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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)

#311

Post by p4l4g4 »

Did a lot of data wrangling this year. The usual grep, sed, awk, jq and even find has sped up my days significantly. Sed is among my favorites to whip up some quick, ad hoc, transformations.

This year I added Miller [0] to my list; a tool to process tabular data, similar to sed, awk, etc. It handles csv, tav, json lines, etc. in a consistent way. I like the delimited key-value pairs format, which allows me to write simple oneliners in bash to collect some data (e.g. "ip=x.x.x.x,endpoint=/api/x") and use Miller to crunch the results. Not sure it saved me 100h, but it was one of the biggest time savers this year!

[0] https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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

#312

Post by DavidPiper »

KiranRao0 wrote: post #205

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...

Thank you for saving me 100 hours in 2023. Installing for Firefox right now.

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

#313

Post by Shorel »

mastersummoner wrote: post #200

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…

I would say Sublime Text is in fact a program.

It has also saved me over 100 hours or more.

And this includes its instantaneous speed and the ability to open huge files!

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

#315

Post by songzme »

23B1 wrote: post #194

http://freedom.to Block websites so you can focus on work. Different blocklists and different sessions makes it easy for me to stay focused during the week. Best investment in myself I ever made.

good idea. FYI you can also `sudo vim /etc/hosts` and map any websites to 127.0.0.1, effectively blocking them. Your comment inspired me to do that thank you!

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

#316

Post by BeetleB »

systemvoltage wrote: post #303
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…

Pssh... adults use JMP ;-): https://www.jmp.com/en_us/software/data-analysis-software.ht... Trivia: JMP stands for "John's Macintosh Project". Also, the entire semiconductor industry depends on JMP just like the entire pharmaceutical industry depends on Minitab.

And we go full circle. I learned pandas in 2012 so I don't have to deal with Excel or JMP scripting.

Still use Excel for quick stuff but otherwise it's pandas for me.

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

#318

Post by wolfadex »

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.

Elm has easily saved me hundreds of hours per year in compile time alone, not to mentioned the likely thousands of hours it's saved me in time spent debugging. I still shudder to think of the horrendous compile times I got from even small TypeScript projects, and the days I'd waste trying to debug them.

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

#320

Post by ajuc »

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?

It can with a proper regex. Mostly. Depending on the language, your patience, and the amount of false positives you are comfortable with.

I did sth like that (I had bash scripts for common programming "refactorings" and "queries" like "print all classes and methods where this variable is used"). I couldn't use a modern IDE cause we were programming on a legacy linux server through ssh for licencing reasons.

And the (C++) code was written by a guy that learnt C++ and OOP on the job and it showed. Class hierarchies were sometimes 8 levels deep and class variables were reused for different purposes to "save effort on serializing them" :)

So if the user interactions were in the same order and with the same text prompts - a class would inherit them and add some new ones. Even if the old class was just accidentally asking the user similar questions :) So OR_PalNr could mean shelf number in base class and Printer number in descendant, because both times the user was asked to "scan the barcode", while the callstack was a mix of methods from both classes :)

Fun times.

BTW nowadays I mostly work with IntelliJ, but sometimes a script is still the best way to understand the code. For example grepping the git blame output is often very useful. It's never 100% reliable, but it's often good enough.

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