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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)

#191

Post by TeeMassive »

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.

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.

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

#192

Post by jamespo »

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.

That's the beauty of open ended UNIX tools

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

#193

Post by towawy »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #181
jerzyt wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

I'm curious, how did you establish the Postgres connection?

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

#195

Post by boplicity »

jmcgough wrote: post #149

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.

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.

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

#196

Post by mmcgaha »

residualmind wrote: post #112

To generate some stats for insight on a legacy project: Grepping logs with ag/rg, piping into sed/awk/cut, and then into wc

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.

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

#198

Post by ianmcgowan »

jpmattia wrote: post #41
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...

> 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.

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.

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

#199

Post by Quekid5 »

hedora wrote: post #96
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.

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.

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.

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

#200

Post by mastersummoner »

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.

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