Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#441

Post by danielhunt » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #438

The simple tool I'm most proud of is spiped. If you have two systems which need to be able to talk over TCP without worrying about evilness on the network between them, spiped is the answer. The 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.…

https://tankardapp.com

Ludicrously simple but I rely on it and use it every single day for Dev (and real) purposes

edit the app I use for HN (MiniHack) seems to have mistakenly replied to the first reply instead of the root

Sorry for comment sniping!

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#442

Post by cgag » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

I wrote a cloc (count lines of code) competitor in rust that's pretty fast: https://github.com/cgag/loc (turns out perl is pretty easy to beat).

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#443

Post by cperciva » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #407

The Obvious Password Detector, intended for use inside programs for setting and changing passwords.[1] (Yes, this is real K&R C, pre-ANSI.) [1] http://www.animats.com/source/obvious/obvious.c

Wow, you're that John Nagle?

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#444

Post by mgunlogson » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

I built a cuckoo filter library in Java that nobody uses :) https://github.com/MGunlogson/CuckooFilter4J

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#445

Post by nicolashahn » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

A little tool to check the similarity of two images using PIL, it gives a % difference as well as an diff image:

https://github.com/nicolashahn/python-image-diff

Also a utility I made for myself to graph my bank transactions. For some reason USAA doesn't have that feature on its site so I made it for myself. Very bare right now but it does want I need it to, which is to visualize my spending. Eventually want to be able to look at transaction names from within the graph.

https://github.com/nicolashahn/USAA-Transaction-Graph

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#446

Post by milesokeefe » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

mk4p wrote: post #116

https://izuded.com (i.e., "iz u ded?") I made this because I adopted a puppy and realized that, if I got hit by a bus on a Friday, he could be stuck in his crate for days before anyone realized. Morbid, but useful. It texts you every X days and asks, "u ded?" -- if you don't click "naw" before X days pass, it'll notify your contacts. It's a portfolio project to show what I've learned in the realm of "serverless" arch…

After the final one hour warning, it should call you and if you pick up, the alarm cancels. So a final step that's not passive and only requires picking up the phone instead of opening the texting app and clicking a link. Also helps if you're somewhere where you have SMS/calling but no data. Although in that case, being able to reply "I no ded" would be more reliable.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#447

Post by instakill » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

cromo wrote: post #94

The simple tool I wrote that I get the most bang for my buck out of is synesthesia[1]. I spend a lot of my time tracing things down across multiple log files, and having to pick out the important lines visually or trying to isolate them with custom grep incantations was wearing on me. Synesthesia allows you to specify regexes, and it will color matches based on the value of the match itself, meaning that it's statele…

Sorry, but please make a short screencast of what synesthesia looks like?

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#448

Post by kogus » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:14 PM UTC

FindIt. It's a simple utility that lets you do find-in-files searches, but with features to require that a file contain any number of terms together, and the ability to exclude files that have an unwanted term. I wrote it for myself and every friend I shared it with ends up pinning it to their taskbar.

https://findit.codeplex.com/

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#449

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#450

Post by jacalata » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 8:18 PM UTC

I built a Windows phone app for PAX that let you have the schedule and maps offline. At the time there was an iOS and and Android app, but not even an unofficial one for Windows. There are more apps now, and PAX has gotten more "professional" a.k.a it has gotten harder every year to access the schedule. This year it wanted me to log in to the Guidebook site to even see it and I decided that was a good cue to stop providing the app so when Microsoft said anything without an age rating would be unpublished i just let it happen (it's less necessary now anyway since internet access at PAX has gone from none-whatsoever to pretty decent). I had several hundred users each year, and people emailed me suggestions and requests. Definitely the only individual project I've ever done that had other people relying on me, and it was harder than I thought (one year MSFT didn't approve my update with the new schedule until after PAX, so then I built an in-app downloader that fetched the schedule data from my server, etc).