[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edi...
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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
I've asked this previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208 But a few years have
past and want to see what's emerged since. Although can be new to
you vs. released in 2021 or 2022 necessarily. Things I've come
across in the meantime: * mock AWS services
https://github.com/spulec/moto * query cloud services
https://github.com/turbot/steampipe * munge CSV
https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv * page json
https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless * text to tree
structure [I use this as a hack to version control my music
library] https://github.com/birchb1024/frangipanni
Author : zJayv
Score : 320 points
Date : 2022-12-20 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Careful with moto: it uses Python's context managers to set-up
| and tear-down the mocking. If you haven't got the right mixture
| of nesting, yields, etc. then you may end up running tests
| against real AWS resources (using your default credentials).
|
| For this reason, I don't have any default AWS credentials
| configured: I always specify an AWS_PROFILE manually when it's
| needed ;)
| brailsafe wrote:
| Dash for Mac and Vs code
| Myrannas wrote:
| I've found Wallaby (https://wallabyjs.com/) to be a great
| addition to my tool chain over the last year.
|
| It is an automated test runner for JS / TS code with a great
| integration with ides. It has made writing tests and refactoring
| so much more productive.
| nikivi wrote:
| Still Karabiner and it's probably 1000 hours yearly at this
| point.
|
| https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner
|
| On order of 100 hours, this year I'd say it's Sublime Merge,
| VSCode, Height (to manage projects) and Telegram.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| Karabiner and Keyboard Maestro have saved me a lot of time as
| well. Being able to remap consistent shortcuts for every
| application is really nice.
|
| https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/
|
| Alfred is another good one for Mac. Being able to add your own
| custom commands & workflows is useful.
|
| https://www.alfredapp.com/
|
| Hammerspoon too, which is great for scripting all different
| parts of Mac OS. I use it mainly for custom window layouts.
|
| https://www.hammerspoon.org/
| CharlesW wrote:
| Along these lines, Raycast1 is excellent. It's got lots
| built-in capabilities and available extensions2 that I've
| used to replace several miscellaneous utilities.
|
| 1 https://www.raycast.com/ 2 https://www.raycast.com/store
| sarlalian wrote:
| Raycast is on track to replace Alfred for me. The
| simplicity of scripting with it is so nice compared to
| relative complexity of Alfred workflows.
| stared wrote:
| Fish + Starship (https://starship.rs/) + z
| (https://github.com/jethrokuan/z). For me it is a really nice
| configuration, fast do do stuff & visually pleasant (it
| influences my comfort & motivation).
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| _make_ + _pandoc_ + _a build script in my own programming
| language_ + _latex_ allow me to auto-generate the reference
| manual for my toy Lisp interpreter.[1] That was definitely a huge
| time-saver, since I already had the help entries for an online
| help system.
|
| [1]
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rasteric/z3s5-lisp/main/do...
| inasio wrote:
| Not really a program, but this year the Tabu [0] heuristic saved
| me at least on that order of time. I work on combinatorial
| optimization problem (think traveling salesman), typically we use
| local search heuristics like simulated annealing or parallel
| tempering that work well but require a lot of hyper parameter
| tuning. Tabu is super simple, has very few parameters to tune,
| and works great.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabu_search
| hedora wrote:
| How do you implement "tabuList.contains(sCandidate)"?
|
| Has it been successfully generalized to problems with infinite
| / continuous search spaces? I imagine you could use edit
| distance or something for large combinatorial spaces.
| baby wrote:
| rust-analyzer, if that counts
| andwaal wrote:
| JetBrains software.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Especially local history - being able to go back in time before
| any commits were made saves you rewriting code or having to
| remember what something was doing before.
|
| Otherwise the number of times I "show usages" or refactor
| shortcuts (rename, extract method / variable) throughout the
| day...
|
| All of it out of the box as well, it's great value for money.
| pwenzel wrote:
| XDebug in PHPStorm. Can't live without it!
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Specifically CLion's excellent code browsing features. It's the
| only thing between me and insanity when I have to "quickly"
| patch a binary with source code spread out over 1000+ files.
| mastudebaker wrote:
| On windows, http://symbolclick.com/index.htm is great for XML and
| JSON viewing. Use it pretty much everyday. Really love the way it
| display data in a table format.
| Apreche wrote:
| Of all the software I can think of quickly, the one I think may
| have saved the most time in my life is Google Maps.
| signaru wrote:
| This is the single software that made me maximize my travels.
| Removing the fear of getting lost is life changing.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I use and enjoy Google Maps, but some of the features are
| baffling, like insisting on switching you to a "faster" route
| even after dismissing the proposal several times.
|
| This almost got me into trouble a couple of months ago when I
| was driving from Odessa to Chisinau. One route goes through
| Transnistria which is currently controlled by the russian
| military.
|
| I'm not sure if Google is aware that there is a war on
| currently, but I don't fancy getting shot just because
| California product manager guy believes he knows best.
| teknopaul wrote:
| How come it saves 100 hours for you?
|
| In the old days we had paper maps and I checked routes before I
| left: not doing that anymore has cost me time rather than saved
| me time. Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong
| place. Once to the middle of a mustard field in France which
| was a destination it changed to mid-route to a house called La
| Mutardier. 5 hours wrong lost there.
|
| Less than useless on a motorbike due to its UI, actually quite
| dangerous.
|
| I would say it has cost me many hours and saved me from
| carrying a map.
|
| Evermore useless adverts, and now hiding places that it doesn't
| get a kick back from.
|
| Oh and it's cost me money in fines from taking me the wrong way
| down streets I was not allowed to drive on. With no way to feed
| that info back into the system. When its wrong it stays wrong
| for years sometimes where I live, and we have street map, it
| ought to be half decent and at least safe for drivers.
| Jensson wrote:
| Google maps is a map, you can map out the routes yourself
| just like with old maps, but it is way faster to do so than
| with paper maps.
| chungy wrote:
| > Oh and it's cost me money in fines from taking me the wrong
| way down streets I was not allowed to drive on.
|
| It is your responsibility to drive legally. Even if Google
| Maps is suggesting a route that's illegal, you made the
| action to drive the wrong way.
| npteljes wrote:
| I find that a combination is the most useful: planning the
| route beforehand, maybe with an online map / routing service,
| and then use the turn-by-turn for convenience. I don't use
| Google Maps myself, I go with MAPS.ME / Organic Maps these
| days, maybe OsmAnd+.
| burnished wrote:
| Searching the map for your target given only incomplete
| information is much faster. It also scopes the map to your
| screen size, paper does not do this, you save time finding
| the right resolution.
|
| It sounds like the real problem you are experiencing is that
| you stopped checking your route. If you treat it like a paper
| map on crack then it's a great tool. And, to be fair, it does
| sound like you run into more frustrating 'wtf!' problems than
| others.
|
| Credentials: I used a paper map as a pizza boy.
| gtirloni wrote:
| How are paper maps working for you these days? I'm interested
| in your experience replacing GMaps.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place.
|
| Have used it for years and have never seen this happen.
| Neither has send me the wrong way in a lane.
| npteljes wrote:
| Turn-by-turn navigation in a completely foreign place can be
| invaluable, and save much frustration. I personally use Organic
| Maps (MAPS.ME), and I'm fortunate that it never led me astray
| or on horrible roads etc.
| towawy wrote:
| Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of
| rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so
| satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code.
| Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they
| don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for
| it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in
| a pinch.
|
| Obligatory Spolsky intro to Excel:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
| leokennis wrote:
| Often useful CLI tools are linked on HN (like in this thread).
| And probably if you take the time to learn them or if you
| integrate them into your automation they are 100% useful.
|
| But, given the problem "I have some unfortunately formatted
| data which I need to analyze", there is no better solution than
| sanitizing it in VS Code and then analyzing it in Excel.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Pssh... adults use JMP ;-):
| https://www.jmp.com/en_us/software/data-analysis-software.ht...
|
| Trivia: JMP stands for "John's Macintosh Project".
|
| Also, the entire semiconductor industry depends on JMP just
| like the entire pharmaceutical industry depends on Minitab.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The JMP buy page doesn't even give you a price. How expensive
| is it?
| BeetleB wrote:
| And we go full circle. I learned pandas in 2012 so I don't
| have to deal with Excel or JMP scripting.
|
| Still use Excel for quick stuff but otherwise it's pandas for
| me.
| manv1 wrote:
| Excel gets my vote for one of the top 10 software programs
| ever. It's crazy how useful it is.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Excel, the second best program for any task. ;0)
| huijzer wrote:
| As a Linux user, using Excel via the web interface or via a
| virtual machine is not so satisfying nor much faster than
| alternatives.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who doesn't pay for MS, I'm basically using
| a combination of Calc and Gnumeric, because G can open larger
| files (handled larger files than Excel in fact), but Calc has
| more features, and it's more similar to Excel which I was
| used to. ONLYOFFICE's sheets can also be handy, if MS Excel
| compatibility is wanted.
| eitland wrote:
| Crazy useful.
|
| So useful I like it despite how it always goes out of its way
| to waste my time by trying to misrepresent a number of
| different types of strings and numbers as American dates :-|
| zemoose wrote:
| Dear god, I would use Excel so much more if I could get it to
| stop mutating my data.
| jerzyt wrote:
| 100% in agreement on Excel. Even when coding in Python I
| frequently save an intermediate file as xlsx to explore/debug,
| or even load into Tableau for viz.
| aquafox wrote:
| You should learn R and dplyr ;)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Tell us more - in the context of them being replacements
| for Excel for his use case.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 110% agreement on Excel
|
| The ability create a relational database in Excel with
| vlookups and hlookups, then capture it all into a macro is
| amazing.
|
| I've really enjoyed using Excel as a Postgres frontend, with
| a real Postgres DB instance handling data, and then using the
| report functionality to dump to Word.
|
| While a pro reporting engine and cutting out MS Office
| altogether would be a better longterm solution, it is hard to
| beat for quick & dirty results.
| liotier wrote:
| > The ability create a relational database in Excel with
| vlookups and hlookups,
|
| Do yourself a favour and ditch vlookup and hlookup in
| favour of the recently introduced xlookup, which even
| obsoletes index/match !
|
| I try to keep my exploratory joins out of Excel, but I
| admit that I often don't resist the immediacy of Excel's
| poor man's joins located right where I need them.
| towawy wrote:
| I'm curious, how did you establish the Postgres connection?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I used ODBC [1] out of the big list of options [2] which
| gets a bad rep but worked for my use-cases.
|
| The commercial devart plugin [3] looks pretty neat too
| but I haven't used it yet
|
| I've also tried the JDBC connectivity option too [4], but
| with some different use-cases in mind for Postgres (not
| about Excel)
|
| [1] https://datacornering.com/how-to-connect-to-
| postgresql-datab...
|
| [2]
| https://www.postgresql.org/download/products/2-drivers-
| and-i...
|
| [3] https://www.devart.com/excel-addins/postgresql/
|
| [4] https://jdbc.postgresql.org/
| jen729w wrote:
| Yeah, just yesterday. Hacky output from `nslookup`, not ideal
| but it's all we had. Tens of thousands of rows. No IDE with
| regex capabilities available.
