Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

I find myself using Rubular (https://rubular.com/) quite often for experimenting with regular expressions.

I use ratingraph.com quite a lot for seeing the TV-show season trends and if something's worth watching

There are many tools mostly scripts for converting IP addresses, CIDR blocks, aggregating CIDR blocks and ranges, calculating netmasks and much more. Most of those tools are written for IPv4. I have not seen many of them written to calculate the same things for IPv6 or even convert existing IPv4 networks to fit into IPv6 networks.

If someone went back and forked or rewrote all those C, Perl and Python scripts into modern code then perhaps adoption of IPv6 would be slightly higher as network engineers would have more tools in their hands to manage and assign network configurations. Even better, if there was a public git repo that tracked all the older projects and the evolution to newer code in one place I think the adoption of usage would be really high.

I'm using CyberChef (https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/) quite a lot for different tasks.

I love the simplicity of writing a program in mere minutes and distributing it with a single link.

I use followupthen for fast email reminders. Clears the inbox and perfect for inbox zero! https://www.followupthen.com/

I use mint.com to consolidate all my financial details. But it is so buggy. Every time I access it seems to generate all stats from scratch, which means that it has no idea about accounts I have closed, renamed, moved etc.

I use https://nimbletext.com/live to generate/convert commands from/to csv etc. It has been extremely useful for my regular work.

I built a simple email API that I use frequently for notifications and reports. https://batsign.me

A better way to keep up with Github

I don't want email notifications spamming Github. I want a smarter feed of things I should care about and need to keep up with to do my work. PRs I probably need to review, Issues related to what I work on, etc... I haven't found a great way to do this, maybe others have ideas?

Using:

- rot13/rotN

- hex to ascii conversion

- multiple timers at the same time (one in 5 minutes, one in 7, one in 10, one in 15 for example)

- translation, mostly for japanese/english. I use google translate and deepl

- REPLs/playgrounds, when I want to test something in a programming language without installing it

- specific video conversion, usually to post a .mp4 on Twitter. This could and should be a shell script

- Google Sheets, for record keeping from my phone/computer or sometimes graphs

- Regex101.com

Can be improved:

I'd like something like Excel tables for Google Sheets.

Bayesian filtering for news sites. Say I follow a news site, but I'm not interested in all published articles. Only in some topics not covered by existing categories, or hard to specify by keyword search. It would be helpful to have a filter, analogous to a spam filter, that I would train presenting examples of what I like or not, and it would eventually learn what interests me, saving me the effort of sifting through articles periodically.

I'd like web browsers to allow user-controlled privacy deviation where a website in a sidebar is allowed to know the URL in the main pane. The sidebar website can run a group chat, run their own spam and comment moderation, and allow for discussion on the main window. I'm sure it's ripe for abuse, but my base case is a less biased place for people to talk about what's on a website on the main pane. Friends, companies, any tribal alliance can run their own service for the sidebar in a standard way to keep it easy to swap around. Basically it's a way to steal the comment section from websites.

The tool that disappeared, and that REALLY pissed me off, is spotifynewmusic.com. It was a curation of the most notable music news websites, that delivered a fantastic panel of new music. Nothing replaced this in the Spotify offer yet. (in term of quality and diversity).

I don't know if this fits the criteria, but I'd like fuzzy search[1] functionality in the browser, to search page contents. I know there's an old extension[2] that does this, but I think it has a few bugs.

I also use Find & Replace for Text Editing[3] that also searches/replaces regex, but it's not the same as a quick fuzzy search.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching
  [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fuzbal/lidjpicdkcgjdkgifmmpalkibjeppdof
  [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/find-replace-for-text-edi/jajhdmnpiocpbpnlpejbgmpijgmoknnl

I'd like something that eases in reverse engineering websites. Maybe it could record the screen, JS console, and HTTP requests, and enable interactive playback of that.

I want an automated work timeline tool. There are things I do that are semantically linked, grouped by timing. For example:

    I get an issue in Jira "enable AWS feature for project X".
      I search for AWS and Terraform documentation on those subjects.
      I edit code on a feature branch named for the Jira issue.
      I save links and notes into my Emacs org-roam knowledge base.
      I test the new feature.
      I submit a PR.
      I edit documentation to support the new feature.
      I add to the architectural decisions for the team and the project.
    I close the Jira ticket.

All those things might happen within an hour or two, or be dragged out longer for bigger features. I want that temporally and semantically linked set of activities to appear on a timeline with links to and from the various tools I use.

Why? The more data the better. Being able to search for "AWS S3 policies" and get information from all the bits my brain "touched" to implement something. This is also something that might help those team members who are less likely to correctly document or record their work.

Now imagine that, but for a team. This is a half-finished idea, born mostly from a desire to link my Firefox bookmarks' tags and the tags in my org-roam knowledgebase.

CyberChef (https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/) has almost everything I need. It is described as "The Cyber Swiss Army Knife".

https://dateful.com/ especially the Time Zone Converter, has been pretty useful for me

I use a JSON formatting tool a lot (https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/). I do wonder sometimes about pasting sensitive data into sites like this, and what they might be doing with it.

Strange in a way, that companies spend so much effort restricting how we handle sensitive data, and then you copy and paste it into any website with an input box and no one seems to care. Fingers crossed and all that.

These sites are like camera phones when it comes to data. Everyone pretends they don't exist and can't copy data; that our security measures all work, just because.

Also, RGB to HEX. I'm always looking to convert one to the other, or choose similar colors to one I'm working with. The sites I use (at the top of Google) are always lacking in some ways.

I am missing keyword analytics for github. What stuff developers search, most popular searches etc

Not all of these are web based but they are “online”

Image tool by google - Squoosh (https://squoosh.app/) RSS reader - Feedly Classic (looking for alternative that is similar, can be paid but no subscription) General News without the garbage - Winno (iOS app) (looking for web-based alternative) Regex learn - (https://regexlearn.com/) Icons8 - (icons8.com) Raindrop - (raindrop.io)

Things that are missing or can be improved: RSS readers & web browsers (specifically on iOS) Desktop email app for windows (waiting for spark to release)

Some stuff I use often:

- Finding out what a linux command line tool's flag does without having to CTRL+F through multiple matches in the manfile (https://explainshell.com/)

- Test and visualize JS regex (https://regexr.com/)

- Render PlantUML class or sequence diagrams (https://www.planttext.com/)

- Unicode code converter (https://r12a.github.io/app-conversion/)

- Unicode codepoint viewer (https://r12a.github.io/uniview/)

Search. Google’s monopoly and political and legislative corruption are the only things going for it. The world deserves a less evil search engine, ideally one that works like google did about 15 years ago.

I want progressive bookmarks that save where I was on the website even if I don't open them again for a year. Like if I was reading a blog from beginning to end I want to bookmark it once and have the bookmark update every time I open the next entry.

I want a complete website archiver I can launch from a browser. Something like HTTRACK but works with modern sites full of embedded content.