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Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#41

Post by globular-toast »

armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

There is such a thing as a walking desk. Linus Torvalds uses one. Never used it myself, though. Couldn't imagine doing any serious programming like that.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#42

Post by beforeolives »

armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

> Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years.

Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations.

> The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous.

A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outside of that is still vastly preferable to any other combination. Non-sedentary jobs and manual labor will break and wear down your body in different ways, they aren't some ideal to aspire to.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#43

Post by hnrodey »

evo_9 wrote: post #17

Time-web-browser. That would allow me to look at future webpages and see for example what HNers in 2150 are into. If the sky is the limit of course...

The reverse sounds pretty interesting. A browser that shows me the current page but also can load cached/historical copies of a page from a week ago, year ago, 10 years ago, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#44

Post by yoz-y »

armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

I had a shower thought the other day. When playing games it's often quite normal to lean left, right, back in the heat of the moment. (The good old falling out of a chair in the heat of the moment).

It would be nice to have some sort of simple peripheral that would allow to translate simple body movement and maybe breath patterns (multiple games have a button to hold breath) into controls. I know that VR is a thing but I think there is quite some space between here and there.

For office style work one idea would be to have an extended desktop with parallax.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#45

Post by fwsgonzo »

Automatically saving and restoring terminals with tabs and separate histories, per workspace.

I have found nothing yet that does this, or even just one of those things. It would be the killer feature of a new terminal emulator - and I see there are lots of them being developed, but none of them have this! And I can guess why: It's because of the maintenance work required to have this feature, and also trying to be multi-platform, multi-desktop and also the work required just to have a working terminal to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#46

Post by hnrodey »

jimbob45 wrote: post #25

I need a visual studio plugin to disable breakpoint breaking while preserving my enabled/disabled breakpoints. Sometimes, I just want to avoid breaking for a bit without removing or futzing with my breakpoints.

You might want to tweet at https://twitter.com/madstorgersen - he's always asking about ideas for VS plugins, soliciting feedback, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#47

Post by izolate »

pluies wrote: post #26
izolate wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

58G 63f, 1. Go down to line 58 2. Jump to the 63rd comma 3. Edit

This could lead you to the wrong place if, for example, some quoted values on this row contains commas, no?

100%. It's not infallible. There are CSV plugins for Vim that bring increased confidence.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#48

Post by fwsgonzo »

sgarrity wrote: post #35

A standalone hardware mute switch for Zoom/etc calls so you can prominently and reliably see your mic mute status, and quickly and easily flip it on and off. (I know there are a few do-it-yourself options for these, but I'd much rather throw a bit of money at it rather than time).

Sennheiser headsets tend to have a mechanical switch on the microphone arm that turns it on and off when you swing it. I like that part enough that I only buy those headsets now. I'm not sure if they continue the practice these days.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#49

Post by khaledh »

I wish there was a bi-modal programming language: a "design" mode, and an "implementation" mode.

Design Mode:

    - Define domain model: entities, relationships, constraints
    - Define behaviour: state machines, conditions, triggers, calculations
    - Define architecture: systems, subsystems, modules, interfaces/apis
    - Define rules for composition and communication
    - Define extensibility points, service provider interfaces
    - Define access points: ui, cli, api, lib
Implementation Mode:

    - Map domain model -> db schema, code constructs
    - Map behaviour -> code to evolve domain model/state over time
    - Map architecture -> libraries, executables, services, network topology
    - Map composition rules -> snap-in components from architecture using defined interfaces
    - Map extensibility points -> callbacks, hooks, discovery
    - Map access points -> connect ui/api to model and behaviour

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#50

Post by no_one_ever »

yoz-y wrote: post #44
armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

I had a shower thought the other day. When playing games it's often quite normal to lean left, right, back in the heat of the moment. (The good old falling out of a chair in the heat of the moment). It would be nice to have some sort of simple peripheral that would allow to translate simple body movement and maybe breath patterns (multiple games have a button to hold breath) into controls. I know that VR is a thing b…

I got to play HL:Alyx recently and it felt sooo awesome to peek around corners. I definitely want more bodily interaction in VR as it grows.
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