|
| Excel to the rescue! Took me about five minutes to extract
| exactly what I needed.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Not exactly a program but Postgraphile saved me a ton of time to
| write an API. All things considered probably way more than 100
| hours.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'd say that Charles Proxy (https://charlesproxy.com) is my
| "secret sauce."
|
| It allows me to quickly evaluate server interactions in my
| software, without having to program in all kinds of logging.
| mnks wrote:
| Looking at your list you may like VisiData
| (https://www.visidata.org/). See the demo from 2018:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
| npteljes wrote:
| I find good use of my skill in the following:
|
| DBeaver: use a consistent interface for practically any data
| store. Wanna SELECT and JOIN CSVs? It can do that too.
|
| https://www.mail-tester.com/ - Fantastic email server settings
| troubleshooter.
|
| Excel / Calc / Gnumeric: I don't even know macros, just the
| functions, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables enable good
| productivity. And sometimes fun, I chose my current video card,
| and optimized my Factorio gameplay with Calc.
|
| BASH, jq, sed, grep, tr, cut, Geany, regexes: it's fantastic to
| be able to work with text. Log parsing and other text tasks turn
| into a puzzle game, where I win fast, and it's usually faster
| than to use anything else, especially for one-offs.
| micvbang wrote:
| Oh my lord, I love DBeaver so much!
|
| One thing that blew my mind the first time I saw it, was that
| when you look at geospatial data, they let you view your
| geometries on a map. It's so simple and so awesome!
| bdcravens wrote:
| I've long been a DataGrip user, but Dbeaver impressed me when
| it was the first to enable Aurora Babelfish support.
| npteljes wrote:
| Wow, DataGrip also looks very nice. I find it funny that how
| first we had Eclipse vs IntelliJ, and now DBeaver vs DataGrip
| - each built on the respective platform, DBeaver on Eclipse,
| and DataGrip on IntelliJ.
| pfoof wrote:
| macOS and its integration with mac touchpad. I used Windows and
| Linux on several laptops and none was so well designed to switch
| between desktops and searching for windows. Ah and M1 speeds
| (unless you count updates and installing Xcode but you can't have
| everything).
| silasdb wrote:
| Matrix Docker Ansible Deploy [1] allows me to unify all chat
| networks that I use under one single server (and, therefore, one
| single client), avoiding switching windows. I do believe it saved
| me hundred of hours...
|
| [1] https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
| numlock86 wrote:
| systemd-nspawn, f that hype train around over engineered
| container solutions.
|
| Also WireGuard. Who has the mental stability to setup OpenVPN or
| similar these days, even with things like Openswan? Yuck.
| abakker wrote:
| Q research software. Best survey analysis tool I've used by far.
| Saved way more than 100 hrs vs spss.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| https://ninite.com has saved me well over that over the years.
| waymon wrote:
| termius - new terminal app. I can save hosts, chain together
| hosts and then easily connect. sftp built right into it.
| honestly, it feels like cheating in terminal.
| synthc wrote:
| Shell productivity tools like fish, fzf and z.
|
| Feels like doing parkour on the command line!
| fotta wrote:
| k9s makes me feel like (and look like to my coworkers) a k8s
| wizard, the parenthetical especially when I'm sharing my terminal
| and zipping around using keyboard shortcuts
|
| https://github.com/derailed/k9s
| dpcx wrote:
| I love k9s, it's completely changed the game for me. I really
| wish the keyboard shortcuts and available commands were better
| documented, though. Figuring out that you have to be in the
| deployment view (and how to get there) to scale something took
| some doing.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It looks intimidating but is very quick to get into. Essential
| k8s tool.
| mtmail wrote:
| Not 100h yet but I've been replacing custom Linux command output
| parsing with https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204) lately.
| spockz wrote:
| I know this is the modulair way with piping. How would ` jc
| command args` be as opposed to `command args | jc ---command`?
| kbrazil wrote:
| Both ways work: $ jc ifconfig lo0
| $ ifconfig lo0 | jc --ifconfig
| hedora wrote:
| That actually looks nice! (I've written at least 10,000 perl
| one-liners.)
|
| Will definitely check it out.
| mywacaday wrote:
| One note, dump info once and search later, never fails
| eitland wrote:
| VSCode / IntelliJ / Netbeans / Eclipse - it is crazy how much
| time a decent IDE with refactoring support can save. (And still
| many on HN hate on them. I am fairly sure that for most people
| that spend lots of time on vim had spent as much time as they
| spend to get good at vim at learning and customizing a normal,
| good IDE, they'd have much better return on investment.)
|
| Git / SVN / CVS - never having to worry about if I can undo my
| way back to the last combination of files that worked its a
| superpower that we mostly take for granted, but I was over 20
| when I learned it.
|
| JUnit - again, being able to experiment fearlessly.
| drmaximus wrote:
| Sioyek: https://sioyek.info
|
| It's a PDF viewer that automatically finds and previews
| references in documents, even when the PDF doesn't have links.
| Makes reading some math books a very enjoyable experience instead
| of a chore.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| https://github.com/git-time-metric/gtm
| Gazoche wrote:
| The fish shell (https://fishshell.com/) and its fantastic auto-
| completion. It now replaces bash as the default shell on all my
| machine and is the first program I install when connecting to a
| fresh cloud instance.
| ramblerman wrote:
| mpv, mpvacious [1], and anki
|
| I've been learning spanish, and since hitting the intermediate
| stage outside of talking I mainly watch spanish shows or dubbed
| shows (Star trek TNG). I can create flash cards of difficult to
| understand phrases, or new words in seconds.
|
| I usually still edit them slightly depending on my purpose for
| the flashcard, but having > 2000 cards right now, I can't imagine
| what doing this by hand, or manual review would have cost me.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Ultrafast, super lite file search on Windows, Voidtools
| "Everything": https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
|
| I haven't touched the Windows Search utility since I found it.
| radicalriddler wrote:
| Yup, Everything is a godsend. It also makes it more likely for
| me to download a portable exe instead of a full install because
| I can quick search for the exe, where as windows search
| struggles.
| sixothree wrote:
| Everything paired with AstroGrep (or your favorite grep
| program) is the ultimate pair for searching on Windows. We
| pretty much force new devs to install these otherwise we watch
| them struggle for way too long.
| frizzlebox wrote:
| Everything is a godsend and ought to be built into Windows.
|
| Agent Ransack (free for commercial use) and FileLocator Pro
| (paid, has near-instant indexed search) are the go to grep
| alternatives for Windows on my dev team.
| https://www.mythicsoft.com/
|
| I also hear VS Code has ripgrep built in, but I haven't used
| it extensively.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I use RipGrep with it.
| kennedy wrote:
| Terraform: mainly because my organization used to make everything
| manually, using boto3/sdk scripts, and poorly tested/constructed
| cloudformation templates
| nijave wrote:
| While not perfect, `terraform plan` is a massive time saver. A
| lot of IaC tools still don't have good (or any) support for
| "dry runs" and provisioning a bunch of infrastructure to see if
| your thing works is really slow
| kennedy wrote:
| 100%, `terraform plan` is such a useful time and cost saving
| step when developing terraform.
|
| Ive read about pulumi and casually used it (python) to learn
| about it. Benefits like taking advantage of proper python
| language niceties, like running pytest on your IaC.
|
| Additionally, it uses terraform's providers behind the scene,
| both contributing their success to the other.
| bondolo wrote:
| Flexelint. The compilers have gotten better over the years but I
| wouldn't consider doing C/C++ development without it.
|
| It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging since I first
| started using it in 1990. The very first day it found a 'write
| past end of array' in some code written by a Pascal programmer
| which was doing a[sizeof(a)] = '\0'; that would have stymied us
| for days.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Git. Github. VSCode. ASP.NET. Vercel/Netlify. The CPanel thing
| that comes with free hosting. Wordpress.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Flying Logic
|
| Aeon Timeline
|
| ObservableHQ - particularly the discovery that I can use most of
| it locally and privately for free. I've tried with quarto so far,
| but I think there are other ways too.
|
| What I want is a way to instantly switch between dag and tree
| data structures: graph for visual editing, tree for easy data
| entry. So something that would analyze/cluster intelligently to
| minimize links when converting to tree, for when children have
| multiple parents.
| madjam002 wrote:
| Out of interest how do you run most of Observable locally?
| tunesmith wrote:
| I followed the instructions at Quarto.org, integrated with VS
| Code. So they are text documents stored locally. I didn't
| realize observable-cli was open source.
|
| I find it can't do nested logic the way observablehq.com can
| though. For instance, I like having inputs embedded in
| paragraphs of text, which requires having logic mixed in with
| a markdown cell. There are certain things that I can do on
| the web that don't work locally.
|
| There's also https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-
| dataflow, which I haven't tried yet.
| ss48 wrote:
| Everything Search by Voidtools.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| Woah, this is a blast from the past. I switched over to Mac a
| few years so I can't use this anymore, but this was my favorite
| piece of software from a prior job when I had a PC. This thing
| completely changed how I thought about performance and speed in
| software. I know there's the old adage about avoiding
| "premature optimization", but occasionally you use something
| like this that leaves your jaw on the floor in terms of what
| hyper-optimized software is capable of.
| thomasswift wrote:
| NameMangler (OS X) - renames files in all sorts of ways!
| ninawalters wrote:
| GoLinks! https://golinks.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-go-links/
| manv1 wrote:
| bourne shell (now bash) has saved me tons of time. It's
| ridiculously easy to glue stuff together...like migrating 10k
| videos from one video CMS to another, with custom fields etc. How
| do you drive that? bash scripts driving node, curl, and a few
| other programs.
| usrme wrote:
| If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a
| disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The
| amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-
| mitogen-b3...
|
| [2]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html
| rwky wrote:
| Just tried this, shaved a playbook from from 8 minutes 30
| seconds to 3 minutes 10 seconds! Thanks :)
| gtirloni wrote:
| This should have been integrated into upstream Ansible a long
| time ago.
|
| People say it's not a big deal these days but it still is.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Home Assistant [0] through bunch of automations we have around
| our home must've saved 100h in total for me and my partner so
| far.
|
| [0] - https://www.home-assistant.io/
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I hook tons of stuff up to HA and I love it. It's great with
| Sonoff switches flashed with Tasmota.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I've moved on my Sonoffs from Tasmota to ESPurna and finally
| to ESPhome which I find excellent.
| tunesmith wrote:
| What kind of automations have you found necessary? Any time I
| think about getting into it, I can only think of automations
| that sound silly or extra but nothing truly time-saving.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Turn off ac in the morning and back on before I come home.
| Saved me about $70 a month
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I got tired of tuning the speed on air purifiers at home.
| Since outdoor PM levels can change up to 1000x in a single
| day, you have to adjust accordingly, and it takes a lot of
| attention to do that.
|
| So I set up automation for that based on a few parameters:
| indoor and outdoor particulate matter levels (current and
| averaged over the last hour), noxious gas levels based on
| third party monitoring, wind direction and speed, and the
| weather forecast for the next few hours.
|
| Probably doesn't apply to others here, though.
| theblazehen wrote:
| Where I live we have frequent scheduled power outages, I use
| that to schedule when and how far to charge my batteries
| ununoctium87 wrote:
| South Africa?
