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command line data converter

SHOW HN2022

Universal Text Transformer

Shown by notamy on Mar 7, 2022. Click the card to turn it over.

127points

35comments

#485of 2,570 in 2022

Top 19%of 2022 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

1 positive, 8 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 6 critical, out of 15 comments about the project. Thread score -0.27.

Docs: 1 for, 2 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 0 for, 2 against

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

Loads entire dataset into memory, no streaming
From 2 comments
- Good idea, but this is a painful limitation: > For example, utt does not process data in a streaming manner, but rather loads the entire dataset into memory before processing
  sanity31415 on HN
- It is! I’m not very happy with it and would love to change it — I’m just fortunate to have a primary workstation with an absurd amount of RAM.
  notamy on HN
Name collides with ML transformer term and UTF
From 3 comments
- Cool project! Something to consider: "Transformer"[1] is already used to refer to a popular element of state of the art deep neural networks, especially ones that are used on…
  lgessler on HN
- Good to know, thanks! I was originally considering a name more like "universal text finagler" but then I realised that there's already a well-known "UTF" (:
  notamy on HN
- UTF itself is already short for "Unicode Transformation Format" and certainly predates any usage of the middle word by ML projects.
  chungy on HN
Java startup time may be slow for shell use
From 1 comment
- The spirit of the tool is great! Not sure how long it takes today to start up and load classes on a JVM. The idea of using a java program regularly in the shell immediately makes…
  parentheses on HN

List supported input and output formats in docs
From 1 comment
- I would recommend highlighting what are the supported input and output formats or at least highlights of what is supported. Another key question I have is why use this tool…
  slaymaker1907 on HN
Add a diagram of conversion possibilities like Pandoc
From 1 comment
- Interesting project and seems very useful. Reminds me of Pandoc, maybe you could make a diagram similar to how [1] Pandoc shows conversions possibilities. [1]…
  gitgud on HN

Why use this instead of jq?
From 1 comment
- I would recommend highlighting what are the supported input and output formats or at least highlights of what is supported. Another key question I have is why use this tool…
  slaymaker1907 on HN
What license is it under?
From 1 comment
- What license is this code under? I'm just curious if I might be able to use it as part of a work project in the future.
  InfiniteRand on HN

Pandoc
From 2 comments
- Interesting project and seems very useful. Reminds me of Pandoc, maybe you could make a diagram similar to how [1] Pandoc shows conversions possibilities. [1]…
  gitgud on HN
- Reminds me of the Haskell project Pandoc ... which is also aimed at this use case.
  TheMagicHorsey on HN
nushell
From 1 comment
- FWIW nu shell can be used for a lot of the same use-cases: ``` $ echo "[1, 2, 3]" | nu -c 'cat | from json | to yaml' --- - 1 - 2 - 3 $ echo ' {"key": [1, 2, 3]}' | nu -c 'cat |…
  kbd on HN
jq
From 1 comment
- I would recommend highlighting what are the supported input and output formats or at least highlights of what is supported. Another key question I have is why use this tool…
  slaymaker1907 on HN
rq
From 1 comment
- Thanks! Also see rq: https://github.com/dflemstr/rq
  ducktective on HN