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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

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Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#111

Post by gtirloni »

teknopaul wrote: post #51
Apreche wrote: post #16

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.

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…

How are paper maps working for you these days? I'm interested in your experience replacing GMaps.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#113

Post by xmonkee »

qrio2 wrote: post #93
xmonkee wrote: post #6

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.

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#114

Post by eftepede »

alexchantavy wrote: post #68
namuol wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Try fzf for history management, it's a life changer.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#115

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

alexchantavy wrote: post #68
namuol wrote: post #32

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.

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.

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

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#116

Post by cccybernetic »

ss48 wrote: post #50

Everything Search by Voidtools.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#117

Post by sureglymop »

namuol wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#118

Post by bobbob1921 »

hedora wrote: post #76
alexchantavy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 'history' command is helpful the 1% of the time Ctrl-R and Ctrl-S fail you.

Bash alias. And my large bash_alias file

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#119

Post by hedora »

jodrellblank wrote: post #98
hedora wrote: post #58

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 leas…

> " 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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#120

Post by travisgriggs »

actinium226 wrote: post #57

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.

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

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