Top all-time · #4420
csvbase blog
Company blog · csvbase.com/blogdataprogramming
csvbase blog is the company blog at csvbase.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2022, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “Take the tools out of 'Data', but don't take the data out of the tools”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link csvbase posts on HTTP content negotiation, serving one URL as CSV or HTML, and ETag-based caching of tables. Comments discuss the techniques rather than praise the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Take the tools out of 'Data', but don't take the data out of the tools4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-01-11
- /meripaterson/stock-exchanges4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-10
- Why my favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-13
- There are 665 open licences, most are pretty rubbish3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-18
- DuckDB Isn't Just Fast2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-05-31
- Parquet: More than just "Turbo CSV" (2023)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-03
- I didn't write any JavaScript, and other shortcuts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-22
- The semantic web is now widely adopted2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-21
- Show HN: CSVBase – a website for hosting (smallish) data tables2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-10
What Hacker News says?
I'd like to point out that llama 3.1 is not open source[1] (I was recently made aware of that fact by [2], when it was on HN front page) While it's very nice to see a peak of interest for local, "open-weights" LLMs, this is an unfortunate choice of words, as it undermines the quite important differences between llama's license model and open-source. The license question does not seem to be addressed at all in the ar…
Comment linking /blog/14
on “Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops”Submitted The semantic web is now widely adopted as a story · 455 points
HN discussionNice. Its interesting to me that searching and filtering isnt something that http://csvbase.com has.
Comment linking /
on “Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table”Submitted You can't just assume UTF-8 as a story · 195 points
HN discussionhttp is already registered as a protocol and you can indeed do that already. It's printed on every table page. eg on https://csvbase.com/calpaterson/opcodes-6502 : import pandas as pd; opcodes_6502 = pd.read_csv('https://csvbase.com/calpaterson/opcodes-6502', index_col=0) But writing back is harder. It's not easy to make pandas do an HTTP PUT and then insert the HTTP basic auth and so on. Plus (not discussed in the…
Comment linking /calpaterson/opcodes-6502
on “Client libraries are better when they have no API?”Submitted Client libraries are better when they have no API? as a story · 159 points
HN discussion> Total clickbait title, obviously being able to make an HTTP request to an endpoint, and get a CSV back, is an API. Respecting the “accept” header to return different data formats, based on what the client requests, is totally fine/reasonable, but it doesn’t magically make an interface that’s designed for applications to program against not an API. I'm sorry about the title. As I said below; that was really meant i…
Comment linking /calpaterson/opcodes-6502.json
on “Client libraries are better when they have no API?”Submitted Caching secrets of the HTTP elders, part 1 as a story · 142 points
HN discussionOhh this is an interesting case. You could abuse the hell out of Etags, Urls and DIFFS to get a much better long haul response. https://csvbase.com/user-name/table-name/ would return you an etag. The etag needs to be a hash of the file (sha256). https://csvbase.com/user-name/table-name/etag could return a 204 for an unchanged document. If the two dont match then return a diff + new etag. Apply the diff as a patch, a…
Comment linking /user-name/table-name/etag
on “Caching secrets of the HTTP elders, part 1”Submitted DuckDB Isn't Just Fast as a story · 111 points
HN discussionI love your tool. If you want a slightly more structured version of Gists that speaks parquet try my own tool, csvbase :). I pasted this data in as https://csvbase.com/calpaterson/opcodes-6502 and you can get parquet by adding .parquet to that ( https://csvbase.com/calpaterson/opcodes-6502.parquet ) Here's datasette lite running off that file: https://lite.datasette.io/?parquet=https%3A%2F%2Fcsvbase.com... Really ni…
Comment linking /calpaterson/opcodes-6502.parquet
on “The 6502 instruction set as a database”Submitted Why my favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website as a story · 71 points
HN discussioncsvbase does ship parquet! Just add ".parquet" - eg https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges.parquet
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges.parquet
on “Why my favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website”Submitted There are 665 open licences, most are pretty rubbish as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI'm on paternity leave at the moment, so, during naps, I have been working on this side-project: a kind of "github, but for data tables". The motivation is kind of twofold: I always wished there was a simple pastebin style thing where you could paste output from SQL queries (eg queries you run because someone asks you something on slack) and also I wish there that open data was in a more straightforward format when…
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges
on “Show HN: CSVBase – a website for hosting (smallish) data tables”Submitted From Shell to Excel – with a little bit of HTTPS as a story · 24 points
HN discussion> There's nothing in the underlying HTTP response from https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges that tells me I can get an HTML or CSV version. Is there a JSON version available? What other variants exist? How do I know that this URL will deliver different responses? Well, you can send a HEAD request with a given accept: header to find out what you’ll get without actually fetching the data. But it’s true tha…
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted DuckDB Isn't Just Fast as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThere are two downsides to this approach: 1) The discovery of the different response formats. How do I know that I can get csv files from that URL, other than by hoping that the website documents this somewhere? There's nothing in the underlying HTTP response from https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges that tells me I can get an HTML or CSV version. Is there a JSON version available? What other variants ex…
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted Take the tools out of 'Data', but don't take the data out of the tools as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThey support extensions also. As in the article https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges.csv will always render a CSV (regardless of accept headers), and https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges.html appears to do the same for HTML
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges.html
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted Show HN: CSVBase – a website for hosting (smallish) data tables as a story · 6 points
HN discussionInstead of relying on settings in clients I would have required something more explicit in the url. For example https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges for the html version and https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges/csv for the csv version. Generally speaking, implicit magic is cool but can also be frustrating if its not working as expected. Very OT: Apple has this attitude of 'it just works'. Rea…
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges/csv
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWell, one of my bugbears is that most open data is released in weird formats. Take the boston housing dataset as an example: http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/boston This is one of the most popular beginner datasets around. It's often used in tutorials and when experimenting. Does everyone who wants to use that have to write some custom parser? Why? https://csvbase.com/calpaterson/boston.csv is just so much easier
Comment linking /calpaterson/boston.csv
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted There are 665 open licences, most are pretty rubbish as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome links in the article are missing the TLD curiously enough, it does work if you go to: https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges .
Comment linking /meripaterson/stock-exchanges
on “How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick”Submitted Parquet: More than just "Turbo CSV" as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://csvbase.com/blog/13 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41307011
Comment linking /blog/13
on “Ask HN: Do You Use JSON-LD, Schema or Open Graph?”Submitted DuckDB isn't just fast (2024) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
