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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)

#121
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.

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[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.

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

#122
post #72

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.

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 nav…

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.

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

#123
post #47

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

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.

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

#125
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

How does home assistant track know if you are home or not? Is it tracking your location?

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

#126
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.

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

#128
post #25
post #9

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...

I've switched from Mosh to Eternal Terminal ( https://eternalterminal.dev ) because of its excellent native scrolling support.

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.

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

#129
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.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...

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

#130
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 my way there as quickly as possible.

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