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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)

#251

Post by OrvalWintermute »

towawy wrote: post #193
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I used ODBC [1] out of the big list of options [2] which gets a bad rep but worked for my use-cases.

The commercial devart plugin [3] looks pretty neat too but I haven't used it yet

I've also tried the JDBC connectivity option too [4], but with some different use-cases in mind for Postgres (not about Excel)

[1] https://datacornering.com/how-to-connect-to-postgresql-datab...

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/download/products/2-drivers-and-i...

[3] https://www.devart.com/excel-addins/postgresql/

[4] https://jdbc.postgresql.org/

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

#252

Post by liotier »

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…

> The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups,

Do yourself a favour and ditch vlookup and hlookup in favour of the recently introduced xlookup, which even obsoletes index/match !

I try to keep my exploratory joins out of Excel, but I admit that I often don't resist the immediacy of Excel's poor man's joins located right where I need them.

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

#253

Post by ironrabbit »

cooperaustinj wrote: post #201
boplicity wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdotally, chatgpt seems much worse to me than Google for getting correct answers. Like orders of magnitude worse. Tells me the wrong timezone for a city kind of bad. No doubt it will be much better in the future, and they've definitely found PMF with the interface, but I would not trust it right now with anything even slightly important to me.

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

#254

Post by majkinetor »

robk wrote: post #230
porridgeandrice wrote: post #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 c…

Can you point me to some good examples? I use it for text replacement but their own site is fairly sparse for creative uses.

Use official forum, it has tone of good examples.

Here is something I did long time ago: https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-autohotkey

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

#255

Post by tommica »

mikojan wrote: post #219
ivanjermakov wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Go, command line: $ gorename -from '"my-package".myFunc' -to myRenamedFunc

That's amazing!

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

#256

Post by casey2 »

eitland wrote: post #217
nx7487 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It cannot differentiate between a field in a class and a variable in a method, or even a word in a comment, can it?

Sam could do all that since the 80s. So ~40 years.

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

#257

Post by nijave »

kennedy wrote: post #49

Terraform: mainly because my organization used to make everything manually, using boto3/sdk scripts, and poorly tested/constructed cloudformation templates

While not perfect, `terraform plan` is a massive time saver. A lot of IaC tools still don't have good (or any) support for "dry runs" and provisioning a bunch of infrastructure to see if your thing works is really slow

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

#258

Post by Kiro »

samwillis wrote: post #106

The combination of TypeScript, VSCode and GitHub Copilot is just a joy to work with. The are valid criticisms of Coplilot around copyright but I'm not using it to generate whole algorithms. It just knows your code and what you are trying to do.

Exactly. Anyone who has worked with Copilot seriously knows that generating whole algorithms is not what you actually use it for. The things Copilot generate and autocomplete for me are unique and tailored to what I'm trying to do, completely based on the context of the code.

Sure, you can bait it into reproducing stuff but why bother? Considering how convoluted it is to trick it you might just as well copypaste the algorithm straight from the repo. I almost find the discussion irrelevant because of how detached from reality it is.

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

#259

Post by rwky »

usrme wrote: post #52

If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point. --- [1]: https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3... [2]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html

Just tried this, shaved a playbook from from 8 minutes 30 seconds to 3 minutes 10 seconds! Thanks :)

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

#260

Post by tluyben2 »

bilater wrote: post #131

Not 100 hours yet but I've been pleasantly surprised how effective ChatGPT is at giving me code that is 90-100% good to work with. Never used Copilot but now I'm warming up to this idea.

Copilot has been great the past year and longer. I am so used to it , I don’t even remember how it was not having it.
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