Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 574 posts

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

#281

Post by micvbang »

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…

Oh my lord, I love DBeaver so much!

One thing that blew my mind the first time I saw it, was that when you look at geospatial data, they let you view your geometries on a map. It's so simple and so awesome!

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

#282

Post by fredrikholm »

travisgriggs wrote: post #120
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.

I'd be curious what your flavor of "functional programming and pure functions" is? I ask, because I used to feel very similar about the OO paradigm (it helped me model the world easier, made me insufferable because of my zeal, etc). But, I had the privilege of doing that with nearly 20 years of Smalltalk. A battle worn path of ObjectiveC, Swift, Java, Python, Kotlin, and JavaScript later, I feel the pain. It's like b…

> I don't know how welcome it is in the "functional programming and pure functions" club, but I think it's awesome.

Erlang, and by extension Elixir, are very respected.

The fact that you have a strong background in Smalltalk isn't a surprise: Kay's idea of isolated objects sending methods to each other, independent of each other is OTP. Erlang, IMO, is the most beautiful combination of functional and (Kay's definition of) OOP there is.

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

#283

Post by JW_00000 »

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.

But how can you verify ChatGPT's answers if you don't know what its sources were? E.g. if I google a technical question about HTML5, I can see whether a result is the HTML5 spec, MDN, W3Schools, or a random medium blog. If I google a medical question, I can see if I'm on a hospital's website or on Men's Health.

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

#284

Post by quanticle »

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.

JetBrains' IDEs are great for the languages which they explicitly support, but are often hilariously bad for the languages that are supported with plugins or extensions. For example, the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ, Cursive, doesn't have great macro support, and, one day just stopped being able to run unit tests. Or rather, it'd pretend to run the tests, give a nice green bar, green checkmark and everything, but the tests wouldn't actually have been run. I found this behavior the hard way, when I almost committed a bug. I'd run the test suite, saw that it was green, and thought that the code I'd written had passed all of the checks. It was only during some happenstance manual testing that I noticed "impossible" behavior (i.e. the code behaving in a way that I'd explicitly checked for in tests). Immediately suspicious, I reran all the tests from a REPL on the command line, and saw a whole bunch of failures that Cursive hadn't reported.

Since then, I've been using CIDER on emacs to do Clojure development, and I haven't had any issues.

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

#285

Post by zemoose »

eitland wrote: post #202
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 :-|

Dear god, I would use Excel so much more if I could get it to stop mutating my data.

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

#287

Post by tqwhite »

namuol wrote: post #32

Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling… Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.

Sorry mate but that is just wrong. I get payback of a hundred to one on most of my fiddly bits.

A single command that does the ten things needed correctly every time instead of looking up each thing, typing it wrong four times and doing it again is a godsend. Lots of time saved. More accurate and reliable as well.

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

#288

Post by stackbutterflow »

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.

That's the go-to example whenever IDEs are discussed on HN but I...almost never do that?

I don't think I can count on two hands the number of times I have to do that in a year. As for undoing it I don't think I've ever done it at all. Anyway it doesn't matter because vim + CoC can do it. And for undoing it I guess I simply rename it back to the original name. Actually I just tried and yeah, it works.

One of these day I'd like to sit with a JetBrains user and see how they work. I'm sure it's a great IDE but so far I haven't heard about anything life changing.

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

#290

Post by wingmanjd »

Ninite's automated installers [1].

This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all their stuff up to date.

[1] https://ninite.com/ Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once

Post reply on HN