| klinquist wrote:
| I've documented all of the automations I have set up at my
| Airbnb: https://www.linquist.com/airbnb/automation
| bath_ wrote:
| Not the user you replied to, but for me:
|
| Open blinds in the morning, shut them at sundown.
|
| Turn on porchlights after dark if I'm not home. Turn them off
| 10m after I'm home.
|
| Turn HVAC up/down when I leave the house, revert when I get
| home.
|
| Unlock doors when I arrive home. Make sure they're locked
| when I leave.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| How does home assistant track know if you are home or not?
| Is it tracking your location?
| crookedview wrote:
| You can set up zones based on your phone's GPS (there is
| a Home Assistant mobile application that can report data
| back to the server), or you could set up an automation
| based on whether your phone is connected to your home's
| wireless network. Or probably even via some Bluetooth
| beacon.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| https://www.homeautomationguy.io/home-assistant-
| tips/better-...
| elchief wrote:
| The Singer spec https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is, for data
| ingestion and loading
|
| 1. open source
|
| 2. hundreds of pre-built taps and targets (for apis and
| databases)
|
| 3. supports incremental and full refresh
|
| 4. don't need to write any SQL and it creates and loads tables
| for you
|
| Stitch, Meltano, and (sort of) Airbyte also use it
| TeddyDD wrote:
| https://grep.app/ and https://cht.sh/ for quick reference.
| return_to_monke wrote:
| I very much agree with cheat.sh! I just do curl cheat.sh/X
| instead of X --help and then man X and then the search for "how
| to do y in X"
| justindeguzman wrote:
| I've been using clickhouse-local (the CLI tool, not the database)
| a lot recently to do data analysis work. It's simpler/better
| developer experience when using local files for quick data
| analysis compared to writing python scripts. As someone who does
| a lot of data science and is not a software engineer, it feels
| more natural to write SQL vs. having to write actual code-and
| it's super fast...
| namuol wrote:
| Seeing a lot of "fiddly" software being listed here. Stuff that
| lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It's ironic
| that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it
| doesn't really account for time saved so much as time spent
| fiddling...
|
| Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is
| the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.
| sureglymop wrote:
| ActivityWatch. Records your activity in the background (how
| much time spent in which programs and the time period). It can
| record browser tab titles and vs code open files, sometimes it
| can be invaluable to go back and check out what i did at a
| specific point in time.
| pplante wrote:
| Reminds me of a co-worker who would spend between 3-5 hours a
| day messing with their vim config. I know we cannot actually
| write code for 8 hours a day, heck a 3-4 hour session can feel
| too long. But spending 15+ hours a week endlessly fiddling with
| their tools was hilarious to watch on some level. I remember at
| team lunches how they would go on and on about this new plugin
| they found that is going to save them so much time now. Oh the
| irony if they only stepped back for a moment...
| tqwhite wrote:
| Sorry mate but that is just wrong. I get payback of a hundred
| to one on most of my fiddly bits.
|
| A single command that does the ten things needed correctly
| every time instead of looking up each thing, typing it wrong
| four times and doing it again is a godsend. Lots of time saved.
| More accurate and reliable as well.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| From that perspective, using Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S for reverse-i-
| search in a shell saves me so much time from writing commands
| especially big Kubernetes ones.
| namuol wrote:
| Cmd/Ctrl-F in general is probably the biggest invisible time-
| saver if you can count UX patterns.
| jmiserez wrote:
| Give hstr a try: https://github.com/dvorka/hstr
|
| It's saved me countless hours over the years as it's just so
| much better than regular CTRL-R. I also find it to work
| better than fzf.
| hedora wrote:
| The 'history' command is helpful the 1% of the time Ctrl-R
| and Ctrl-S fail you.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Bash alias. And my large bash_alias file
| msluyter wrote:
| You can also add a comment for searchability, as in:
| > big hairy command with --lots --of arguments # foobar
|
| Then you can search for 'foobar' via fzf or whatnot.
| eftepede wrote:
| Try fzf for history management, it's a life changer.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Add fzf to get fuzzy search for your history. I reuse long
| complicated commands all the time by pressing Ctrl+R and then
| typing the first letters of a few words I remember using.
|
| https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
|
| It's also useful to remove duplicate commands and store
| infinite history. Add this to ~/.bashrc:
| export HISTFILESIZE= export HISTSIZE= export
| HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
| dllthomas wrote:
| Changing HISTFILE by context has been a huge win, keeping
| commands from generic system administration or different
| projects from getting in the way as I search back through
| my history to do a thing again.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Airtable has allowed my team to save 100s of hours. Excellent
| tool for adding a little structure and automation to adhoc
| workflows.
| codetrotter wrote:
| JetBrains CLion.
|
| I used to program in Vim/Neovim. Using a full-blown IDE is a real
| productivity boost when programming in for example Rust, which is
| what I write the most, and use CLion for the most.
|
| CLion has Vim emulation also. So I still have normal mode, insert
| mode, and most other main features of Vim that I know and love :)
| modernerd wrote:
| The CLion/JetBrains Vim emulation via IdeaVim is _so_ good.
| Better than VS Code and on a level with Emacs Evil mode for me.
|
| Adding shortcuts to my ideavimrc saved me a bunch of time and
| has made CLion largely keyboard-driven for me.
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-product-as-the-vim...
| sseagull wrote:
| Similar story for me. Used to basically use vim, but after
| taking over a large-ish python project I switched to PyCharm.
|
| Its support for detecting type errors (I use type hints pretty
| consistently) and its refactoring support have probably saved
| me way more than 100 hours. Just Shift-shift searching has
| probably done that by itself, too. And import optimization. I
| could go on and on.
|
| Plus integrated sql/db stuff is just icing on the cake. Best
| subscription I've ever paid for.
| nurettin wrote:
| ddterm (a quake terminal for gnome) is my favorite time saver. f1
| dropdown, open a bunch of tabs and run mosh terminals for
| managing remote servers, name them appropriately and the
| spaceship is ready. Any time I need to access a remote, I press
| f1 and switch to its tab within seconds.
| superpope99 wrote:
| +1 to moto.
|
| Does anyone know of a similar library for GCP? Searched and not
| been able to find anything and I miss it dearly
| Stevvo wrote:
| Ministry of Flat. http://www.quelsolaar.com/ministry_of_flat/
|
| Automatic UV unwrapping.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I'm sure both vim and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler have saved me
| hundreds of hours. One puts the text in the file, and the other
| makes sure the text makes sense.
| amelius wrote:
| GCC saved me from thousands of hours writing assembly code ...
| hedora wrote:
| If you're OK with cloud services, you might consider using
| godbolt for your assembly-generating needs. It's polyglot, and
| you can easily copy paste its output into ed or notepad.
| betolink wrote:
| miniforge, no need to deal with conda environments anymore.
| https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge
| jasone wrote:
| Dune (https://dune.build/) is the preeminent build tool for OCaml
| development. I don't love its input syntax (s-expressions), and I
| sometimes miss the ability to write high-level functions to
| reduce boilerplate (especially for unit tests), but it _always_
| gets the dependencies right, and it 's fast. This is in stark
| contrast to some of my experiences with various other build
| systems, and I am super happy that the default option for OCaml
| build systems is so good.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| Not a program, but being very familiar with the keyboard
| shortcuts in SublimeText has saved me countless hours of dev
| time.
|
| Things like Ctrl-D to highlight multiple instances of a word,
| plus the ability to put on Caps checking in the search bar first
| so you're only highlighting correctly capitalized versions. Make
| the same change in multiple locations. Saves so much time.
|
| Knowing how to highlight a letter, a word, a line at a time.
|
| Ctrl-shift-down to make your cursor span multiple lines at the
| same point, and have copy/paste respect the copied text from the
| respective lines.
|
| So many things add up to hours upon hours of time saved, and
| frustration avoided.
| unsigner wrote:
| Came here to post this. The multiple cursors feature combined
| with the ability to open huge files with gracefully degrading
| performance turns a lot of what would be one-off programming
| tasks that would take dozens of minutes to an hour into
| interactive sessions that take seconds to minutes.
|
| Also the low latency is amazing. Sublime on an old laptop feels
| batter than VS Code on a fancy new desktop.
| Shorel wrote:
| I would say Sublime Text is in fact a program.
|
| It has also saved me over 100 hours or more.
|
| And this includes its instantaneous speed and the ability to
| open huge files!
| samsolomon wrote:
| Cleanshot X
|
| I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time
| taking screenshots--dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs
| and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots
| suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them--
| save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the
| screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of
| clutter.
|
| Not to mention it has video recording that I frequently use to
| create video walkthroughs for features I'm working on.
|
| The tool is a pretty expensive Mac App, but worth every penny.
|
| https://cleanshot.com/
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It's part of the SetApp package, which is only marginally more
| expensive than just a cleanshot sub. Highly recommend, you get
| dozens of neat little productivity apps with it.
| ianzakalwe wrote:
| github copilot
| pwenzel wrote:
| I used Dynobase for roughing out a DynamoDB project this year.
| It's the best and only real GUI for DynamoDB at this point. Many,
| many hours saved.
| DarrenDev wrote:
| Easily https://vanyalabs.com/ (Access your FHIR API Data)
|
| My own app, not even at the Alpha stage, has already saved me and
| my team 100s of hours of parsing JSON results in Postman.
| logicallee wrote:
| I've easily saved 100 hours already using ChatGPT. If you haven't
| heard of it already, this is, in my personal opinion, superhuman
| general AI with almost no limitations except that it might not be
| free forever and it likes to stay SFW. For example, if you ask it
| to list "What pieces of software that most users don't use is
| most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and
| specific" you get the response at the bottom. Interesting answer
| that opens the door to more specific questions. If you want to
| achieve a task quickly, just ask ChatGPT how to do it. Give
| plenty of instructions on the kind of response you're looking
| for.
|
| Here's a specific example of how ChatGPT has saved me time: I
| asked it to make some text I wrote shorter and more likely to
| succeed, and it suggested eliminating the entire second half of
| it as it takes away from my point and isn't likely to achieve the
| result I want. That actually ended up saving me the work
| associated with the entire second half of my proposal.
|
| Others have had it make recipes and meal plans, by just listing
| what they had at home and asking it to list recipes using those
| ingredients. It is superhuman in many of its abilities.
|
| I would write a caveat but don't feel like it. I'll just ask
| ChatGPT: "I consider you almost superhuman but in no more than 15
| words summarize the caveats or ways in which it would be wrong to
| consider you superhuman. Be extremely brief and specific, get
| right to the point."
|
| it's answer: "I am a machine learning model and not a human."
|
| So, there's your caveat. It's a machine learning model and not a
| human.
|
| ---
|
| *
|
| [Prompt: What pieces of software that most users don't use is
| most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and
| specific.]
|
| It's difficult to determine what specific software may save you
| 100 hours without knowing more about your specific needs and
| workflows. However, here are a few suggestions for software that
| may be helpful in increasing efficiency and saving time:
|
| Task management and productivity software: Tools like Trello,
| Asana, and Todoist can help you organize and prioritize your
| tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. These tools can help
| you stay on top of your work and reduce the time you spend on
| tasks that don't align with your goals.
