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Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

454•paveworld•9h ago•93 comments

Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/03/why-dont-more-developers-use-the-platform/
135•vinhnx•5h ago•100 comments

VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next

https://gamehistory.org/5k-magazines/
7•rdmuser•1h ago•1 comments

So you think you could be an electrician?

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/so-you-think-you-could-be-an-electrician
227•zdw•3d ago•156 comments

OpenBSD Developers Reject Uutils Coreutils

https://news.lavx.hu/article/openbsd-developers-reject-uutils-coreutils-port-over-licensing-and-c...
14•pjmlp•2h ago•4 comments

The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC-2026-Valve-Timur-AMDGPU
289•speckx•14h ago•44 comments

In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults

https://energytransition.org/2026/09/in-ukraine-distributed-renewables-foil-russias-assaults/
68•JumpCrisscross•1h ago•31 comments

Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/rodin-museum-3d-scan-verdict
201•CosmoWenman•16h ago•90 comments

Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

https://liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory
175•kmeh•17h ago•96 comments

Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields

https://notoriousbfg.com/hole-punch/
295•trwhite•16h ago•66 comments

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/
436•elffjs•9h ago•216 comments

We're working on a new RuneScape MMO

https://play.runescape.com/4
66•droidjj•8h ago•25 comments

Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager

https://www.whec.com/top-news/webster-man-celebrating-the-100th-birthday-of-the-kidney-his-mom-do...
195•gscott•2d ago•51 comments

Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked

https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/reasons-not-emt-ranked/
153•citelao•13h ago•75 comments

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-s...
133•Anon84•16h ago•176 comments

Religious scholars met with Anthropic

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html
80•bookofjoe•7h ago•153 comments

Dirty Optimization Secrets (C for Playdate)

https://devforum.play.date/t/dirty-optimization-secrets-c-for-playdate/23011
14•ibobev•1d ago•1 comments

We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/next-git-platform-on-cloudflare/
132•geoffbp•14h ago•114 comments

gpuvis: GPU Trace Visualizer

https://github.com/mikesart/gpuvis
3•luu•1d ago•0 comments

Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOuxo6SA8Uc
43•bobajeff•1d ago•18 comments

How to hack time, with C2PA

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/hacking-time.html
38•Retr0id•15h ago•4 comments

I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/?gift=v5U_Uz...
231•Brajeshwar•20h ago•492 comments

Your body of work thinks back at you

https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/09/25/your-body-of-work-thinks-back-at-you/
61•surprisetalk•3d ago•8 comments

UK Government Body Kept Files on People Criticizing Prevent Program

https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-prevent-unit-tracked-online-critics
43•latein•3h ago•10 comments

FTL: A new operating system for clouds

https://ftl-os.org/
173•romac•19h ago•67 comments

Three AI agents, two countries, and one uneven world wide web

https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/multilingual-ai-agents
31•effects•1d ago•1 comments

"Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate...
19•airhangerf15•2h ago•20 comments

Former SR-71 engineer talks NASA's Blackbird revival program

https://www.twz.com/air/former-sr-71-engineer-talks-nasas-blackbird-revival-program
61•rkagerer•1d ago•36 comments

What Meta got right with Muse

https://metedata.substack.com/p/what-meta-got-right-with-muse
49•young_mete•15h ago•62 comments

Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

https://sjg.io/writing/binrange-have-you-actually-put-the-bins-out/
76•simonjgreen•13h ago•37 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Convert Large CSV/XLSX to JSON or XML in Browser

https://csvforge.com
41•Botlabs•1y ago
Hello HN, I'm excited to share a project I've been working on: A simple, fast way to process huge CSV and XLSX files directly in your browser and export them as clean JSON or XML

