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

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

#101

Post by kumarsw »

a_square_peg wrote: post #98

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.

It does seem like like a somewhat straightforward application of spam filters, doesn't it? Clickbait headlines follow strong trends ("...and here's what happened"). So do the linked "articles."

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

#102

Post by codecutter »

The issue I face is that the TV volume suddenly increases when they start playing advertisements on TV. It is probably done to attract user's attention, but it is very annoying esp. for old people.

I wished that there was some way (maybe an app on the phone) that will automatically control volume level at a set limit. The phones already have a way to measure decibals (sound meter app) and also a way to control audio receiver volume (remote control app). If we could combine these 2 in a single app, that will be great.

I can set the volume level in the app. It will monitor sound level say every 3 seconds. If it exceeds say 10%, then automatically reduce the volume. Someone, please build such an app. I will buy it or consider sponsorship/financial help. The loud commercials are driving me crazy. Thank you for listening to my request.

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

#103

Post by rvieira »

I would love a "better Doxygen", or more accurately a nice multi-repo, multi-language documentation generator. It would have almost zero config to get started, but highly customisable. It would support (or be open to easy extension) both "classic" as "modern" and/or niche languages, from Java, C, JS to Python, Go, Nim, Haskell and Crystal. The generated documentation should look modern and exportable to both static HTML for online hosting and to some agnostic format, like JSON for further processing.

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

#105

Post by singularity2001 »

codecutter wrote: post #102

The issue I face is that the TV volume suddenly increases when they start playing advertisements on TV. It is probably done to attract user's attention, but it is very annoying esp. for old people. I wished that there was some way (maybe an app on the phone) that will automatically control volume level at a set limit. The phones already have a way to measure decibals (sound meter app) and also a way to control audio…

yes iOS "reduce loud sounds" settings should extend from headphones to all speakers!

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

#106

Post by mikewarot »

An ANSI/UTF-8 Reference Counted strings library for C.

In Free Pascal, the AnsiString type is a reference counted string, which can contain up to 2 billion characters, and you never have to allocate/deallocate them. These strings can contain any binary data, including nul, with the length of the string being counted as well. If you modify the string, it first checks the reference count, if it's 1, nothing needs to be done, if more than 1, it copies it first.

There is an equivalent WideString type as well as traditional pChar, etc.

C could really use a modern string type.

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

#107

Post by ducharmdev »

LVB wrote: post #100

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.

Although it's more manual, you could set up a mic to record into Audacity, cut the sections with no sound, and the length of the clip should give you your answer.

Or if the piano supports midi, maybe record using some kind of DAW (e.g. FL Studio), that way you won't be fooled by someone making noise into the mic to keep the timer going.

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

#108

Post by mikewarot »

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…

It sounds like you want to combine git blame with performance data.

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

#109

Post by teknopaul »

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…

And of course SQL is a relevant standard, even if you don't implement all of it.

BETWEEN Date1 AND Date2

is in the spec.

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

#110

Post by eligro91 »

ludovicianul wrote: post #96
dkarl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ever thought on making this open-source?
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