|
| Text expansion and automation software: Applications like
| TextExpander and Alfred allow you to create custom abbreviations
| that expand into longer phrases or blocks of text. This can save
| you a significant amount of time if you frequently type out the
| same phrases or long emails.
|
| Text and code editors: Advanced text and code editors like
| Sublime Text, Atom, or Visual Studio Code can save you time by
| providing features such as syntax highlighting, code completion,
| and project management. These tools can help you write and edit
| code more efficiently and make it easier to navigate large
| codebases.
|
| File management software: Applications like Hazel and Dropbox can
| help you automate file management tasks, such as organizing and
| renaming files, and keeping your files synced and backed up. This
| can save you time and reduce the risk of data loss.
|
| It's important to keep in mind that the software that will be
| most helpful in saving you time will depend on your specific
| needs and workflows. It may be helpful to spend some time
| identifying the tasks that take up the most time in your work and
| looking for tools that can help you streamline those processes.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It requested my phone number to register. At least google
| search doesn't ask me for that - yet. Even though they would
| balk if I am using a VPN - they really want to know my real IP
| address.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I don't know how useful this reply is. Essentially everything
| it suggested is not "software that most users don't use" (which
| is what was requested). It just a list of really common
| software, with lots of fluff text. If you knew nothing about
| software, this list could be helpful, but otherwise this reply
| is not good.
|
| That being said, I find ChatGPT really useful for generating
| basic code samples. It can replace basic uses of Google and
| Stack overflow.
| logicallee wrote:
| Try telling it your workflow and ask what might save you
| time, since half of its answer was that everyone's workflow
| is different. You might be surprised at what it knows or can
| suggest for you.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| PHP Propel 2.0
|
| It's a small ORM with nice features and it saved me a ton of
| time. Just generate the classes from the database. Very fast to
| iterate from.
|
| https://propelorm.org/
| hedora wrote:
| Probably showing my age here, but their database:reverse
| feature just blew my mind.
|
| The problem with most ORMs is that language object models are
| way more expressive than SQL (due to having multiple subclasses
| of the same superclass / interface, or even multiple
| inheritance, and none of those mapping to SQL foreign keys).
|
| Targeting the less expressive data model should automatically
| avoid most ORM footguns. I wonder how it works in practice.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| It just works :D
|
| I work with it every day and the the documentation is not the
| best, but for 95% of pure php projects it's the Right answer.
| There maybe other right answers, but propel is definitely one
| of them.
|
| If you iterate the database as you go, simply create the
| classes and there you go. I m amazed how good it works.
|
| I m a single developer, so your results may vary, but for
| small to medium projects it works fine. And most of all
| projects are small to medium.
| terminal_d wrote:
| Emacs (use it for everything important)
|
| QMK (keyboard's firmware, helps me do things an order of
| magnitude faster)
| nb_key wrote:
| Tableau Data Prep. It is a powerful tool that can save many hours
| of tedious data preparation work. It has a nice interface and
| comparatively fast.
| cjvirtucio wrote:
| good ole find, grep, sed, and jq.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I'll join those who benefit from personal workflow automation. I
| use
|
| BASH Alfred Applescript NodeJS bbedit
|
| in a zillion combinations to make things fast and easy. I have a
| bad memory so I have tons of BASH aliases and .bashrc terminal
| reminder files. I use Alfred, for example, to record 'time
| clientA 1 do an hour of work' in a tenth of a second. I use
| Alfred and AppleScript to shuffle windows around as I focus
| attention or finish things. bbedit's find/replace/regex stuff is
| better than anything I have ever seen. I use it to munge files in
| crazy ways. I have a set of files that act as a NodeJS ad hoc
| workspace. (Need to change the GUID on the records in a tsv file?
| Not a problem.)
|
| And when I do something that has ongoing value, Alfred and/or
| bbedit give me a way to add them to the toolkit.
| carvking wrote:
| All of these programs are so interesting they will cost you 200
| more hours than you saved.
|
| Call it carvkings law.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Anki - I don't know how I'd prep for the MCAT without this. Open
| source with desktop and mobile clients, syncing via cloud. It's
| flashcarding but uses gradual intervals so you see things less
| often once you've retained them.
|
| ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for
| biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct
| me if I'm wrong.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| I can't think of a single piece of software that has cloud
| syncing, for free, with no option for payment.
|
| I'm not sure who is running it (hopefully some well funded
| academic group), but it restores me faith in humanity a little
| every time I press sync and don't get CTA'd to sign up for some
| subscription.
|
| Amazing tool, kudos to the devs, and if there other comes a
| time where payment is required, I would be happy to chip in
| with the above being said.
| risos wrote:
| AFAIK anki is primarily funded by sales from the iOS app
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-
| flashcards/id373493...
| boplicity wrote:
| RE: ChatGTP...
|
| How confident are you that it's giving you the correct answers
| to your queries? I've noticed that it often sounds right, but
| is sometimes completely wrong, in subtle ways. It always puts
| together words that are commonly near eachother, and it is
| always grammatically correct, but it is often absolutely wrong.
| I've observed that the more specific and technical a question I
| ask, the more likely it is to be wrong.
| hammeiam wrote:
| You can actually ask ChatGPT to cite its sources. Anecdotally
| when I tried, it provided me with a valid url to a census.gov
| site that contained the answer to my question. That doesn't
| make it better than google, but it does mean that some
| verification is possible.
| cooperaustinj wrote:
| How often are you confident that you find the right answer on
| Google? As with anything, you need to reason about it
| yourself and verify.
| ornornor wrote:
| Parent is using chatgpt as a tutor though, not as a google
| search.
|
| I'd expect a tutor to give the right answer, but I wouldn't
| expect google to. Chatgpt is often wrong. It's a problem if
| you're trying to learn something and using it as your
| tutor/truth.
| ironrabbit wrote:
| Anecdotally, chatgpt seems much worse to me than Google for
| getting correct answers. Like orders of magnitude worse.
| Tells me the wrong timezone for a city kind of bad. No
| doubt it will be much better in the future, and they've
| definitely found PMF with the interface, but I would not
| trust it right now with anything even slightly important to
| me.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| But how can you verify ChatGPT's answers if you don't know
| what its sources were? E.g. if I google a technical
| question about HTML5, I can see whether a result is the
| HTML5 spec, MDN, W3Schools, or a random medium blog. If I
| google a medical question, I can see if I'm on a hospital's
| website or on Men's Health.
| placatedmayhem wrote:
| gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
|
| It takes JSON input and produces flat, key-value output based on
| the path to the value. Usage with grep was obviously the original
| intention, but I've used it to help me better understand a given
| JSON's structure, too, which I then usually reflect back into a
| program that's consuming that JSON.
|
| It also supports "ungron" too, so, for example, `gron some.json |
| grep -v "thing I don't want" | gron -u > filtered.json" makes for
| quick filtering of a JSON. I find it more user friendly than jq's
| language.
| Wistar wrote:
| Beyond Compare, AutoHotKey, the macro functions in Notepad++ and
| Photoshop, and the user-preset function in Lightroom.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Beyond Compare (file comparison+) is a really useful tool.
| oakpond wrote:
| fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
| fotta wrote:
| I probably shouldn't admit this but the fzf fish shell
| integration is basically how I remember useful commands instead
| of writing them in a note, because I'm too damn lazy
| MH15 wrote:
| Haha yes- and then when I open a new machine or somehow lose
| shell history it takes me a bunch of time to get back up to
| speed. IMO worth it for me but it can be a speed bump.
| fotta wrote:
| I recently moved to a new machine and copied the history
| file over, definitely helped me immensely
| tandav wrote:
| * https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io
|
| also alias to create jupyter kernel for activated environment:
| mkkernel() { if [ -n "$1" ]; then
| KERNEL_NAME=$1 elif [ -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" ]; then
| echo "Pass either kernel name as argument or activate virtualenv"
| return 1 else [ -z "$1" ]
| KERNEL_NAME="$(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV)" echo "No
| kernel name provided, using name from virtualenv $KERNEL_NAME"
| fi pip install ipykernel python -m
| ipykernel install --user --name=$KERNEL_NAME }
| kklemon wrote:
| Vimium. Vim-like shortcuts for the browser. I can't name any
| other tool or extension that gives me anywhere near the
| productivity boost of Vimium. I spend probably half of my work
| day plus a few hours a day in my spare time in the browser, and
| it makes navigating the browser feel like butter. When I'm tired
| and don't want to be glued to my desk, I can relax and surf with
| one hand which just feels incredible. I quickly got so used to it
| that I instinctively try to use Vimium shortcuts when I'm on
| other computes and feel withdrawal symptoms if I realize that it
| isn't installed.
| kondor6c wrote:
| There also is quite browser, which is similar (not an extension
| though) it has some very cool features like domain conditional
| proxies and other settings
| flobosg wrote:
| Do you mean qutebrowser? https://qutebrowser.org/
| beernutz wrote:
| If you like Vimium, you should check out SurfingKeys. It is
| similar but seems to have even more going for it:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surfingkeys/gfblio...
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| There's also Tridactyl, which is a similar project, but more
| customizable. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| the moonlander keyboard and its customization software have been
| my biggest time saver this year. it's worth the hype, the price
| and the time investment learning to use it effectively. 100 hours
| maybe... but I bet I've saved 100 miles of finger travel distance
| and half a million key presses by now
| [deleted]
| dec0de wrote:
| The jetbrains IDEs for various languages, but especially CLion
| and PyCharm.
|
| Beyond Compare, to compare differing versions of large codebases,
| which - for reasons I won't go into, are just stored in
| filesystems, rather than accessed via some version control
| platform like git.
|
| Sublime Text, because multicursor, and fast searching of large
| codebases, the ability to edit everything, the plugin api, and
| just blazing performance on massive codebases.
| chucky_z wrote:
| fzf!!!
| actinium226 wrote:
| Not a program, but the concept of functional programming and pure
| functions. It makes it a lot easier to think about code, and also
| makes it easier to test and parallelize code.
|
| Although be warned, it can also have the "side-effect"
| (functional programming pun!) of making you somewhat insufferable
| as you try to convince everyone around you that functional
| programming is amazing.
| tasuki wrote:
| The question was what _saved_ you 100 hours.
|
| Functional programming easily _cost_ me hundreds of hours
| without much to show for it. Monad transformers, free monads,
| final tagless... this rabbit hole is very very deep.
|
| No regrets though, would suffer through this again!
| hedora wrote:
| You should check out rust. The compiler reasons about side
| effects + parallelization, and testing for you, but you get
| (nearly) complete low-level control.
|
| As a bonus, you'll be able to write insufferable comments like
| these in HN threads.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Not to put too fine a point on it, but "side effects" !=
| mutation.
|
| Also: The level of control offered by Rust comes at a steep
| cost compared to GC'd languages.
| patrick451 wrote:
| It's so curious to me that functional disciples wear this as a
| badge of honor. In nearly all other facets of software
| development, we get badgered that it's better to produce code
| your entire team understands (code is read more often than
| written and all that) than code which only makes sense to you.
| If I ran around talking up the zen of single letter variables,
| my team would shoo me out of the room, and almost nobody on HN
| would applaud me for it. But for some reason, functional
| programming tends to get a pass, despite it just not clicking
| for a large swath of team mates.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I'd be curious what your flavor of "functional programming and
| pure functions" is?
