Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

- my gripe with most of these tools is that whenever i actually need one, i can never seem to remember their name.

- That kills like half the traffic for you guys.

- For example look at this dude https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ This is easily one of the most comprehensive tools I have ever seen anyone build

- I literally bookmarked that site under a tools tag and that is how I am able to find them. I can't ever seem to remember their name when I need these quickly

- Perhaps get a good DOT COM domain name and host your site there. It would make a huge difference in usage.

- Discoverability is the problem. Since these tools I believe are not there to sell subscriptions, that means they don't make much in revenue. Organic marketing is the best way for such tools and an easy to remember name makes a huge difference.

View on HN

CyberChef is a great tool, thanks for sharing that! One of my main focuses was to create something a user could keep on their own system if they wish. Only coming back to the actual site when/if they want to get latest versions.

I was going to ask. Is a goal here for users to self/locally host if they like?

Yes, you can self host if you’d like as long as you don’t make it public. Be sure to get the latest version from GitHub periodically, or not. If it’s working no need to update.

CyberChef runs locally as well. It even has a download link for that on the top left of the main page.

That ‘dude’ is the UK’s GCHQ. Of Bletchley Park fame.

TIL!

Phenomenal collection but like the parent of this message, I have many similar sites bookmarked but without a good bookmark manager (Chrome), it's hard to add meta data like "I really like this page's JSON formatter" etc.

I might have a go at a making meta-utility site when you enter names, descriptions, tags etc. of a utility and it lists relevant sites.

To the parent's point about a good DOT COM, I have one that might be perfect since I seem incapable of finishing the project I purchased it for decades ago.

You know that "this dude" is basically the UK Governments version of the NSA, right?

https://github.com/gchq

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/

I was not expecting that. It's really interesting that they are behind this.

Ah you beat me to it ;) I was chuckling when I read that

I was going to post this exact tool to see what the differences were. As others have noted, GCHQ is basically the NSA for Britain.

my big gripe with them is that they aren't part of a "developer" package my operating system offers. I wouldn't, personally, consider any of these utilities "bloatware", if they were just on my machine. They do something useful, even if I rarely need to do those things. But even if we say that those apps would be "bloat" for an OS, I should still be able to open the package manager and get a vendor-supplied package that includes a bunch of utilities like this. Not a third-party "if you know, you know" situation. Windows Development Utilities. Ubuntu devutils. DevToolKit on MacOS. Etc. Included as a toggle on the OS install screen, even.

But like... this is the kind of stuff I want an Operating System to provide. Not just paging and networking and file storage, and so on, but also utilities for me to operate the system specifically the way I want to at any given time. Basic text entry, word processing, and - yes - text manipulation utilities. Color space utilities. Randomizing utilities. Password and cryptographic utilities. All of those with familiar UIs that can be iterated on by the OSes and relied upon by the devs.

Many of those things can be done with commandline utilities which come pre-installed with your OS of choice. But you have to learn about them, it's not a clicky GUI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com