Here's a few things that makes this converter different: - runs in the browser - all parsing and conversion is client side can handle data any size data - automatically detects delimiters, encodings, and data types as it parses - Live preview with column renaming, search/replace, and data cleanup - Export to JSON or XML — clean, structured output that can be used for API or Databases

backstory: I built this tool for myself. I work with massive CSV and TXT files, some over 10GB, and opening them in Excel would freeze my laptop, some of the online converters only limits to a certain size, so I started learning Python and pandas but ended up wasting so much time trying different delimiters or fixing badly structured data just to make it usable, and I thought this would be a really fun project to build

I'd love some feedback. Thank you

URL: https://csvforge.com

Comments

sverhagen•1y ago
"Runs in the browser" and "client side" isn't as much of a selling point to me as it's made out to be. It's a claim that I can't really validate until it's too late. If it's a commercial service I'm going to have to pay for, then maybe you should go all the way in gaining my trust with whatever safeguards it takes, so that I no longer care if I upload my data to your server or not.
rustc•1y ago
> then maybe you should go all the way in gaining my trust with whatever safeguards it takes

What kind of safeguards are possible with a web app?

sverhagen•1y ago
I think this comes down to legally-enforceable contracts with some teeth. A lot of business seem okay to trust Google's cloud products, or Microsoft's? I think as private person with limited means for litigation, you're likely sol.
hahn-kev•1y ago
Yeah I really wish there was a way for this to be enforced by the browser that the end user could trust. It would have to be a standard, but outside of opening dev tools and toggling offline mode there's no way to be sure.

The funny thing is that it feels safer to download a desktop app and give it the same data even though it's usually much harder to validate if it's shipping your data somewhere else.

strogonoff•1y ago
There’s a cheap trick to make sure a website that claims to do everything client-side actually does everything client-side:

1. Open the site in an incognito window.

2. Turn off your Internet.

3. Do what you’ve got to do.

4. Close browser window.

As a bonus, and this makes it better than just flipping the offline switch in developer tools, if you turn off Internet in a way that keeps the browser thinking it’s online, you can also peek at whether any network requests are made (for pathological cases where the app does everything locally but phones home anyway).

Botlabs•1y ago
Sure, but you can validate it dev tools exist for a reason. Honestly, I just can’t afford the storage costs if users are uploading 50GB+ CSVs. It’d be a huge strain on any server, not to mention painfully slow for users. Running everything client side was the easiest and most practical way to build this MVP at least for me thanks for the feedback
o11c•1y ago
"Large" generally means "bigger than RAM"; 10GB is medium-sized these days since it fits in most people's RAM. Does the browser actually have the (web worker?) APIs needed to stream and "upload" and "download"?
shubhamjain•1y ago
I don't get it. Are JSON and XML files more friendly to import vs CSV files? I always assumed CSVs were the standard. Any reasons to prefer structured formats?

Shameless plug: I am working on a similar problem of Excel not being a great tool for large datasets. My desktop app[1] lets you import raw data files and query them using SQL. (The website needs to be updated, the app looks much better than the current screenshots).

[1]: https://textquery.app

Botlabs•1y ago
yes they are a lot easier to work with when inserting into the database
snappr021•1y ago
This type of thing is fairly trivial to create with ChatGPT running entirely locally in HTML.

A couple of kb of open standard vanilla js that does some simple things faster than legacy spreadsheets etc ever could.

Even to the point of creating invoices, reports etc based on standard filters stored in local storage…

oschvr•1y ago
Looks like you made it in lovable. It has that characteristic UI.

If so, how much time did it take you?

Botlabs•1y ago
thanks for your comment, it took me almost 3 weeks to build this
constantcrying•1y ago
I think it should go without saying, but never use this with anything more relevant than a hobby project.

Doing this with any kind of data you don't fully own (e.g. data from your company) is a terrible idea, from so many standpoints. That it is "allegedly" running locally is not making it much better.

I think my question to OP is, who is this for. Any developer can write up a convert for his own datasets, in basically any case I can think of where you are handling large amounts of data you are building a pipeline to do cleanup, renaming, conversion, etc. Who wants to have a part of that pipeline be uploading the data into the browser?