markdowndown
Productivity
web clipper
SHOW HN2024
How HN took it
8 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 10 critical, out of 35 comments about the project. Thread score -0.08.
Idea: 5 for, 1 againstExecution: 2 for, 4 againstPerformance: 1 for, 3 againstPricing: 0 for, 1 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
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
What HN said
What people liked
Clean output on complex marketing pages
From 1 comment
Just tried it on a complex marketing page and it did a great job. Congrats! I'm curious, if you care to share, what kind of load this places on your host? Is this something that…
alsetmusic on HN
Handles HN traffic well on Vercel
From 1 comment
it has actually scaled pretty well and has been negligible cost-wise. I didn’t have to do anything to handle HN traffic. Just a boilerplate nextjs app.
asadalt on HN
Objections
Gets stuck on cookie consent walls
From 2 comments
It looks like, if the website presents a cookie message, the tool just gets stuck on that and does not parse the actual content. As an example, I tried https://www.cnbc.com/ and…
old_dev on HNTried it earlier today, but it was hugged to death. Tried it now, but it only gave me the contents of the cookie-wall, not the page I was looking for. Tried on another page of…
sigio on HN
Server overload errors and hugging to death
From 2 comments
"Failed to Convert. Either the URL is invalid or the server is too busy. Please try again later."
midzer on HNI think it was hugged to death
julienreszka on HN
Fails on some sites like cnn.com
From 1 comment
I did cnn.com and it just downloaded a file that said cnn.com can't be found lol
cchance on HN
Requests
Open source the code
From 2 comments
Is the code open source?
remorses on HNIs this open sourced anywhere by any chance? Are you using GPT to do the conversion, or just doing it yourself by ways of HTML -> Markdown substitutions?
radicalriddler on HN
Turn into a browser extension
From 2 comments
Nice. Turn this into a browser extension and id install it. Feel like id forget about it otherwise
jamesstidard on HNThis is awesome. I kind of want a browser extension that does this to every page I read and saves them somewhere.
ChadNauseam on HN
Fix tooltips on mobile
From 2 comments
nitpick: the tooltip (triggered by the question mark icon) does not work on mobile - at least on my iPhone (both chrome & safari) May be worth taking a look at. Good stuff…
ohans on HNTooltips next to options don't work for me on Firefox for Android 124.0.2, and the converter failed on "https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2023/obituary-for-a-quiet-life"…
neitsab on HN
Questions
Is the code open source?
From 1 comment
Is the code open source?
remorses on HN
Does it use GPT or HTML-to-Markdown substitutions?
From 1 comment
Is this open sourced anywhere by any chance? Are you using GPT to do the conversion, or just doing it yourself by ways of HTML -> Markdown substitutions?
radicalriddler on HN
Alternatives named
Trafilatura, Newspaper4k, python-readability
From 1 comment
Converting websites to markdown comes with 3 distinct problems: 1. Throughly scraping the content of page (high recall) 2. Dropping all the ads/auxilliary content (high…
screye on HN
Firecrawl, Urlbox, url2text, usescraper
From 2 comments
Great idea to offer image downloads and filtering with GPT! I built a similar tool last year that doesn't have those features: https://url2text.com/ Apologies if the UI is slow -…
jot on HNVery cool. We posted about a similar tool we built yesterday https://www.firecrawl.dev/ It also crawls (although you can scrape single pages as well)
cpeffer on HN
Pandoc
From 1 comment
This is one of those things that the ever-amazing pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does very well, on top of supporting virtually every other document format.
blobcode on HN
MarkDownload browser extension
From 2 comments
I use markdownload extension for Firefox. Seems to work pretty ok.
brokenmachine on HNThis fork: https://github.com/deathau/markdownload With extension available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari.
Terretta on HN