Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
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  • webview

    Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).

    The webview project fills some of this need, correct? I didn't start using one yet but there were multiple GUI projects leveraging it to create cross-platform application binaries.

    Link - https://github.com/webview/webview

  • neatroff

    Neatroff troff clone

    Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd recommend Ali Rudi's port (neatroff [2][3]) for a minimalist implementation. There's also Heirloom Documentation Tools [4] which is an implementation of *roff-and-friends that uses Knuth's paragraph-at-once algorithm (instead of the original line-wise one) for typesetting, plus some other interesting features.

    The authors of eqn wrote a paper about it: "Typesetting Mathematics" by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Kernighan also wrote two manuals (one in 1976 with a revision in 1992, and one in 2007 with updates for the Plan 9 version). [5].

    [0] utf8 was developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike during the creation of Plan9. The entire OS is compatible. Story here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

    [1] http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/eqn

    [2] https://github.com/aligrudi/neatroff

    [3] PDF manual for neatroff: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf

    [4] https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

    [5] These (and more) can be found here: http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/troff.html

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • Electron

    :electron: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

    Here's the 6-year-old issue about a shared runtime for Electron:

    Idea of runtime mode - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

  • yet-another-speed-dial

    a modern speed dial for chrome, edge and firefox

    i'm working on this as a browser extension. to get my feet wet i created Yet Another Speed Dial (https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial) which many people find useful, but the end goal is to apply the same kind of richness to all bookmarks and history

  • linux-surface

    Linux Kernel for Surface Devices

    I have a Surface Pro 2 running with the linux-surface kernel [0]. It feels like it has some rough edges - you have to decide between having pen support or having touch screen support, and suspend can be unreliable. These issues may be fixed now. Also, I encrypted my Windows partition, and now it requires the key each time to boot up, so I recommend against doing that.

    Overall, I do agree that the hardware feels quite nice, and besides those issues I listed, the Linux experience is quite good. I was very happy to not be forced to use Windows.

    [0] https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

  • pyodide

    Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly

    There has actually been quite a lot of work in this area. A colleague of mine wrote up a comparison of several solutions last year:

    https://anvil.works/blog/python-in-the-browser-talk

    We build our all-Python full stack dev environment (https://anvil.works) on Skulpt - but there's a lot of room in that solution space! If you haven't checked out Mozilla's Pyodide project, for example, it's truly impressive - they compiled all of CPython and popular data science libraries to wasm for a full notebook experience in your browser:

    https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide

  • notes

    A zero dependency shell script that makes it really simple to manage your text notes. (by nickjj)

    While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

    It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

    Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

    [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • hyperswarm

    A distributed networking stack for connecting peers.

    With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be

    [0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

  • asciidoctor-latex

    :triangular_ruler: Add LaTeX features to AsciiDoc & convert AsciiDoc to LaTeX

    How close does AsciiDoctor + asciidoctor-latex get to that? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex

    I've only been using Asciidoctor for a few weeks but I'm already an MD convert.

  • phd_thesis_markdown

    Template for writing a PhD thesis in Markdown

    Markdown for academic papers. We have this https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown (which is the best template I know and on a personal note I've written my thesis with that too) but the whole ecosystem can be still improved.

  • 22120

    Discontinued 💾 Diskernet - Your preferred backup solution. It's like you're still online! Full text search archive from your browsing and bookmarks. Weclome! to the Diskernet: an internet on yer disk. Disconnect with Diskernet, an internet for the post-online apocalypse. Or the airplane WiFi. Or the site goes down. Or ... You get the picture. Get Diskernet. 80s logo. Formerly 22120 (project codename) ;P ;) xx;p [Moved to: https://github.com/i5ik/Diskernet]

    This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it:

    > We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users

    ...

    > We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.

    Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:

    > I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]

    One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:

    > about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931

    [1] https://github.com/c9fe/22120

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427464

    [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744785

  • wasabi

    Wasabi A/B Testing service is an open source project that is no longer under active development or being supported (by intuit)

    I have also observed this. We had a custom thing over Wasabi : https://github.com/intuit/wasabi which was quite difficult to maintain, but compared to the paid solutions out there was still cheaper to do. I wonder why aren’t there more products in this area.

  • gpresent

    Presentation macros for GNU roff (unofficial fork with patches and extensions)

    It's funny, I looked at the "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition)" postscript document, and - at least with macOS' Preview - some big brackets are segmented (Neatroff brackets don't seem to do this, although I've seen it in other troff generated documents), and they even say this:

    > Warning — square roots of tall quantities look lousy, because a root-sign big enough to cover the quantity is too dark and heavy

    The solution is naturally to rewrite big roots as powers.

    pic does seem close to Tikz, although I had to look in the GNU pic doco to figure out how to do colors. Even then, transparency didn't seem to be supported?

    Heirloom actually looks the most useful/mature. At least the output looks pretty/someone cared enough to make the example files pretty, there's actual documentation. Limitations are still there (having to convert bitmaps to EPS?). I will say I'm at least slightly impressed by `gpresent`, which is like beamer (so for making presentations), and built-in hyphenation support.

    I still don't get Neatroff. It's compatible with/implements a lot that Heirloom does, but then the font support is worse again? It's an impressive project though, the source is very readable, and RTL/LTR support. Less impressive is the lack of a license - I think it's ISC, based on a single comment, but who knows?

    ---

    A repository and a makefile are distinctly different than an installer. Random macro packages that may or may not be on GitHub are different than `tlmgr`. Piping stuff around and having to convert images is different than just one command. GUI editors. Example documents (like https://texample.net/). That is what I mean by ecosystem.

    XeTeX outputs PDFs by default (granted, via xdvipdfmx), and can also include bitmaps directly (again, granted it needs graphicx or something). All TeX stuff isn't without it's warts, and seems overly complex (pdfTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTex/LuaTeX/ConTeXt, etc). But in practice, it kinda somehow just works (until it doesn't).

    [0] https://github.com/rhaberkorn/gpresent

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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