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

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421–430 of 574 posts

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

#421

Post by philomath_mn »

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…

Are the COCOMO estimates useful at all for you? That always comes up when I look at code metrics but I have a hard time believing they mean anything

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

#422

Post by QuadrupleA »

hedora wrote: post #58

Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no particular order): jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs, gkrellm, nload. Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior, you're doing things completely wrong): Anyway, this document saved me at leas…

1000 hours each? Really? So literally half a year of full-time 40 hour weeks saved by each of these on your list, vs the next best alternative?

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

#423

Post by allisdust »

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…

If only it would not gobble up so much memory. For an ide that has been around for this long, one would have assumed they would have switched to a more performant non gc language by now.

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

#424

Post by rzach »

During my freshman year of college, I was in a general chemistry class. Halfway through the semester I wrote a little Python script that encoded mass of a whole bunch of (not all of) elements and wrote some functions to calculate mass of compounds plus a few other useful quantities. Homework was online so I didn't have to show work - I would just type in the compound and whatever I wanted to calculate. If not 100 hours, it saved quite a bit of time!

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

#425

Post by Sugimot0 »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #48

Ultrafast, super lite file search on Windows, Voidtools "Everything": https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ I haven't touched the Windows Search utility since I found it.

I switched to linux a long time ago so now i use plocate, but on windows everything was a must! Also directory opus was a nice file manager, not sure if there's a new/better foss alternative yet.

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

#426

Post by dougdonohoe »

ikrenji wrote: post #399
rscrawfo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why not just used IntelliJ with the plugins for python? I’ve never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a better experience?

idk, i just assumed that pycharm would be optimized out of the box for python, so i never bothered with intelliJ

AFAIK IntelliJ with the Python plugin is basically the same as PyCharm.

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

#427

Post by akira2501 »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #177
akira2501 wrote: post #83

LSP. The Language Server Protocol. Entirely changed my life for the better this year, once I took the time to get it integrated into Emacs and get the various backends I needed installed. Easily has saved me hundreds of hours so far, being able to view function prototypes quickly, pull up documentation as an overlay on the code, jumping to the next error, and even down to getting simple things like enumerated 'case'…

What language(s) do you do most of your work in?

Go, Javascript, HTML and CSS.

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

#428

Post by rsync »

zJayv wrote: post #413
rsync wrote: post #156

vimv You invoke 'vimv' in a directory and the resulting editor is a directory list for your pwd ... and you can edit it as a text document. When you save and exit, all of your file (re)naming is committed to the directory.

https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv 100%. I use this every day, esp. when editing my music library.

Yes! My music library is, indeed, where I use this the most.

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

#430

Post by capitalsigma »

hedora wrote: post #119
jodrellblank wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point " I clicked on your link with 16 pages of just contents links to find what the point is, and found "the make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them". What's the point you see?

It automatically parallelizes any large scale data processing pipeline (assuming that your data set is already broken into files). People use it for things like documentation generation. I've used it to process the results of web scrapers, large scale data cleaning tasks, etc, etc. It takes about an afternoon to set up NFS + SSH primitives that automatically distribute the computation across clusters of machines. Sin…

The idea of working with a distributed data pipeline implemented via makefiles is nightmare fuel
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