A modern version of Vern Buerg's List.com. I used that tool in DOS days and almost always had it running.
Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
101–106 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#102I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…
I had a shower thought the other day. When playing games it's often quite normal to lean left, right, back in the heat of the moment. (The good old falling out of a chair in the heat of the moment). It would be nice to have some sort of simple peripheral that would allow to translate simple body movement and maybe breath patterns (multiple games have a button to hold breath) into controls. I know that VR is a thing b…
Head tracking (without full VR) is quite a big niche in flight/space sims, whether just for rotations or a limited amount of translation as well. It's much more natural using your head to look around, keeps your hands on the flight controls, and frees up hat switches and other buttons which no longer need to serve that purpose.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#103I wish there was a bi-modal programming language: a "design" mode, and an "implementation" mode. Design Mode: - Define domain model: entities, relationships, constraints - Define behaviour: state machines, conditions, triggers, calculations - Define architecture: systems, subsystems, modules, interfaces/apis - Define rules for composition and communication - Define extensibility points, service provider interfaces -…
Working on something similar in my spare time, its quite... exhausting to be honest.
Basic premise is you define a core model or different types of models and use transformers to transform them from one type to another, building a huge structure in the process than can help you generate stuff and notify of updates. The biggest problem is cascading updates, recursive calls, UI and performance in general. Currently doing it on the JVM but I think I should migrate to something closer to machine code to net realistic performance.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#104I've been looking for software to map relationships between my team's products (app servers) and their integrations. E.g. server01 can go from 3.1 to version 4.0 since foo01 integrates with server01 and foo01 supports 3.1 and 4.0. I have been poking around at graph databases for this, but I'm also looking for something better than wiki pages.
Yes! I worked at a well-known regional company about 15 years ago and we built one of these ourselves. It would track servers, software, packages, etc... You could quickly see which web servers were running which versions of .Net and then drill into the applications which had their own tagging to specific .Net versions. Then you'd have a clear picture of the opportunity/costs/consequences of upgrading the version on…
maybe I have a new project to start.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visidata is great for this kind of thing, exploring and editing csv. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/docs/edit/
(OP) I've had a short look at Visidata. Maybe it works or not on my described scenario (I should read the docs more carefully and make a test to be sure), but it's definitely in the direction I had in mind (a simple yet customizable enough tool for the job).
The tutorial is well written and gives a great tour of the tool: https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#106Being able to incrementally load compressed files. Sometimes I have to load large tables, do some processing and save the result. The easiest way to do that has been to load the rows of csv files by blocks (it's really easy to load parts of csv files). But I'd love a way to do the same row wise loading with compressed file formats such as parquet. (Bonus points if that's possible even if I'm not the one who built the…
Not applicable to parquet, but I have used zless/zgrep often on tar.gz-compressed logs. (I'm not sure what they're doing is actually that efficient though...)
FYI, the Logfile Navigator (https://lnav.org) can display gzipped/bzipped files on the fly. The top-of-tree has new support for automatically unpacking archives to a temporary directory using libarchive and displaying the contents.