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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)

#401

Post by dysoco »

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...

Funny that for me it works exactly the opposite; I'm subscribed to a lot of channels that upload many videos that don't interest me, however youtube's algorithm is pretty spot-on with videos that I will be very interested in watching, whether they come from channels I'm subscribed to, or not.

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

#403

Post by melagonster »

jen729w wrote: post #162
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…

Yeah, just yesterday. Hacky output from `nslookup`, not ideal but it’s all we had. Tens of thousands of rows. No IDE with regex capabilities available. Excel to the rescue! Took me about five minutes to extract exactly what I needed.

where can I input regex to excel? I really need that, last time I copied table to nopad++ then copy paste it back.

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

#404

Post by steine65 »

dotancohen wrote: post #218
aquafox wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should learn R and dplyr ;)

Tell us more - in the context of them being replacements for Excel for his use case.

I love R but can't use it at work :(

With just the tidyverse library (which includes dplyr), R can be very useful in a data analysis pipeline. It is great for data cleaning and aggregation, especially when a process needs to be done multiple times. It is much faster than excel/power query. I am an accountant in SaaS and spend a lot of my day waiting for excel/powerbi automations to refresh. Similar solutions in R/sql/python would be nearly instant. Also excel/powerbi automations are a bitch to troubleshoot, and are unnecessarily complex.

When following tidy principles, a framework designed by the tidyverse dev Hadley Wickham, R code can be very easy to interpret, similar to SQL. Additionally the R community has made libraries for everything, and I consider R a great general purpose language as well.

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

#405

Post by qazxcvbnm »

p4l4g4 wrote: post #311

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 s…

I second Miller - besides its extensive support for various formats, it is fast. If you ever have to deal with gigabyte-sized files, Miller will give noticeable speed ups versus jq et al.

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

#406

Post by galkk »

On my work there is a utility that sends my shell history from all my terminal sessions and pcs to centralized database as I run commands, enabling search and cross reference. That saves tons of time. I haven’t bothered to set similar things for my personal use but I’m sure they do exist too.

Tmux + tmux continuum is another utility that saves many hours. I use it only on remote machines though.

Ffmpeg cli for fast lossless cutting of video. (Apparently there is nice gui for that, never tried though)

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

#407

Post by PikachuEXE »

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...

Or try out FreeTube https://freetubeapp.io

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

#408

Post by gamjQZnHT53AMa »

kryptn wrote: post #301
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.

Rust in vscode with rust-analyzer: Select the symbol, cmd+shift+p to get the command palette, type rename and select 'rename symbol'. Or right click and pick rename symbol. You can undo/redo with cmd+z or cmd+shift+z. replace cmd with ctrl on linux or windows.

F2 is also the shortcut in vscode

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

#409

Post by gamjQZnHT53AMa »

heipei wrote: post #122
Bekwnn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes. Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse nav…

I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme, barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc). Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors (VSCode et al), especiall…

Any advice for someone who wants to switch to vim for Go development but struggling to find a good workflow? Using vscode it's so easy to rely on the auto complete, click a function name to go to it's definition, etc. I haven't found a good guide on getting that sort of basic workflow going which is unfortunate because I would love to stop using my mouse so much.

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

#410

Post by monkpit »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #222
eitland wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

add the c and it will prompt so you can make the determination yourself.

So, no
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