Awesome Mad Science

Delightful npm packages that make you say "wow, didn't know that was possible!" PRs welcome!

peer-to-peer

peerwiki - all of wikipedia on bittorrent
simple-peer - send video/voice/data p2p in the browser (with webrtc)
torrent-docker - realtime boot of remote docker images over bittorrent
torrent-mount - mount a torrent as a filesystem
webtorrent - streaming torrent client for node & the browser

browserify

brfs - turn fs.readFileSync() calls into inlined static assets
browser field spec - replace certain files/modules when a module is bundled for the browser
browserify - use require() in the browser
glslify - npm modules compiled into WebGL shaders
webworkify - composable web workers for browserify

files

file-type - detect file content types by checking their magic numbers
fuse4js - write filesystem driver in js

geometry

alpha-shape - any dimensional alpha shapes (think "concave" hull)
box-intersect - fast any dimensional box intersection detection
convex-hull - robust any dimensional convex hull
delaunay-triangulate - robust any dimensional delaunay triangulation
surface-nets - extracts level sets in any dimension
voronoi-diagram - any dimensional voronoi diagrams
voxelize - voxelize a mesh

hardware

cylon - command robots, devices, and more from node

images

indico.io - facial emotion recognition and facial feature extraction

sound

doppler - detect motion with the doppler effect using only the microphone and speakers ^{★ 2105, pushed 229 days ago}
speak.js - text-to-speech on the web ^{★ 180, pushed 231 days ago}

streams

strip-html - strip html from a stream

text

diff - show text differences
franc - detect the language of text
indico.io - political sentiment analysis
node-tesseract - A simple wrapper for the Tesseract OCR package
normit - Google translate text & speak it
ocrad.js - OCR in Javascript via Emscripten
pullquoter - pull interesting quotes out of an article
sbd - split text into sentences
sentiment - basic sentiment analysis

terminal

minimist - simple argument parser
progress - create a simple terminal progress bar
terminal-menu - create retro terminal menus
vantage.js - CLI + SSH + REPL for Node ^{★ 3124, pushed 146 days ago}
cash - Cross-platform Linux commands in pure ES6 ^{★ 6717, pushed 126 days ago}

virtual machines

jsemu - A list of emulators written in the JavaScript ^{★ 629, pushed 146 days ago}
jslinux - x86 emulator for running Linux, written in JavaScript
jvm - java virtual machine in pure node.js
doppio - actively updated jvm in node.js, written in TypeScript ^{★ 802, pushed 131 days ago}

misc

bell.js - real-time anomalies detection for periodic time series.
bitcoinjs-lib - bitcoin client for node & the browser
fastparallel - zero overhead parallel function calls
google-distance - calculate travel distance between two locations on earth using Google Maps' API
qr-image - generate QR codes

meta-programming

notevil - javascript javascript interpreter, useful for running untrusted code safely.

mad scientists (people)

Mikola Lysenko - linear algebra, computational geometry, WebGL
Dominic Tarr - streams, distributed systems
Elijah Insua - NC machines, CAD/CAM
Mathias Buus - torrents in node, fuse bindings, data replication
Feross Aboukhadijeh - webtorrent, bittorrent, p2p hacks
Max Ogden - streams, voxels, data replication

License

To the extent possible under law, Feross Aboukhadijeh has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.