues for the whole movie…

But that's the "job" of releasers? I have had to manually sync subs to audio maybe a few times over the past two decades...

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

#70
post #51

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!

It is strange that most of these tools seem to involve sending your data half way around the world. Guess local doesn't pay?

I just use good old SMB/network sharing - it's not much harder than setting up some program on two devices. Works between Windows/Linux/Android, fast and good enough.

Post reply on HN