|
| I ask, because I used to feel very similar about the OO
| paradigm (it helped me model the world easier, made me
| insufferable because of my zeal, etc). But, I had the privilege
| of doing that with nearly 20 years of Smalltalk. A battle worn
| path of ObjectiveC, Swift, Java, Python, Kotlin, and JavaScript
| later, I feel the pain. It's like being in forestry, one day
| you work with a chainsaw, and the next day they give you a fan
| with spoons welded for the blades.
|
| These days I'm doing some Elixir... and I love it. I don't know
| how welcome it is in the "functional programming and pure
| functions" club, but I think it's awesome.
|
| I have a working theory that what has made these paradigms
| loved or hated, is less about them theirselves, and more about
| the execution thereof. What made and makes both Smalltalk and
| Elixir appealing to me is their simplicity and
| straightforwardness. There's a mechanism you learn to reason
| about the problems you're trying to solve, and then you can
| excel at it, instead of constantly stumbling on edge cases
| where "hybrid" languages try to reconcile all of the paradigms
| together.
|
| YMMV
| fredrikholm wrote:
| > I don't know how welcome it is in the "functional
| programming and pure functions" club, but I think it's
| awesome.
|
| Erlang, and by extension Elixir, are very respected.
|
| The fact that you have a strong background in Smalltalk isn't
| a surprise: Kay's idea of isolated objects sending methods to
| each other, independent of each other is OTP. Erlang, IMO, is
| the most beautiful combination of functional and (Kay's
| definition of) OOP there is.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| At my job I was introduced to functional programming with
| Python with strong typing.
|
| I was at first rushing implementing ~50 business rules (which
| changed weekly) on the setup of a system. Then this functional
| wise kid came along and we did in one week what took me 5
| weeks.
|
| Along with that, using MQTT to separate your program with
| Protobuf makes everything so much easier. Program crashes? Let
| it burn and let systemd restart it. So much easier to test too.
| Our code coverage is 99% if we exclude the main files that
| initialize everything.
| ayewo wrote:
| Can you share more about Python with strong typing?
| wolfadex wrote:
| Elm has easily saved me hundreds of hours per year in compile
| time alone, not to mentioned the likely thousands of hours it's
| saved me in time spent debugging. I still shudder to think of
| the horrendous compile times I got from even small TypeScript
| projects, and the days I'd waste trying to debug them.
| xmonkee wrote:
| RedwoodJS https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood
|
| I launched my startup from 0 to first customer in 3 months thanks
| to this guy. Most of my time saved was because of a solid
| collection of libraries, brilliantly integrated together (backend
| to frontend), and I didn't have to suffer analysis paralysis
| every time I needed something.
| qrio2 wrote:
| Very interesting project, It's interesting to see trends coming
| back to bundled BE/FE. What would you say are the biggest
| issues you have with Redwood?
| BossingAround wrote:
| Seems like a replacement for MeteorJS.
| xmonkee wrote:
| My issues are kind of specific to the idiosyncrasies of my
| app. Its multi-tenant and two-sided (admins and applicants),
| so I had to kind of roll my own auth system on top of the
| existing one. The fact that I could do that really means that
| it's flexible enough honestly.
|
| Another issue is that it doesn't expose a server.js file, so
| its hard to do stuff like integrate an APM.
| esperent wrote:
| I've just been researching this the last few days. There's a
| couple of other similar tools that I'm also checking out:
|
| Refine.dev
|
| Wasp-lang.dev
|
| I'm quite early into researching these so I don't have anything
| much to say about them yet.
|
| Wasp is a DSL so it's a bit different.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Workflowy for task management.
|
| Made me more efficient, must have net saved me 100 hours.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Vim. I can never leave modal editing now. Been using it since
| 2010 and I think in vim when editing. It lets me enter a flow
| state so much easier. My brain maps into writing and editing.
| Bekwnn wrote:
| I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the
| merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how
| effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes.
|
| Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how
| complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became
| better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of
| fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and
| reduced mouse navigation, feels great.
|
| You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be
| very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever.
| But you can also slowly add to it.
| heipei wrote:
| I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything
| else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme,
| barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel
| like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup
| I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any
| codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc).
|
| Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors
| (VSCode et al), especially with code completion /intellisense
| and file trees. For me, I rarely feel like I need to be able
| to complete function parameters in my code to be more
| productive. Code-writing takes up such a small amount of the
| creative process that I'm perfectly fine looking up seldom-
| used functions in a web-browser. I wonder if anyone has ever
| attempted the jump from longtime-vim-user to these and can
| share their stories about why or why not.
| tasuki wrote:
| I've been using vim since perhaps 2004.
|
| Switched to IntelliJ in 2018 when writing Scala. IdeaVim is
| fine, it even lets me switch to normal mode with jk/kj [0].
| What more could I want?
|
| I've been using IntelliJ for Scala, Elm, and Python, and
| still use (neo)vim for editing other languages and random
| files. I'm prepared to jump ship to vim+LSP on short
| notice.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/tasuki/dotrc/blob/master/.ideavimrc#L5
| NDizzle wrote:
| Have you tried something like JetBrains tooling with
| IdeaVim, or one of the Vim plugins for VSCode? Might help
| with the transition.
| dgacmu wrote:
| My co-founder/ collaborator has. He is a 100% vim person,
| to the extent that he has Firefox configured to let him do
| things with vim key bindings (I believe using imperator).
|
| He's switched over to VScode with vim key bindings and has
| been happy as a clam. He's heavily using Python with
| pylance plus copilot for the python side of what we do
| (which is most things).
|
| I'm an emacs user who has made a similar switch (but with a
| horribly weird mix of native and emacs keybindings). Oh,
| and the VScode sync extension for me. I use and love the
| rust-analyzer extension.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| thepostman0 wrote:
| Lots of support for vi editing. Things like bash (set -o vi)
| and other CLI/TUI have bindings. Check out the browser plugin
| vimmium too.
| spariev wrote:
| Just a reminder that you _can_ leave modal editing with :q
| (sorry couldn't resist)
| gorjusborg wrote:
| vi and friends (vim/neovim)
|
| Being able to edit text by piping it through shell commands and
| back into the buffer is pretty darn useful. In this case, it's
| not vi alone that provides the benefit, but whatever.
|
| Macros and registers can be super handy when you have to do the
| same thing over and over in a big file. Sure, I could write a
| script, but sometimes it's just easier to do it by hand once and
| repeat the macro thousands of times.
|
| Once you are able to commit certain operations to muscle memory,
| you can really whip around. For instance 'vapgq' selects around
| the current paragraph and formats it.
| synergy20 wrote:
| second this, vim has been my biggest time saver
| moozeek wrote:
| My most time saving programs didn't change in several years:
|
| Slickrun, floating command line for Windows
| https://bayden.com/slickrun/
|
| Autohotkey - shortcuts, text expander and scripting for
| everything https://www.autohotkey.com/
|
| Total Commander, still the best file manager on Windows
| https://www.ghisler.com/
|
| CyberChef - The "Cyber Swiss Army Knife" - single file web app
| for all kinds of conversions, encryption, encoding, compression
| and data analysis https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
|
| Adminer - lighweigt database manager https://www.adminer.org/
| beernutz wrote:
| I use Total Commander and Autohotkey, and CyberChef as well.
|
| I would add ClipMate as the absolute BEST clipboard manager:
| http://www.thornsoft.com/clipmate7.htm
|
| Display Fusion Pro for managing window layout with multi
| monitors https://www.displayfusion.com/
|
| Misc programs I use daily that are easily google-able: Evernote
| Belvedere Bitwarden Snagit
| bsnnkv wrote:
| kanata[1] and komokana[2].
|
| kanata is basically like QMK for any keyboard without the
| firmware requirement. I use kanata with my trusty old iMac
| keyboard which is to this day my favourite keyboard of all time.
| But now I have all the cool QMK-style layers with it.
|
| So that is awesome on its own, but where it gets even better for
| me, and this is where the seconds have really added up to hours,
| is that I wrote another piece of software which programmatically
| changes layers on kanata whenever a different window is focused
| in my tiling window manager.
|
| This has honestly changed -everything- for me. I no longer have
| to waste keys on my keyboard to switch layers, I no longer have
| to -think- about switching layers, I just focus another window
| with alt+hjkl and whatever keyboard layer I expect for any given
| application is automatically applied. Definitely one of those
| "you can never go back" experiences for me.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
|
| [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| This is exactly what I've been looking for, thanks! QMK has
| always been weird to me: why is it hardware specific?
| porridgeandrice wrote:
| Autohotkey There is simply no better automation program on any
| OS. I even run a fully fledged tiling wm written in autohotkey. (
| For reference, here's when I tricked r/unixporn into thinking it
| was bspwm
| https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/nhzz3b/confession... )
|
| Fluent search Spotlight on steroids, for windows. Apart from
| being a search/launcher, it has a bunch of atrociously good
| features. It lets you use a custom search indexing backend, which
| brings me to...
|
| Everything A search indexer backend for windows. Really great
| search.
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| > Autohotkey There is simply no better automation program on
| any OS.
|
| No, there are: hammerspoon or Keyboard Maestro for macOS. Which
| has better accessibility API hooks compared to Windows anyway.
| [deleted]
| robk wrote:
| Can you point me to some good examples? I use it for text
| replacement but their own site is fairly sparse for creative
| uses.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Use official forum, it has tone of good examples.
|
| Here is something I did long time ago:
| https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-autohotkey
| hedora wrote:
| Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no
| particular order):
|
| jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs,
| gkrellm, nload.
|
| Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful
| for building software, you've completely missed the point
| (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior,
| you're doing things completely wrong):
|
| Anyway, this document saved me at least 10,000 hours:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.htm...
|
| Other peoples' python has the distinction of being the only
| software in my -1000 hours saved category. (And if you consider
| maintaining code written in the above "write only" languages,
| you'll realize how big of a feat that is!)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _If you think it 's only useful for building software,
| you've completely missed the point_"
|
| I clicked on your link with 16 pages of just contents links to
| find what the point is, and found "the make utility
| automatically determines which pieces of a large program need
| to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them".
|
| What's the point you see?
| hedora wrote:
| It automatically parallelizes any large scale data processing
| pipeline (assuming that your data set is already broken into
| files). People use it for things like documentation
| generation. I've used it to process the results of web
| scrapers, large scale data cleaning tasks, etc, etc.
|
| It takes about an afternoon to set up NFS + SSH primitives
| that automatically distribute the computation across clusters
| of machines. Since it is restartable, it automatically
| tolerates hardware faults (up to dozens of machines, in
| practice).
|
| Basically, you get Map Reduce, but for arbitrary data
| processing DAGs, and it supports any language that works well
| on Unix-style operating systems.
| rebelos wrote:
| Okay but clearly none of this is "the point" of make, so
| your original comment is still baffling.
| hedora wrote:
| The point of make is that it's not _only_ useful for
| building software. Take a look at the built-in implicit
| rules:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Catalo
| gue...
|
| There are two things to note: (1) you can turn them off
| so they don't get in the way of other use cases, (2) they
| include non-build stuff like version control, linting,
| and document generation.
