This looks great, particularly the way the website breaks down the main functionality with plain explanations and code samples. I know that there's a bit of a bugbear with some people when it comes to reimplementing CSV parsing but having it in-browser could be very handy.
Yeah, it explains it so well. Being able to relate to each point and feature is such a key part of explaining your service.
This site might be for a CSV parsing library and not a startup, but it does a better job of telling a story than most startups do. And, to me, that's how you sell and engage users.
Thanks for your feedback. If it helps to know, the Q&A format on the homepage is the result of scratching my head for a while, thinking "How would I explain this to somebody? There's a lot to it, and it's all immediately relevant."
I eventually convinced myself that the last part isn't true. It could be disclosed in parts. So I decided to run the scenario in my mind instead: "I'll give somebody this library and imagine that they'll reveal their use cases one piece at a time and I'll help them through it." Then the conversation flowed naturally and came out while typing.
What really got me was the desperation in the "voice" of the questions, slowly being won over by a calm father figure. I've never had to parse CSV in the browser, but now I feel like I should. Powerful stuff!
I'm also a big fan of libraries where the library name is also the API (ie Papa Parse -> Papa.parse()). It just fills me with glee.
I'd be okay with that, I just hadn't considered it. By format do you mean design or content (or both)? And are you thinking a Creative Commons license?
I meant the design, since the page created such a clear template that would be fantastic for future open source projects to modify. But if you want to release the content in the open too, all the better. I just think that a lot of open source projects which struggle with onboarding would be greatly benefited by using the page as a base.
Hm, could somebody explain the multi-threaded part to me? I'm a little confused. I didn't think multiple threads were possible in js. Furthermore, does this only work on Firefox?
It depends on your browser support requirements. On the Brackets project[1], we work within Chromium (and "modern browsers" with our in-browser branch), so we can rely on web workers for doing things like parsing JavaScript for autocompletion.
Web workers are quite useful and I'm sure there are a fair number of webapps that take advantage of them.
Given the jaunty tone of the documentation, I really think they missed an opportunity to somehow have a "Beard Papa" version. Randomly inserts cream puff ingredients or something.
For me the background is grey on that spot and the bg image is only behind the main hero at the top so I definitely think it's a browser issue. Looks great here.
Your demo page is slick. I was able to parse and inspect a couple files I had laying around locally. Toggling the header and typing options worked great.
Awesome, glad it's useful. I was unsure how visitors would feel about having to open the developer tools, but I feel like they give you a better way to explore the results than just stringifying some JSON.
Yes! Thank you! We're using the d3 CSV parser for our CSV upload functionality [1] but are having a ton of issues with performance and cross-browser support. Can't wait to try this out.
Cool, good luck! Disclaimer: some features definitely won't work in older browsers.
I saw your service on HN a while back. It generated some excitement among us here at SmartyStreets, which also uses Papa to process customers' lists without requiring them to send us their whole file. I think these are great use cases.
Haven't used the tool. Not sure I'll need it in the immediate future. But damn I love the website and how quickly and easily I understood what it does.
The explanation of features is one of the best I've seen on the landing page. I didn't even have to hit the documentation to fully understand usage under a variety of conditions/circumstances.
Do you guys think it would be too cheesy/unoriginal to "steal" this Q&A format for other products? I have a free software library to publish pretty soon, and I absolutely love your way of explaining how it all works in a cool, conversational style.
Steve jobs (who stole it from Picasso, who took it from ?) said "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
This was later "clarified" by Bud Tribble: "If you take something and make it your own ... it's your design and that is the dividing line between copying and stealing."
My history teacher in high school had a simple challenge to get an A for the entire year, skipping all tests and quizzes, and free pass to sleep during class: "Give me a 100% unique idea"
Obviously everyone tried and everyone failed. There are no unique ideas, only innovations upon existing and past work of others.
So I find it odd anyone would downvote you for the truth!
>> Steve jobs (who stole it from Picasso, who took it from ?) said "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
That's faintly ironic -- he had too much shame to steal the quote from Picasso. Perhaps he meant that his company employed shameless great artists, not that he was one himself. Steve Jobs has always struck me as a businessman, primarily (which is probably what you want in a CEO, if you owned, say, Apple stock -- not a thief).
Amazing project! Everything seems really well put together. I really like the humor and the Q&A format. Do you mind if I borrow it for v2 of a project I'm releasing soon?
Also, there is not a single negative comment here. That's a HN record. Congratulations!
And yeah, I've been surprised! I hadn't anticipated so many comments about the web site, since the feature is a Javascript library. It's like going to a movie for the previews.
Definitely grateful for the feedback, though. It's great that quirks that are being constructively reported so they can be fixed.
> I hadn't anticipated so many comments about the web site...
Well, first, I think you need to accept the fact that you made a truly stand-out website, with a useful innovation (the Q&A format with code examples) that people are going to copy (and to good effec).
But second, the comments about the web 'preview' is the GCD of HN - Haskell, .Net, and Python programmers might still take a peak at a JavaScript library web page, even if they won't use it immediately.
Third, and this is most important, it would be significantly better if you published Papa Parse to the NPM registry, because then "real" javascript programmers can add it to their existing project with a simple "npm install papaparse --save". Publishing is trivial (install npm, run 'npm init', set values, then 'npm publish').
