[HN Gopher] Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020)
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       Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020)
        
       Author : vortex_ape
       Score  : 105 points
       Date   : 2025-01-03 13:26 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.geoffreylitt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.geoffreylitt.com)
        
       | hubraumhugo wrote:
       | I love the idea of having a plug-in spreadsheet on every website,
       | so I can work with the data without having to do any scraping or
       | programming.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, it looks like the project was abandoned after the
       | initial talk and paper in 2020.
       | 
       | I assume that we'll get there soon with small LLMs running
       | directly in the browser (like Gemini nano) that will make it easy
       | to query/structure website data.
        
       | TeMPOraL wrote:
       | Thanks for linking it. I've said many times that many, if not
       | most websites and SaaS businesses would be better and more
       | ergonomic for the users if done as Excel spreadsheets instead.
       | Great to see it actually being tried!
        
         | baxtr wrote:
         | I am curious to understand why you think that. What's the use
         | case? To create custom views like in the video?
        
       | dustingetz wrote:
       | this is excellent
        
       | notpushkin wrote:
       | Neat! Seems that development has stopped in 2020 though :-(
       | https://github.com/geoffreylitt/wildcard
        
       | AIrtemis wrote:
       | Neat project! The link to signup for the mailing list points to a
       | blank mailchimp page.
        
       | gklitt wrote:
       | Creator of Wildcard here! Neat to see this pop up on HN after
       | several years. As others have noted, this project isn't under
       | active development anymore.
       | 
       | One reason: while I still think there's great potential in
       | browser extensions, I ultimately felt limited by scraping and
       | fetching bits of data from a server, and grew more interested in
       | a deeper overhaul of how we build applications in order to locate
       | more data on the client. Eg: check out this demo [1] of a
       | Wildcard-esque data manipulation but in an app that stores all
       | its data in a client-side database. I'm still continuing this
       | work today, exploring "local-first" architectures at the Ink &
       | Switch research lab, in support of malleable customizable
       | interfaces.
       | 
       | It would be interesting to revisit Wildcard now that LLMs exist--
       | I suspect that many of the scraping parts (building "site
       | adapters" in Wildcard parlance) would be far more possible to
       | automate now. A few years ago we explored some semi-automated
       | programming-by-example interactions for scraping [2] but the
       | friction was always really noticeable without any AI support.
       | 
       | [1]: https://riffle.systems/essays/prelude/#data-centric-
       | design-e...
       | 
       | [2]: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/Joker-LIVE-2022.pdf
        
         | dustingetz wrote:
         | did you guys decide to publish code for Woldcard? i might take
         | a whack at building something cool on top of this if y'all are
         | interested in permitting that
        
           | gklitt wrote:
           | Code is here! Totally support any riffing on this concept.
           | 
           | https://github.com/geoffreylitt/wildcard
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-05 23:01 UTC)