|
| There's also a whole chapter on ar file maintenance. This
| is mostly useful for linking these days, but ar is the
| precursor to tar, so this used to also be useful for
| running filesystem backups:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Archiv
| es....
| vehementi wrote:
| _Your_ point is that make has uses beyond that. That is
| not "the point of make"
| jamespo wrote:
| That's the beauty of open ended UNIX tools
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| $ make install
| athorax wrote:
| jq + parallel is a godsend. Take some command output, run
| another json-producing command in parallel on each line, and
| pipe it back into jq -s
| samwillis wrote:
| The combination of TypeScript, VSCode and GitHub Copilot is just
| a joy to work with.
|
| The are valid criticisms of Coplilot around copyright but I'm not
| using it to generate whole algorithms. It just knows your code
| and what you are trying to do.
| Kiro wrote:
| Exactly. Anyone who has worked with Copilot seriously knows
| that generating whole algorithms is not what you actually use
| it for. The things Copilot generate and autocomplete for me are
| unique and tailored to what I'm trying to do, completely based
| on the context of the code.
|
| Sure, you can bait it into reproducing stuff but why bother?
| Considering how convoluted it is to trick it you might just as
| well copypaste the algorithm straight from the repo. I almost
| find the discussion irrelevant because of how detached from
| reality it is.
| [deleted]
| ss48 wrote:
| Mailstore. It's an email archiving program, and saves a ton of
| time in searching for emails at our company by allowing you to
| search all emails in every email address for what you're looking
| for.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| Instant Data Scraper [1]
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instant-data-
| scrap...
| MattyMc wrote:
| I wish there was some sort of 'export to selenium' function to
| this.
| z3ugma wrote:
| Gong.ai - transcribes Zoom and Google Meet calls with very high
| fidelity, and identifies which callers are talking and suggest
| tips to your sales, customer success, and demo staff on how to
| improve their presence in online meetings and phone calls.
| https://www.gong.io/product/
|
| This is the SaaS I'm most excited about this year.
| qxxx wrote:
| I sometimes use whisper to transcribe videos or audio to text.
| Works good and it is free.
| gomox wrote:
| Very useful yet very expensive. Someone will build the
| personal/SMB version at some point.
| eloff wrote:
| For me it's github copilot. It produces bad code frequently and
| often code that looks good at a glance, but is bad. So I treat
| the output with extreme prejudice. However, I think it saves me a
| few hours a month on average. Maybe not 100 in a year, but in two
| or three years, certainly. It saves me much more time than my IDE
| does (JetBrains + vscode).
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Throwing my hat in the ring for Justfile. It's basically a
| streamlined make.
|
| https://github.com/casey/just
|
| Where it really shines are in places like monorepos where you may
| have many inter-related setup scripts, build commands or helper
| utilities.
|
| You define all of your commands in one file (or multiple if you
| want a hierarchy) and can run commands from any subdirectory.
|
| eg. You have a monorepo with a web server, and also a react-
| native app in separate directories, you can call `just build-app`
| in the web directory, or call just `start-server` when your
| terminal's current directory is 7 diretories deep in the mobile
| directory.
|
| The amount of time I have saved cd'ing around has honestly been
| amazing. It's worth it's weight in gold, especially on large
| projects.
| akira2501 wrote:
| LSP. The Language Server Protocol. Entirely changed my life for
| the better this year, once I took the time to get it integrated
| into Emacs and get the various backends I needed installed.
|
| Easily has saved me hundreds of hours so far, being able to view
| function prototypes quickly, pull up documentation as an overlay
| on the code, jumping to the next error, and even down to getting
| simple things like enumerated 'case' labels inside of a switch
| statement.
| truncate wrote:
| I was going to say the same. Before LSP it was constant effort
| to keep up with changing tools/scripts/hacks to keep all the
| code navigation/completion working, and it was still never as
| good as its now.
|
| And once in a while I'd randomly have to look at some code that
| is not my primary work language, but everything will just work
| out of the box. Working with Emacs has never been better.
|
| Huge shoutout to Magit mode, which I dearly love and definitely
| saved me bunch of time otherwise spent context switching to
| command line or another UI. 100hr = 6000min, I've been using
| Magit for 8 years at-least.
|
| Assuming I'm doing some coding at-least 4 days a week, 4days *
| 4weeks * 12months * 8years = 1536 days of work. Let say it
| saves me 30 second on average by not switching window,
| selecting hunk individually that I love doing, doing arbitrary
| VCS operations (I love looking at diffs and just hitting enter
| to go to the source), I just need to open it 8 times per day to
| make it 100 hours so far. Definitely have used more than that I
| think. But even if this calculation is way off, and I'm not
| really saving time, its a very pleasant experience that is
| unmatched if you use Emacs IMO.
| quanticle wrote:
| The only mystifying thing to me about Emacs' LSP support has
| been the fact that they chose to bring Eglot into Emacs core,
| instead of the (in my opinion) superior LSP-mode.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| What language(s) do you do most of your work in?
| tezza wrote:
| Sorry to talk shop:
|
| * All time King keeps on giving: MS Excel
|
| * MS Visio... last good Sequence Diagrams etc
|
| * Adobe Illustrator... keep visual scrapboards
|
| * Perl one liners with cygwin getclip/putclip
|
| * DBeaver SQL gui
|
| * StreamDeck with Autohotkey custom actions
|
| * SimpleNote - your notes everywhere when you need them for
| creation, reference and search
| shortlived wrote:
| Greenshot - free, lightweight and just the right set of features
| for marking up screenshots and making new UI mockups based on
| existing screenshots of apps. I've tried a lot of other
| alternatives but they were either too complicated to use or lack
| a key feature.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| Do you find greenshot better than say ShareX ?
| shortlived wrote:
| IMO yes. ShareX had too many options, and too many layers to
| navigate to get something done.
| pinkcan wrote:
| docker compose is like using cheat codes
| KiranRao0 wrote:
| I feel like I have a unique one here. The chrome extension:
| "Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions"
|
| It has easily saved me over 100 hours by preventing me from
| continuously scrolling through youtube recommendations.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...
| punkspider wrote:
| I use Pocket Tube [1] and I absolutely love it. I started using
| it 1 month ago so can't really estimate how much time it's
| saved me.
|
| Before that I always found YT frustrating and never cared about
| subscriptions because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the
| subscription system is disorganized. It doesn't make sense to
| me. I found myself having a hundred subscriptions that I didn't
| know how to follow in an organized manner.
|
| With this extension now I've organized subscriptions into
| groups, which get integrated into the UI in the sidebar, and
| you can set notifications for whichever group you'd like. It
| has more features - like the "Deck" feature, where you add a
| few columns of either playlists/groups/channels. You can also
| view all the latest vids from each subscription group, or all
| your subscriptions and filter them by groups.
|
| I'm quite happy that I suddenly noticed I had this pain point
| and quickly found the perfect solution. It's one of my favorite
| extensions. [1]
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pockettube-youtube-
| subscr/kdmnjgijlmjgmimahnillepgcgeemffb
| mtwshngtn wrote:
| can you not just click 'subscriptions' in the left sidebar on
| the homepage? Or direct?:
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
| joshmlewis wrote:
| The extension redirects the home path to the subscriptions
| path so that is what it's doing, just automatically.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Thank you for saving me 100 hours in 2023. Installing for
| Firefox right now.
| planb wrote:
| Docker. Shipping every single script along with all dependencies
| saved me from hundreds of hours of fixing stuff after updates.
| And I don't mean production stuff, just helper scripts and
| programs that I'd normally use a few times a year and which don't
| need the latest security (let alone feature) updates.
| stared wrote:
| GitHub Actions. While it is not the only CI tool, its low barrier
| to entry does magic. I use it for tests & deployment (of
| anything, including the smallest personal projects), taking
| periodic screenshots of my websites, and building PDF files from
| its LaTeX source.
| kiernanmcgowan wrote:
| Things - its a light weight todo app with just enough features to
| make it useful. I tend to use it for a dev log to keep track of
| what I'm working on, keep notes, and finally mark something as
| complete
|
| https://culturedcode.com/things/
| ironrabbit wrote:
| This looks very nice but no android support is unfortunately a
| dealbreaker
| geocrasher wrote:
| Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it
| native now, but it's not as good as Ditto.
|
| https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/
|
| AutoHotKey
|
| https://www.autohotkey.com/
|
| And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be
| nominated, because that saved me _hundreds_ of hours I 'm sure :D
| amrtn wrote:
| I loved ditto when I used windows. Do you know a good ditto
| alternative for mac?
| geocrasher wrote:
| A quick Googling found this, and it looks similar:
|
| https://maccy.app/
| Blank-field wrote:
| AutoHotkey https://www.autohotkey.com/
| teknopaul wrote:
| bash_completion: I can imagine life without it. It's got a pretty
| nasty api to set it up if you have to but most things are done
| for you.
|
| If you create your own clis in the format
| appname mainoperation flags args/files
|
| writing bash_completion scripts is easier.
|
| I believe git, yum, apt clis are popular for this reason.
|
| I can't imagine the amount of time wasted if bash_completion
| didn't exist. I would have probably wasted 10000 hours writing
| guis.
| rsync wrote:
| vimv
|
| You invoke 'vimv' in a directory and the resulting editor is a
| directory list for your pwd ... and you can edit it as a text
| document.
|
| When you save and exit, all of your file (re)naming is committed
| to the directory.
| zanfaruqui wrote:
| Coherence https://docs.withcoherence.com/
|
| we're saving our customers (and ourselves) hundreds if not
| thousands of hours by not having to write and maintain glue code
| for their dev tools
| p4l4g4 wrote:
| Did a lot of data wrangling this year. The usual grep, sed, awk,
| jq and even find has sped up my days significantly. Sed is among
| my favorites to whip up some quick, ad hoc, transformations.
|
| This year I added Miller [0] to my list; a tool to process
| tabular data, similar to sed, awk, etc. It handles csv, tav, json
| lines, etc. in a consistent way. I like the delimited key-value
| pairs format, which allows me to write simple oneliners in bash
| to collect some data (e.g. "ip=x.x.x.x,endpoint=/api/x") and use
| Miller to crunch the results. Not sure it saved me 100h, but it
| was one of the biggest time savers this year!
|
| [0] https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| wdrw wrote:
| The Mosh SSH client for intermittent connectivity (
| https://mosh.org/ ) has definitely saved me at least 100 hours.
| Too bad that it's only available for Windows as a Chrome
| extension, and Chrome will discontinue support for it starting in
| the new year. Really not looking forward to having to search for
| an alternative...