I meant GCD. The LCD between people on HN is arguably their personhood - but that's not useful, since it's true for every online community. The GCD of HN, on the other hand, has to do with a shared love of problem solving, particularly in fair contests. The website of a library, as opposed to the library itself, is an expression of "a solution", which we can all enjoy (and comment on), even if we don't use it in our work. Therefore website exposition speaks to the GCD of HN members.
Thank you! And you're right about the audience and their interests. That makes sense.
I'd love to package this thing up for NPM. But I'm not a Node.js developer, so I haven't tried running this in Node. I'll see what I can do though to make that happen.
Interestingly, a lot of people are putting up non-node.js libraries on NPM (front-end stuff), which Bower, Browserify, and others take advantage of. So don't be shy, just document that it's for front end (though I have a feeling it'll probably do just fine in node anyway, the lack of dependencies makes it easy)
When you convert CSV to and from JSON(/XML) then the interesting part IMHO is how to convert the hierarchy (of JSON/XML) to CSV and how to encode it (e.g. in a header-line). Do you account for that?
There are some assumptions made. Mainly, that you have an array of arrays or an array of objects to encode as CSV. For an array of arrays, that's easy: each array is a row. For an array of objects, each object is a row keyed by field name.
Data with a varied structure is much trickier, if at all possible, to flatten. I haven't figured out a magic formula for that (yet?).
Thanks for scrolling down :) and answering. Yes assumptions have to be made. I have just been curious, since I have done sth similar recently (http://www.use-the-tree.com). The assumptions I make there are "that these are reasonable business documents" (e.g. invoices, orders). E.g. A List of Customers having Orders with Order Lines (3 levels (or more))
This seems like it might integrate really well with crossfilter[0] which is a really neat multi-dimensional filtering tool but can completely lock up the browser as the data is loaded.
In Demo it says to get see the data in browsers console.. thats cool .. but how do we Download the data , like the results should directly prompt a Save dialog window..
Hmm... I'll consider that for a later upgrade to the demo. For most people, it seems that seeing the results in the console is enough to know if it does what they need.
yeah we can wait for later stages for the implementation in demo but in the meantime any documentation or pointers on how to achieve the direct download of results..
A quick Google search yields this[0] which would probably do the trick. Just beware of browser compatibility[1] (something that plagues several features of Papa already, hence it requires a modern browser to use them).
85 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadThis site might be for a CSV parsing library and not a startup, but it does a better job of telling a story than most startups do. And, to me, that's how you sell and engage users.
I eventually convinced myself that the last part isn't true. It could be disclosed in parts. So I decided to run the scenario in my mind instead: "I'll give somebody this library and imagine that they'll reveal their use cases one piece at a time and I'll help them through it." Then the conversation flowed naturally and came out while typing.
I'm also a big fan of libraries where the library name is also the API (ie Papa Parse -> Papa.parse()). It just fills me with glee.
They are available in most major browser (including recent IE).
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/Guide/Performance/...
Web workers are quite useful and I'm sure there are a fair number of webapps that take advantage of them.
[1]: http://brackets.io/
[1] http://geocod.io
I saw your service on HN a while back. It generated some excitement among us here at SmartyStreets, which also uses Papa to process customers' lists without requiring them to send us their whole file. I think these are great use cases.
Edit: Hey why the downvotes, I didn't say it, Andrew Chen said it. Slide 23 http://andrewchen.co/2013/10/14/zero-to-productmarket-fit-pr...
This was later "clarified" by Bud Tribble: "If you take something and make it your own ... it's your design and that is the dividing line between copying and stealing."
My history teacher in high school had a simple challenge to get an A for the entire year, skipping all tests and quizzes, and free pass to sleep during class: "Give me a 100% unique idea"
Obviously everyone tried and everyone failed. There are no unique ideas, only innovations upon existing and past work of others.
So I find it odd anyone would downvote you for the truth!
That's faintly ironic -- he had too much shame to steal the quote from Picasso. Perhaps he meant that his company employed shameless great artists, not that he was one himself. Steve Jobs has always struck me as a businessman, primarily (which is probably what you want in a CEO, if you owned, say, Apple stock -- not a thief).
Can't find variable: performance
Also, there is not a single negative comment here. That's a HN record. Congratulations!
And yeah, I've been surprised! I hadn't anticipated so many comments about the web site, since the feature is a Javascript library. It's like going to a movie for the previews.
Definitely grateful for the feedback, though. It's great that quirks that are being constructively reported so they can be fixed.
Well, first, I think you need to accept the fact that you made a truly stand-out website, with a useful innovation (the Q&A format with code examples) that people are going to copy (and to good effec).
But second, the comments about the web 'preview' is the GCD of HN - Haskell, .Net, and Python programmers might still take a peak at a JavaScript library web page, even if they won't use it immediately.
Third, and this is most important, it would be significantly better if you published Papa Parse to the NPM registry, because then "real" javascript programmers can add it to their existing project with a simple "npm install papaparse --save". Publishing is trivial (install npm, run 'npm init', set values, then 'npm publish').
Greatest common multiple, lowest common denominator
I'd love to package this thing up for NPM. But I'm not a Node.js developer, so I haven't tried running this in Node. I'll see what I can do though to make that happen.
Data with a varied structure is much trickier, if at all possible, to flatten. I haven't figured out a magic formula for that (yet?).
[0] http://square.github.io/crossfilter/
[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3665115/create-a-file-in-...
[1]: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=max%20length%20of%20data%20ur...