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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)

#201

Post by cooperaustinj »

boplicity wrote: post #195
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 b…

How often are you confident that you find the right answer on Google? As with anything, you need to reason about it yourself and verify.

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

#202

Post by eitland »

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…

Crazy useful.

So useful I like it despite how it always goes out of its way to waste my time by trying to misrepresent a number of different types of strings and numbers as American dates :-|

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

#203

Post by ianmcgowan »

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.

I use timebro.com, which is a paid service (though recovering one extra hour to bill covers the monthly cost for me). Once you have to log time in multiple systems, it's essential to get something to help manage that process or chaos quickly follows.

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

#204

Post by BonoboIO »

hedora wrote: post #105
BonoboIO wrote: post #34

PHP Propel 2.0 It’s a small ORM with nice features and it saved me a ton of time. Just generate the classes from the database. Very fast to iterate from. https://propelorm.org/

Probably showing my age here, but their database:reverse feature just blew my mind. The problem with most ORMs is that language object models are way more expressive than SQL (due to having multiple subclasses of the same superclass / interface, or even multiple inheritance, and none of those mapping to SQL foreign keys). Targeting the less expressive data model should automatically avoid most ORM footguns. I wonder…

It just works :D

I work with it every day and the the documentation is not the best, but for 95% of pure php projects it’s the Right answer. There maybe other right answers, but propel is definitely one of them.

If you iterate the database as you go, simply create the classes and there you go. I m amazed how good it works.

I m a single developer, so your results may vary, but for small to medium projects it works fine. And most of all projects are small to medium.

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

#205

Post by KiranRao0 »

I feel like I have a unique one here. The chrome extension: "Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions"

It has easily saved me over 100 hours by preventing me from continuously scrolling through youtube recommendations.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...

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

#206

Post by bdcravens »

npteljes wrote: post #167

I find good use of my skill in the following: DBeaver: use a consistent interface for practically any data store. Wanna SELECT and JOIN CSVs? It can do that too. https://www.mail-tester.com/ - Fantastic email server settings troubleshooter. Excel / Calc / Gnumeric: I don't even know macros, just the functions, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables enable good productivity. And sometimes fun, I chose my current video c…

I've long been a DataGrip user, but Dbeaver impressed me when it was the first to enable Aurora Babelfish support.

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

#207

Post by jviotti »

Vim, and it probably saved me way more than 100 hours. I use for coding (C++/JavaScript), for writing academic publications (dissertation/papers) and for writing e-mail (through mutt).

I've used it so much that it is second nature at this point, and moving to any other editor without my ever growing set of macros, etc would significantly impact my productivity.

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

#208

Post by nazka »

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…

Also when you have to refacto in dynamic langages like Ruby, doing merge conflicts, or also anything around a SQL database.

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

#210

Post by nx7487 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #186
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.

sed -i "s/function_name/function_name2/g" $FILES && git restore $FILES

Edit: Not claiming this is better, just saying what I get by with. I have never used an IDE in my career so far, or any autocomplete or code modification features.

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