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _Too bad that it 's only available for Windows as a Chrome
| extension_
|
| Looks like it's available under msys2 on windows:
| https://packages.msys2.org/base/mosh
|
| As an aside: msys2 mingw64 and friends are > 100 hours saved if
| you are a linux-soul in a windows environment. I don't think
| msys gets the attention it deserves.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| And if you work in locked down corporate windows
| environments, asking for Git for Windows ("for local version
| control only") is a sneaky way to get the basic Unix utils
| installed. It's a lot easier to ask for VSCode + Git than
| some open source tools that will be viewed with suspicion by
| the local support team.
| ohbtvz wrote:
| I guess you can install it in WSL?
| synergy20 wrote:
| how is it different from autossh? never used mosh yet
| yanokwa wrote:
| I've switched from Mosh to Eternal Terminal
| (https://eternalterminal.dev) because of its excellent native
| scrolling support.
| ladberg wrote:
| To add on to that, I use iTerm2 with tmux control mode which
| combines a native UI frontend with a tmux backend on a remote
| server, meaning I can spawn new native tabs, windows, or
| panes and they're all tracked by the remote so I can
| reconnect to all of them at once if I disconnect.
|
| I keep one laptop at home and one laptop at work and can
| seamlessly switch between the two without having to manage my
| active sessions at all. If I open a new tab at work and go
| home for the day it'll be there on my laptop at home.
| chungy wrote:
| Eternal Terminal pitches itself as entirely superior to Mosh,
| but also describes itself as using TCP (Mosh uses UDP). I'm
| curious how that can actually cover the use cases Mosh
| provides?
|
| Mosh using UDP means that as a connectionless protocol, your
| end points can move (eg: from WiFi to LTE, or vice-versa),
| and beyond a small hiccup, your connections remain alive and
| well.
| breck wrote:
| GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at
| all.
|
| Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and
| excited when a public domain competitor comes out.
|
| Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point.
| I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of
| pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that
| belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The
| stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with
| anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super
| exciting. It's all public domain.
| silverfrost wrote:
| Red Gate's SQL Prompt for SQL Server Management Studio. Saved
| countless hours in very small increments: https://www.red-
| gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt...
| kristopolous wrote:
| Assuming python sqlite is being dumb with regards to transactions
| and functions and that simple optimizations aren't just futile
| efforts from ignorance and narcissism has saved me 100s of hours
| in runtime alone.
|
| Also the commonality of fast networks really hit me this year. I
| was using free wifi at a small coffee shop in Tokyo and was
| transferring files to my apartment in Los Angeles at ~20MB/s.
| That's faster than my local LAN was 15 years ago over 5,000 miles
| of ocean, so cheap that they give it out for free if you buy a
| coffee. Absurd
| geocrasher wrote:
| I just wanted to thank OP for this thread. I'm discovering some
| excellent tools. GoLinks may be the coolest thing I've seen in a
| while!
| mcs_ wrote:
| Excalidraw (paid edition) Autopilot
| jansan wrote:
| JASC Paint Shop Pro 7.04 from 2001. Still by bitmap editor of
| choice. Unfortunately all versions after that were crap and the
| 7.04 lacks alpha channel support when copying to or pasting from
| the clipboard. But man, am I fast with that tool.
| billylo wrote:
| Mobile app build/deployToAppStore automation:
| https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great
| coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java,
| PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs,
| but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm
| or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above
| languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill
| down" in to code, including 3rd party libraries with barely any
| configuration is like magic. The git integration is phenomenal -
| I rarely get stumped doing anything in git and dealing with merge
| conflicts are a breeze.
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| Plus it's awareness of proper idioms in each language and
| syntax checking makes me much smarter/productive in a new
| language. Also, it's spell checker keeps me honest. Go for that
| "green check mark" in the upper right corner and you know you
| avoided most common mistakes.
| signaru wrote:
| I use Visual Studio for the same reason, but might give
| IntelliJ a try as I've just checked that it also has a plugin
| for Rust.
| nijave wrote:
| IDEs like this are definitely kludgy and slow but the
| productivity gain from code navigation, test tool integration,
| profiler, and debugger is just insane (imo). Having a tool that
| helps you visualize the code (while it's running) is incredibly
| powerful
| ikrenji wrote:
| slow? i use both pycharm and webstorm and their are
| definitely neither kludgy nor slow...
| rscrawfo wrote:
| Curious, why not just used IntelliJ with the plugins for
| python?
|
| I've never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a
| better experience?
| sarmasamosarma wrote:
| gavinray wrote:
| My one big complaint with IntelliJ is that they don't have
| Devcontainer support
|
| It's (almost) 2023, the way to develop applications is to put a
| reproducible Docker container with all the dependencies + debug
| tools you need in the repo, so that anyone can clone it and
| spin it up in their IDE.
|
| VS Code has amazing support for this, while the only Jetbrains
| IDE that comes close is CLion.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I've tried to migrate to something more lightweight like
| (neo)?vim, Helix, emacs; but regardless of how good their
| syntax awareness/LSP support is, it's always inferior to
| JetBrains IDEs.
|
| Simple example: (any language, e.g. Rust) rename a function
| across multiple files and undo it. Let me know how you'd do it
| in your editor of choice.
| nx7487 wrote:
| sed -i "s/function_name/function_name2/g" $FILES && git
| restore $FILES
|
| Edit: Not claiming this is better, just saying what I get by
| with. I have never used an IDE in my career so far, or any
| autocomplete or code modification features.
| eitland wrote:
| It cannot differentiate between a field in a class and a
| variable in a method, or even a word in a comment, can it?
| ajuc wrote:
| It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the
| language, your patience, and the amount of false
| positives you are comfortable with.
|
| I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common
| programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all
| classes and methods where this variable is used"). I
| couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a
| legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons.
|
| And the (C++) code was written by a guy that learnt C++
| and OOP on the job and it showed. Class hierarchies were
| sometimes 8 levels deep and class variables were reused
| for different purposes to "save effort on serializing
| them" :)
|
| So if the user interactions were in the same order and
| with the same text prompts - a class would inherit them
| and add some new ones. Even if the old class was just
| accidentally asking the user similar questions :) So
| OR_PalNr could mean shelf number in base class and
| Printer number in descendant, because both times the user
| was asked to "scan the barcode", while the callstack was
| a mix of methods from both classes :)
|
| Fun times.
|
| BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a
| script is still the best way to understand the code. For
| example grepping the git blame output is often very
| useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good
| enough.
| casey2 wrote:
| Sam could do all that since the 80s. So ~40 years.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| add the c and it will prompt so you can make the
| determination yourself.
| geysersam wrote:
| Sure, but if function_name is a subword of
| another_function_name, this would break things :/
| mikojan wrote:
| Go, command line: $ gorename -from '"my-
| package".myFunc' -to myRenamedFunc
| tommica wrote:
| That's amazing!
| nomel wrote:
| I would say that's a fairly trivial example. How about
| renaming a method? Or, moving a class to a different file?
| jansan wrote:
| I have been using IntelliJ IDEs since the early 2000s.
| Currently I am using WebStorm's (IntelliJ's small JS
| brother), and the local history feature in combination with
| the outstanding diff view are just one reason why I could not
| work without it.
| quanticle wrote:
| JetBrains' IDEs are great for the languages which they
| explicitly support, but are often hilariously bad for the
| languages that are supported with plugins or extensions. For
| example, the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ, Cursive, doesn't
| have great macro support, and, one day just stopped being
| able to run unit tests. Or rather, it'd _pretend_ to run the
| tests, give a nice green bar, green checkmark and everything,
| but the tests wouldn 't actually have been run. I found this
| behavior the hard way, when I almost committed a bug. I'd run
| the test suite, saw that it was green, and thought that the
| code I'd written had passed all of the checks. It was only
| during some happenstance manual testing that I noticed
| "impossible" behavior (i.e. the code behaving in a way that
| I'd explicitly checked for in tests). Immediately suspicious,
| I reran all the tests from a REPL on the command line, and
| saw a whole bunch of failures that Cursive hadn't reported.
|
| Since then, I've been using CIDER on emacs to do Clojure
| development, and I haven't had any issues.
| askvictor wrote:
| Having recently moved from IntelliJ to VS Code, I still miss
| a few things in the IntelliJ platform (it's overall layout is
| cleaner, important things are easy to get to), but VSCode has
| (last I checked) far superior remote debugging support, and
| is otherwise similar enough once you get past the muscle-
| memory.
| fredophile wrote:
| As someone who uses visual studio almost every day I'd say
| it isn't complete on its own. I can't navigate around a
| vanilla install that doesn't have visual assist installed
| as well anymore. If you want a cheaper alternative,
| workspace whiz is also decent.
| [deleted]
| patrick451 wrote:
| First, I almost never do this, so whether I can or not isn't
| really a selling point. That said, emacs+lsp-mode handles
| this just fine, at least for c++.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| That's the go-to example whenever IDEs are discussed on HN
| but I...almost never do that?
|
| I don't think I can count on two hands the number of times I
| have to do that in a year. As for undoing it I don't think
| I've ever done it at all. Anyway it doesn't matter because
| vim + CoC can do it. And for undoing it I guess I simply
| rename it back to the original name. Actually I just tried
| and yeah, it works.
|
| One of these day I'd like to sit with a JetBrains user and
| see how they work. I'm sure it's a great IDE but so far I
| haven't heard about anything life changing.
| mehphp wrote:
| This has been my take as well. I can drill-down into third-
| party packages, rename stuff across files, and use the
| debugger.
|
| I'm not saying JetBrains isn't fantastic, their products
| certainly are, but the examples given as to why I should
| switch are less than convincing. Just use whatever works
| for you.
|
| It's similar to the flak I get for using an iPhone instead
| of Android. "You can't customize it!"... I don't want to..
| I just want it to make phone calls and browse the web.
| aussiesnack wrote:
| When I used IntelliJ, for the languages it understood best
| (then Java and Kotlin), it felt very little like editing
| text. The sense was much more like interacting directly
| with an AST. I rarely had to use standard 'text' editing
| features (oriented around word/sentence/para entities).
| This was an emergent affordance from all the many language-
| oriented facilities (all available via keyboard shortcuts)
| offered, rather than one specific feature.
|
| I actually don't use IntelliJ now for reasons not germane
| here. I'm on neovim, mostly with Rust and
| javascript/typescript). This is great in many ways but the
| ergonomics of editing, even with LSP integration, are much
| more like editing text, which is more distant from my
| mental model of the code.
| kryptn wrote:
| Rust in vscode with rust-analyzer: Select the symbol,
| cmd+shift+p to get the command palette, type rename and
| select 'rename symbol'. Or right click and pick rename
| symbol.
|
| You can undo/redo with cmd+z or cmd+shift+z.
|
| replace cmd with ctrl on linux or windows.
| bb88 wrote:
| Pycharm for sure.
| nazka wrote:
| Also when you have to refacto in dynamic langages like Ruby,
| doing merge conflicts, or also anything around a SQL database.
| qxxx wrote:
| - Listary: a launcher (double press crtl to open)
|
| - silversearcher ag
|
| - total commander
|
| - Obsidian
|
| - chrome extension: "I don't care about cookies" will remove all
| the annoying gdpr cookie popups.
|
| - espanso : highly customizable text expander (eg type :myip to
| replace it with your current ip using your fav scripting
| language)
|
| - sqlyog : sql client with awesome power features I never seen
| before: eg schema and data comparision between 2 db sources.
|
| - manictime: a time tracking software which also takes
| screenshots. You can then go back and see what you did and how
| long.
| pinkcan wrote:
| iOS "focus" and "screen time" features
| residualmind wrote:
| To generate some stats for insight on a legacy project: Grepping
| logs with ag/rg, piping into sed/awk/cut, and then into wc
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I came in looking for awk in the list to upvote. By far awk has
| saved me the most time. I have used it for everything from
| parsing EDI documents to making simple shells for managing
| processes.
