Show HN: Hyperparam: OSS tools for exploring datasets locally in the browser (opens in new tab)

That's fair criticism... to be honest when I started the project it was more focused on hyperparameters, and it evolved into this javascript-for-ai mission. But now I just kind of liked the name.

Duckdb and datafusion are super cool! But they are VERY large wasm blobs (30-40mb each). This is often larger than the data you’re trying to load. And they add complexity with serving and deploying wasm files.

Hyparquet is 10kb of pure js, and so its trivial to deploy on a modern webapp, and wins hands down on time-to-first-data metric.

Funny you say that, because I built these tools because I wanted to build something very much like what you're describing!

I was trying to look at, filter, and transform large AI datasets, and I was frustrated with how bad the existing tool was for working with datasets with huge amounts of text (web scrapes, github dumps, reasoning tokens, agent chat logs). Jupyter notebook is woefully bad at helping you to look at your data.

So I wanted to build better browser tools for working with AI datasets. But to do that I had to build these tools (there was no working parquet implementation in JS when I started).

Anyway I'm still working on building an app for data processing using LLM chat assistant to help a single user curate entire datasets singlehandedly. But for now I'm releasing these components to the community as open source. And having them "do a single task each" was very much intentional. Thanks for the comment!

It does support using S3 presigned requests, but it's admittedly a little awkward to ask a server for a presigned request before every fetch. But does still have the benefit that you can have a small and light server just handing out signed requests, and then the user and their browser does the heavy lifting. This can save a lot on scaling out server costs.

That being said, I wish there was a better auth story. Open to suggestions if anyone has ideas!

Zero telemetry, fully local. It spawns `http-server` on port 2048 and opens your browser at `localhost`. Similar pattern as Jupyter Notebooks. Feel free to audit the code... the server is <200 LOC.

I don’t have benchmarks specifically against duckdb. I’m sure native C++ will run faster than JavaScript.

But whats important is that with Hyperparam you can do it in the browser, where the bottleneck will always be network-bound not cpu-bound.