Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by OrvalWintermute » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

jerzyt wrote: post #158

towawy wrote: post #135

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 Exce…

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.

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.

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

#182

Post by moozeek » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

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/

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

#183

Post by chungy » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

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

#184

Post by npteljes » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

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…

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+.

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

#185

Post by hedora » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

rebelos wrote: post #170

hedora wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sin…

Okay but clearly none of this is "the point" of make, so your original comment is still baffling.

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/Catalogue...

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/Archives....

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

#186

Post by ivanjermakov » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

dougdonohoe wrote: post #159

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…

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.

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

#187

Post by npteljes » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#188

Post by breck » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

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.

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

#189

Post by chungy » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

yanokwa wrote: post #25

wdrw wrote: 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.

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.

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

#190

Post by bhandziuk » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

7952 wrote: post #43

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.

How does such a tool know what project you're working on?