|
| I just used it to create a bit over 2000 data transformations
| and wrote another awk script to tie them all together. Yeah I
| did in hours what would have taken a week in the GUI and
| changes will be able to be made in minutes instead of days.
| Plus it saved my wrist from the pain of clicking a mouse
| thousands of times.
|
| To be fair you can do the same thing with any programming
| language but awk just has the least friction for me.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| clickhouse-local[1] saved me countless hours.
|
| I'm using it for format conversion, data processing, querying
| external data, as a calculator, etc...
| clickhouse-local --input-format Parquet --output-format
| JSONEachRow --query "SELECT * FROM table" < data.parquet >
| data.jsonl cat books.ndjson | clickhouse-local
| --query "SELECT author, avg(rating) FROM table GROUP BY author"
| clickhouse-local --query "SELECT * FROM
| url('https://datasets.clickhouse.com/hackernews.native.zst')
| LIMIT 10" $ clickhouse-local ClickHouse local
| version 22.13.1.1. milovidov-desktop :) SELECT
| extractTextFromHTML(*) FROM url('https://news.ycombinator.com/',
| RawBLOB)
|
| [1]:
| https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...
| nathanwallace wrote:
| Excited to see Steampipe shared here - thanks zJayv! I'm a lead
| on the project, so sharing some quick info below and happy to
| answer any questions.
|
| Steampipe [1] is open source and uses Postgres foreign data
| wrappers under the hood [2]. We have 90+ plugins to SQL query
| AWS, GitHub, Slack, Kubernetes, etc [3]. Mods (written in HCL)
| provide dashboards as code and automated security & compliance
| benchmarks [3]. We'd love your help & feedback!
|
| 1 - https://steampipe.io 2 -
| https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/overview 3 -
| https://hub.steampipe.io/
| the-alchemist wrote:
| Clojure. Some many Clojure libs, and state-of-the-art Java
| libraries available through interop.
| wycy wrote:
| tmux. I only discovered it in the last several weeks so it hasn't
| saved me 100 hours yet, but it very clearly will. It has
| completely changed the way I work. Now I mostly work with just
| one large terminal window and I hardly ever touch the mouse
| anymore.
| yanokwa wrote:
| ChangeDetection https://changedetection.io. Self-hosted website
| change detection.
| boyter wrote:
| Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have
| used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X"
|
| It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where
| potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I
| have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was
| because I got caught out from another project, which wasted
| months of my time.
|
| Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.
| LVB wrote:
| GitHub Copilot
|
| As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code
| (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be
| incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm
| slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I
| have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and
| am quite happy to <Tab> my way there as quickly as possible.
| boplicity wrote:
| I'm in a similar position -- I only code because I enjoy it,
| but I also just don't have the time to actually finish the
| coding projects that I'd like to. Plus, I'm a pretty bad coder
| because I only have a few hours every couple of weeks to focus
| on it, outside of the occasional bigger project. I'm going to
| look into Copilot to see if it can help me actually do what I
| want.
| superasn wrote:
| Yes there has been a lot of hot things in A.I. in 2022 but most
| of them are mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD and sometimes
| worse like SEO spam.
|
| Copilot is the only real value I'm getting from the recent A.I
| revolution and it does save me hundreds of lines of manully
| typing code all day. And the best part is it's getting better
| and better each day.
| esperent wrote:
| > mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD
|
| These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking
| up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds
| for advertising, for example:
|
| "A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very
| dramatic, stylish"
|
| You can also add keywords like
| "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to
| your desired style immediately.
|
| Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so and there's my perfect
| background for a "coming soon" flyer. Way better than I could
| have made in Canva. Good enough that multiple people have
| told me the flyers look amazing, and nobody guessed it was AI
| until I told them.
| kristianp wrote:
| I assume you use it with VS Code. Anyone used copilot with
| SublimeText? I know a plugin exists...
| LVB wrote:
| I've used it with Goland (Jetbrains) and VSCode. I'm a ST
| customer... will give their plugin a try out of curiosity.
| bilater wrote:
| Not 100 hours yet but I've been pleasantly surprised how
| effective ChatGPT is at giving me code that is 90-100% good to
| work with. Never used Copilot but now I'm warming up to this
| idea.
| timjver wrote:
| Give Copilot a try, it has been way more reliable for me in
| terms of giving good code suggestions than ChatGPT so far.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Copilot has been great the past year and longer. I am so used
| to it , I don't even remember how it was not having it.
| faebi wrote:
| Switching to Vscode saved me a lot of time, especially the multi
| cursor behavior. I was using VIM, Tmux and iTerm before. Remote
| development is a breeze, connections and sessions are never lost.
| Many extensions get better and better, even a hated maintenance
| task is easier if you have a nice and easy language integration.
|
| Docker, but these days I take it as granted.
| lpolovets wrote:
| Text Blaze (YC W21) has saved me about 50 hours over the past 18
| months. They reduce repetitive typing across websites. For
| example if you have a common format for bugs you're filing, or
| LinkedIn messages or emails that you're sending, you can use Text
| Blaze to write most of the text for you. If you've used
| Superhuman snippets, this is similar but more powerful, and it
| works across the entire web instead of just email.
|
| Time savings screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH (Disclosure:
| I liked the product so much that my fund ended up investing.)
|
| Website: http://blaze.today/
|
| Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-
| blaze/idgadac...
| toddm wrote:
| make, dbx, vi, sed, awk, cut, paste, (s)diff, (f/e)grep, comm,
| sort, col, column, bash, csh, ksh, man, find, cvs, svn, date,
| f77/xlf, cc/xlc, bcc, TeX, ghostview
| 23B1 wrote:
| http://freedom.to
|
| Block websites so you can focus on work. Different blocklists and
| different sessions makes it easy for me to stay focused during
| the week. Best investment in myself I ever made.
| songzme wrote:
| good idea. FYI you can also `sudo vim /etc/hosts` and map any
| websites to 127.0.0.1, effectively blocking them. Your comment
| inspired me to do that thank you!
| jviotti wrote:
| Vim, and it probably saved me way more than 100 hours. I use for
| coding (C++/JavaScript), for writing academic publications
| (dissertation/papers) and for writing e-mail (through mutt).
|
| I've used it so much that it is second nature at this point, and
| moving to any other editor without my ever growing set of macros,
| etc would significantly impact my productivity.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| TablePlus for dev and prod database stuff. Easy as hell, worth
| the cash.
|
| ChatGPT at it's worst saves me an hour a day.
| rex-mundi wrote:
| What do you use chat got for, I could definitely benefit from
| an extra hour
| avogar wrote:
| clickhouse-local is a really good tool for analyzing local data,
| as it supports a wide range of data formats and it's really fast.
| It can save you a lot of time, because there is no need to
| install a batch of packages to use it or setup a database server.
| Just download a binary/install one package and enjoy. It has
| developed rapidly in recent years and continues to improve.
| https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...
| wingmanjd wrote:
| Ninite's automated installers [1].
|
| This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support
| days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in
| downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I
| could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the
| instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all
| their stuff up to date.
|
| [1] https://ninite.com/ Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once
| tasuki wrote:
| I've been using APT for this with great success for the past 17
| years! I guess it's also saved me quite a few hundreds of
| hours.
| ThomasMidgley wrote:
| Windows. I used Mac OS X a few years. But in my opinion Mac OS X
| is (or was, back in this time) PITA. Switching back to Windows
| has definitively saved me hundreds of hours!
| tqwhite wrote:
| That is so strange. I worked in a mixed shop and all of us OSX
| people laughed our butts off when we did zoom and screen share
| with Windows guys as they took forever to do stuff we did
| almost instantly. I used Windows side-by-side with OSX for
| years and had nothing like your experience.
|
| But, good on you. It's nice that you found your niche. If you
| ever are forced to switch back reach out. I have a lot of good
| techniques for fast and pleasant OSX.
| Shorel wrote:
| That sounds so strange...
|
| I use Windows every day, and I know shortcuts and tools for
| many things.
|
| But for work I use Ubuntu, and for writing code it is a much
| more efficient environment.
|
| So it is actually hard to imagine an environment less
| productive than Windows.
|
| Now, if your work is done in Office (which I only use to write
| emails), or Photoshop, then I understand. But I am still
| intrigued.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The pure power of ripgrep + emacs to speed up refactoring
| _probably_ offsets the lots of game time i've spend diddling with
| my editor.
|
| at least that's what i tell myself.
| robertcarter wrote:
| care to share your .init etc, I still having figured how I want
| to couple the two
| hprotagonist wrote:
| for big edits and refactors, i've been using rg.el: https://r
| gel.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/usage.html?highlight=ed... as
| such: (use-package rg :straight (rg
| :type git :host github :repo "dajva/rg.el") :config
| (rg-enable-menu) )
|
| and for short stuff/searching around, etc, i bound consult-
| ripgrep to M-s r.
| pksebben wrote:
| I have a bash function that mashes sed and rg together and it's
| dreamy.
|
| "hey, change all these to that, and don't make it complicated"
| icoder wrote:
| Not at 100 hrs yet but fastlane is getting there.
|
| I set it up for making screenshots, building, sending to slack &
| submitting an app to App and Play Store. Saves time by minimising
| boring work, double win.
| brihter wrote:
| dsq [0]
|
| [0] - https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq
| 7952 wrote:
| I work as a consultant and have to do a timesheet. I use an old
| app called TimeSnapper that records screen grabs every few
| seconds. Works brilliantly for timesheets and has saved me
| numerous times.
| karencarits wrote:
| The developer is also very kind and responsive, even here at
| HN. I was impressed! And it is a nice way to let go of "do I
| need to remember this" (in combination with the Ditto clipboard
| manager)
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| I use timebro.com, which is a paid service (though recovering
| one extra hour to bill covers the monthly cost for me). Once
| you have to log time in multiple systems, it's essential to get
| something to help manage that process or chaos quickly follows.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| How does such a tool know what project you're working on?
| smusamashah wrote:
| RipGrep has been a huge time saver. I work in huge legacy code
| base. Lots of modules, lots of content, lots of scripts.
| Sometimes I can just go to parent directory with all repos and
| search with RipGrep if ever needed.
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| McFly[1] is a terminal history search replacement that is more
| context aware. The only downside is I am probably not memorizing
| the commands I use as much as I should.
|
| Flycut[2] has certainly saved me a lot of time and changed the
| way I write code. Have a good clipboard history has really
| changed my flow.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/cantino/mcfly [2]:
| https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut
| jntnctrs wrote:
| AHK - Auto HotKey
|
| https://www.autohotkey.com/
|
| It's really a time saver as a launcher, running little scripts,
| asking input and doing whatever after works, calling native DLL
| Windows functions.... It's a big helper of your own workflows
| mainedotpy wrote:
| Espanso [0] - such a useful text expander with easy inclusion of
| shell commands and many other features. I love this thing so much
| as someone in the medical field that I made my first ever open
| source contribution to it.
|
| 0: https://espanso.org
| sarlalian wrote:
| Love espanso... I need to get my work to start sending the dev
| money because we are starting to use it in a lot of places.
| locusofself wrote:
| Password managers, specifically Bitwarden (because it's free) and
| previously used Lastpass.
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