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

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

#91

Post by vidanay » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:17 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #75

eligro91 wrote: post #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 critica…

I would want something slightly different. I care a lot about how recently code has been changed. I usually don't care how much code is run in production, unless it isn't run at all, and then I care a lot. So: Code that was changed within the last week: red Code that was changed within the last month: yellow Code that hasn't been changed in over a month: normal Code that hasn't been touched in over a year: green Dead…

I really like the idea of a "code heatmap". I actually think this could be easily implemented in one scenario: Visual Studio Code Lens already has that information. Massaging it into a background color probably wouldn't be too difficult.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/find-code-...

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

#92

Post by mattlondon » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:19 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #76

mattlondon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I unknowingly relied on undefined behaviour in JavaScript Array.sort; worked fine/as expected in Firefox but then got bug reports that turned out to be Chrome/Safari. Not just dark corners IMO.

Interesting - what were the details? I've never heard of this and rely on this feature all the time so please do share the reproduction so we can all benefit?

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

#93

Post by teknopaul » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:19 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #57

Almost 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 ot…

I believe that iso dates officially support missing off any component so points 1 and 3 should be supported by any date parser.

Time parsing from all natural language is going to be hard/impossible because there is so much jargon/ambiguity. How long is a jiffy? Is a moment a point in time or a short while in the future? Mañana has two meanings in Spanish.

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

#94

Post by mihvoi » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:22 PM UTC

An intuitive and simple Phone application/theme on Android smartphones - especially for old people.

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

#95

Post by weinzierl » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:22 PM UTC

eligro91 wrote: post #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 critica…

The tooling for this exits and is 100% usable.

All you have to do is run a build with coverage enabled and then load the coverage data files into your IDE. At least Eclipse (with EclEmma) shows the results in a way that are pretty close to what you described. I'm sure other IDEs can do the same.

The only thing is that nobody does this on production, because of the performance impact and potentially increased risk.

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

#96

Post by ludovicianul » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:27 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #75

eligro91 wrote: post #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 critica…

I would want something slightly different. I care a lot about how recently code has been changed. I usually don't care how much code is run in production, unless it isn't run at all, and then I care a lot. So: Code that was changed within the last week: red Code that was changed within the last month: yellow Code that hasn't been changed in over a month: normal Code that hasn't been touched in over a year: green Dead…

We've built an internal tool which does exactly this. Among a bunch of other correlations

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

#97

Post by pabs3 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:41 PM UTC

mihvoi wrote: post #88

The main thing that keeps me using Windows and not Linux is a tool to index folders and files from all my DVDs and external hard disks. It also accounts for total size of each folder and browse the archive. I only use the search file/folder name feature, I don't even need any content indexing that this tool has. It just needs to scale to Terabytes size (like millions of files/folders) and optionally do de-duplication…

Something like plocate can probably do that.

https://plocate.sesse.net/

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

#98

Post by a_square_peg » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:51 PM UTC

I wish there was a click-bait headline filter.

Too many news headlines are either hypothetical question with no real information content, telling me to re-evaluate everything that I know, something sensationally misleading designed to make some alarm bell go off in my head etc. I worry how some of these might still manage to creep into my head.

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

#99

Post by Hamcha » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

A Linux (maybe FOSS?) version of Cloanto's Accenti software [1]

I know dead keys, I know compose, but they all seem wayyy too unnatural to me, I got used to Accenti's system, ie. just type e' and it becomes è, but context-aware so perche' becomes perché instead of perchè, and pressing ' further cycles between all the other options (èéê..), it even supports user-configurable macros (eg. I have made so I can write "\deg" to become °) It's just very hard for me to consider anything else since this is the most natural I've ever typed, and it's Windows-only.

Another perk of a tool instead of a keyboard system thing I can white/blacklist apps.

---

[1] https://italiantext.com/

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

#100

Post by LVB » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

A timer that counts up/down only when there is sound (ideally there could be some smarts as to what constitutes sound). This would help me with with my two younger kids who practice piano but are up and running around for what seems like half their slot.