Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Gotta love the complaining about cookie banners while also showing a cookie banner.
    by wat10000
  • Rather than saying LLM directly replaced it... isn't it because people can now use LLM to obtain tools like converters they previously couldn't find (due to the hassle), or create them themselves through code generation?
    by hskimse
  • Why the free advertising for AI? There are thousands of code formatters starting with GNU indent, linters etc.
    by 12ex1-2hBa
  • I'm not sure I understand the intended message here. The author seems to describe their own project as "cover[ed] ... with invasive advertising" while saying that new technology accomplishes the same outcomes "faster, cheaper, and [with less maintenance burden]". So what exactly has been ruined?
    by aleksejs
  • On that particular point, I wondered whether there was supposed to have been a "not" before "cover"; otherwise, it definitely doesn't seem to follow.
    by brycewray
  • Exactly. And having AI to work out the 2am dependency issues actually makes maintenance a lot easier. This seems like an odd message.
    by D13Fd
  • I don't know if this website specifically did it, but a lot of other similar websites provide such services in a very bad way, for example base64encode.org and base64decode.org send your data to the server instead of using JS, and no one knows what they do with it.

    I do understand that some still prefer browsers with JS disabled, but a website could probably detect this and default to in-browser processing, while reserving server-side to those edge cases.

    by Tiberium
  • That's surprising. Isn't that a quite famous service? Is there a service implemented using only clientside js without sending?
    by hskimse
  • What a shame. This was a really valuable resource and now it's just gone. Not because the author doesn't want to compete, not because they don't want to do it anymore, but because industry rolled over them

    This has a very similar feel to me like local stores closing up because Walmart showed up next door, or beloved used bookstores dying because Amazon exists. Everything good in life right now is being churned into productivity and profit by hyper capital. The result is we all live "better" but poorer lives

    Sorry for the rant. I'm also on the verge of giving up, so this hits me very hard

    by bluefirebrand
  • Right, this is why you go to the farrier to get your horse reshod every month....

    There are plenty of Amish communities around, maybe you can join one of them to see what life looks like with slow technology progress. See how fulfilled you are there.

    by pixl97
  • Sure enough, even after the demise of the internet, the humble cookie consent banner still asks to share our personal information.
    by jareklupinski
  • From Gemini,

    > FreeFormatter.com [was] a popular online utility website that provides free formatting, validation, conversion, and minification tools for developers, data professionals, and web administrators working with code and data structures like JSON, XML, HTML, SQL, and Java

    Makes sense. Great exit letter.

    by wxw
  • Thank you, I parsed the url as "free for matter" and was very confused
    by morkalork
  • So I had to copy-paste my source code into a web site, submit, then copy-paste the text back out into my document? I'm not putting down the work the author did, but that workflow was always going to be completely obsolete at some point.
    by hyperhello
  • In this particular case - good riddance. Such tools should not require a round-trip to an ad-infested website on the other side of the world. The crucial issue is that in the process you have to trust the owner (and perhaps ad network owners) with your data. Even if you want a round trip, you could have a static page somewhere on GitHub. The fact that the models made this business model obsolete is not necessarily a bad thing.
    by pshirshov
  • I liked Boop's[1] strapline for this:

    > Stop pasting company secrets into random websites.

    [1]<https://boop.okat.best/>

    by sceptic123
  • Last non-retired archived version: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260722191742/https://www.freef...>
    by teddyh
  • Though I empathise with the OP, I feel that SaaS tools now need to add much more value in order to be sellable or appeal to the audience.

    The factors that used to influence the build vs. buy decision are now changing. Earlier, even small tools like Canny (which shows your product roadmap to your customers), link-in-bio tools, or even Calendly used to sell well. I foresee that changing.

    by ashu1461
  • Is it the same as the proverbial buggy whip manufacturers of 100 years ago complaining about how their business is yet another ruined by cars?
    by criddell
  • There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps for things like file conversions, I think image cropping, and other one-offs like that. Anyone remember?

    Nice thing about local PWAs is you serve them statically, CDNs make bandwidth cheap, way fewer vulnerabilities for the host, and all the compute cost is paid by the user's browser.

    by jubilanti
  • I see at least one pr. day here (but I only read /newest)
    by phillipseamore
  • CyberChef? https://cyberchef.io/
    by samschooler
  • IT-Tools, maybe? https://github.com/CorentinTh/it-tools
    by oxinai
  • > There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps

    Maybe this one?

    Useful patterns for building HTML tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223882

    The direct link to the collection of HTML tools: https://tools.simonwillison.net

    by 1659447091