Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
431–440 of 892 posts
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#432I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it.
Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions.
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#433A build tool predating js modules, grunt, ES6. While it hasn't been touched for years, I still go back to it from time to time because it's so simple to use.
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#434I have two small kids (2 and 5) and I am travaling a lot with my family around the world. I found out that it can be hard to find a good place to spend some time with kids. So I build a simple tool that helps me to find such places. https://www.gowithkid.com/ This tool already helped me a lot.
I really like this, thank you. I have a nearly 3 year old boy, and we have a fairly standard set of places we take him around the small European city where we live. Your site actually showed me a couple of new places we haven't been before (only been in this city for about 3 years). I also really liked that almost all the suggestions were outdoor activities or locations. Having said that, there are also a few places…
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#435rsync.net. I am very, very proud of the (very simple) platform that we've built there. It's a basic tool that "just works" - and just works exactly like you'd expect it to . If I were a consumer of cloud storage, this is what I would want it to look like. It pleases me so greatly to know that, right now, someone is doing something like this: pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump" ... while simult…
How does this compare to, say s3? At 14 Cents Per GB / Month, rsync.net costs me ~$1720 per year for 1TB (14 * 1024 * 12 / 100). S3 at 3 Cents Per GB / Month clocks in at ~$368 per year for 1TB (3 * 1024 * 12 / 100). Let's say I'm using a lot of transfer, so I'm going to double the price to ~$720 per year. Still, rsync.net costs me $1000 more per year. Convince me :).
This is already addressed on the site.
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#436rsync.net. I am very, very proud of the (very simple) platform that we've built there. It's a basic tool that "just works" - and just works exactly like you'd expect it to . If I were a consumer of cloud storage, this is what I would want it to look like. It pleases me so greatly to know that, right now, someone is doing something like this: pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump" ... while simult…
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#437Scientific plotting in the terminal. I didn't come up with the idea of abusing unicode characters in such a way, just fyi.
Example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl/ma...
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#438The simple tool which has probably had the largest impact is bsdiff -- now found used in hundreds of millions of devices -- but I'm not particularly proud of it because it was a quick hack and horrible code written by a C novice.
The non-simple product which I'm most proud of is Tarsnap, of course; I've spent a decade of my life on it, and don't expect to stop any time soon.
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's pretty cool. I've thought about moving my parents to Linux; my mom only uses the internet, and while my dad needs his computer for work, the software he uses supports Linux. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to support Windows for them for much longer. I use Linux full time, and Windows is slowly changing. I can still talk them through most problems over the phone, but little changes here and there have…
Have you ever considered installing remote screensharing software rather then having to troubleshoot over the phone? That's how I help out my parents.
For one thing, I'm generally away from my computer when they call me, and all I have is my phone. If that isn't an issue, then port forwarding is an issue, or the desktop sharing they have on their computer is out of date, or they only have RDC, and I can't find a Windows computer. Sharing the desktop via chrome works pretty well, it still can be an exercise in frustration. For instance, my dad is a trader, and has 8 monitors. Getting him to share the correct screens takes forever. (I don't know how Windows decides where to open a window, but it seems like it tries to find a monitor my dad isn't looking at and opening it behind a window marked stay-on-top.)
I might use it if the problem was extremely urgent and extremely complicated, but I live about 30 minutes from them, so I'd just head over to their house if it was that bad. Screen sharing software was just one more thing to go wrong on their computers. This way, I don't have to worry about whether they have a version with a critical vulnerability, or if they'll fall for a social engineering attack and click on a teamviewer invite.
This software solves my concern about not being able to see what the hell my parents are doing when I'm telling them shell commands. This makes it really easy. They'd already be using Linux if I knew I'd always be able to use desktop sharing to look at their computer, and port forwarding/security/etc wasn't a concern, because connecting to a remote X server is incredibly easy. I already fix internet issues by SSHing in to the router (with key-based authentication) and then connecting to whatever piece of hardware needs to be tinkered with. I could probably do the same thing for an actual desktop, but I've fixed misbehaving servers via ssh on my phone before, and typing commands on a phone keyboard is an exercise in frustration.
In any case, I sat down with my dad and created a clean image of his desktop a while back. When he really messes something up he just reimages his computer. He likes the fact that I gave him the ability to bring his computer back from the dead himself. All his files are installed on a separate disk, which is constantly backed up, so he never loses more than about 20 minutes of work.
Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
#440I made this because every time I decide to post something on HN, I hang on for a moment making my mind up on whether it's the right time to post on HN.
So, I made this live visualization, showing activity levels on HN. Now there's this data driven decision instead of a vague hope.