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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)

#371

Post by selcuka »

gavinray wrote: post #270
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…

My one big complaint with IntelliJ is that they don't have Devcontainer support It's (almost) 2023, the way to develop applications is to put a reproducible Docker container with all the dependencies + debug tools you need in the repo, so that anyone can clone it and spin it up in their IDE. VS Code has amazing support for this, while the only Jetbrains IDE that comes close is CLion.

I believe they are currently working with the Docker team on a solution:

https://github.com/docker/dev-environments/issues/70

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

#372

Post by scotty79 »

Short chrome browser extension I wrote some time ago that rewrites normal urls to videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

into embedded video urls like this

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvPPXbo87ds?autoplay=1

bypassing ads and running video in full browser window.

Since I watch a lot of youtube I think it might have saved me 100 hours of waiting so I can press Skip Ad button.

I probably should just use AdBlock but where's the fun in that.

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

#373

Post by yawnxyz »

CUE Lang (https://cuelang.org/) for me. I had to build this massive clinical data collection system in REDCap and it's kind of a nightmare system to use.

So I wrote a script in CUE to programmatically build my REDCap data dictionary to support flexible inputs.

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

#375

Post by therealmarv »

samsolomon wrote: post #295

Cleanshot X I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time taking screenshots—dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them—save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of clutter. Not to mention it has video…

No video recording but Skitch https://evernote.com/products/skitch is still my screenshot tool for Mac. Just don't login with any Evernote account (I don't use Evernote) and you are fine. Free

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

#376

Post by masukomi »

boyter wrote: post #337

Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X" It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time. Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains…

a) cool

b) thanks for explaining how it saved you time

c) holy CRAP the description wasn't joking about "fastest"

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

#377

Post by yawnxyz »

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…

I don't have a Windows machine, and I'm having mixed feeling about Excel for Mac — is it as powerful as the Windows version? Are they exactly the same or are there big difference in functionality? The web / Office360 version doesn't seem much better, either though.

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

#378

Post by andrew_jef »

Automa [0] is just another no-code extension to automate web browser. I used it to scrape excel files from the website of an open-end fund, which does not expose public API for its daily NAV historical data. This extension not only saved me time to manually point and click 1000s of url, but also give me a reason to procrastinate teaching myself selenium.

[0] https://www.automa.site/

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

#379

Post by yawnxyz »

kristianp wrote: post #374

Conversely, what has cost you at least 100 hours? Hacker news is software that definitely took at least that for me!

It gives and takes — I learned about CUE and Svelte through HN which have probably saved me hundreds to maybe even thousands of hours, so it's a net win for me!

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

#380

Post by superasn »

esperent wrote: post #325
superasn wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there has been a lot of hot things in A.I. in 2022 but most of them are mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD and sometimes worse like SEO spam. Copilot is the only real value I'm getting from the recent A.I revolution and it does save me hundreds of lines of manully typing code all day. And the best part is it's getting better and better each day.

> mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds for advertising, for example: "A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very dramatic, stylish" You can also add keywords like "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to your desired style immediately. Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so a…

That sounds great. Is this SD? Are you running this locally or via some service? Would love more details if you don't mind.
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