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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)

#491

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

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…

I love PyCharm for everything but for simple git stuff I somehow always reach for “magit” which is an emacs-based git tool that you can set up as a command you can launch from terminal.

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

#492

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet — for those dealing with tabular data I highly recommend visidata— you can just “vd file.csv” and it shows you a table view in your terminal, with lots of super useful keyboard actions to sort, move, filter etc.

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

#493

Post by tasuki »

patrick451 wrote: post #357
actinium226 wrote: post #57

Not a program, but the concept of functional programming and pure functions. It makes it a lot easier to think about code, and also makes it easier to test and parallelize code. Although be warned, it can also have the "side-effect" (functional programming pun!) of making you somewhat insufferable as you try to convince everyone around you that functional programming is amazing.

It's so curious to me that functional disciples wear this as a badge of honor. In nearly all other facets of software development, we get badgered that it's better to produce code your entire team understands (code is read more often than written and all that) than code which only makes sense to you. If I ran around talking up the zen of single letter variables, my team would shoo me out of the room, and almost nobod…

> If I ran around talking up the zen of single letter variables, my team would shoo me out of the room, and almost nobody on HN would applaud me for it.

Yes, because single letter variables are bad.

> But for some reason, functional programming tends to get a pass, despite it just not clicking for a large swath of team mates.

Perhaps this is a problem with the team mates rather than with functional programming? I'm too dumb for functional programming, but I freely admit it's the superior way of writing software. If we were mathematicians rather than programmers, programming would be way better!

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

#494

Post by nowahe »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #492

Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet — for those dealing with tabular data I highly recommend visidata— you can just “vd file.csv” and it shows you a table view in your terminal, with lots of super useful keyboard actions to sort, move, filter etc.

Highly recommend this as well, it has been a godsend for me for digging into multi-GB Cloudfront log files and extracting stats and patterns.

There is a good (albeit a bit old now, as the interface has been overhauled since) quick demo video from VD's creator : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

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

#495

Post by gregnavis »

thiht wrote: post #477

SmartTubeNext[1] In installed it on my Android TV instead of the official Youtube app and it saved me literal hours: - it blocks ads - it includes SponsorBlock, so sponsored segments, intros, "plz subscribe" are skipped - it allows me to block Shorts Anytime I have to use an official Youtube app, I remember how unusable it was. I even gave Youtube premium a try at some point, but SponsorBlock is just too good to igno…

I'm using NewPipe [1] but it's TV support is rather poor. For example, full screen is broken and some operations are accessible only via a swipe gesture.

If you've used NewPipe, how does it compare to SmartTubeNext?

[1] https://newpipe.net/

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

#496

Post by jesterson »

nikivi wrote: post #487
jesterson wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of Height. What it does better if compared to say ClickUp/BaseCamp?

I just like the way it lets me sort tasks. Mention how I use it below: https://wiki.nikiv.dev/focusing/goals https://wiki.nikiv.dev/research/solving-problems

Thank you. That really helps to understand

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

#497

Post by esperent »

superasn wrote: post #380
esperent wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds for advertising, for example: "A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very dramatic, stylish" You can also add keywords like "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to your desired style immediately. Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so a…

That sounds great. Is this SD? Are you running this locally or via some service? Would love more details if you don't mind.

I've been trying to set up local SD (on windows or WSL) of and on for a few weeks now. Seems to be extremely complicated even with the packages that say they are "1 click install". Then I find out they have dependencies on Cuda, a million python machine learning packages, some package called xformers that I have to compile for my specific GPU, I have to download the right SD image and config, then I have to find and install the right upscaling package and on and on.

So no, I'm not using SD. I paid for a year of Midjourney for $100. Well worth it so far and honestly I think their latest V4 is just as good as SD. Probably is SD in fact, and it doesn't have that "Midjourney style" that previous versions had.

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

#498

Post by IshKebab »

tasuki wrote: post #304
actinium226 wrote: post #57

Not a program, but the concept of functional programming and pure functions. It makes it a lot easier to think about code, and also makes it easier to test and parallelize code. Although be warned, it can also have the "side-effect" (functional programming pun!) of making you somewhat insufferable as you try to convince everyone around you that functional programming is amazing.

The question was what saved you 100 hours. Functional programming easily cost me hundreds of hours without much to show for it. Monad transformers, free monads, final tagless... this rabbit hole is very very deep. No regrets though, would suffer through this again!

I haven't done any serious functional programming but I think the point is that overall it saves you time. It might take longer to write the program but you get fewer bugs, reliable caching and so on.

I know that with Rust the time-to-robustness is much lower than with Python for example.

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

#499

Post by thiht »

gregnavis wrote: post #495
thiht wrote: post #477

SmartTubeNext[1] In installed it on my Android TV instead of the official Youtube app and it saved me literal hours: - it blocks ads - it includes SponsorBlock, so sponsored segments, intros, "plz subscribe" are skipped - it allows me to block Shorts Anytime I have to use an official Youtube app, I remember how unusable it was. I even gave Youtube premium a try at some point, but SponsorBlock is just too good to igno…

I'm using NewPipe [1] but it's TV support is rather poor. For example, full screen is broken and some operations are accessible only via a swipe gesture. If you've used NewPipe, how does it compare to SmartTubeNext? [1] https://newpipe.net/

I haven't used NewPipe on Android TV so cannot compare, but the user experience of SmartTubeNext is top notch. Everything works (you can even use Chromecast from the official Youtube app on your phone directly to SmartTubeNext), you can customize it enough (show/hide relevant sections, default section on launch, shod hide shorts, color theme, SponsorBlock) and the features that I care about are supported. It's basically an improved version of the official app. The only thing missing I can think of is the lack of comments, that might be a negative point for some people.

Also I didn't personally interact with the developer but he seems like a very nice person, very invested in his project, even if some of the feedback he gets is thankless. SmartTubeNext is one of the few projects I'm actually considering donating money to.

I tried using NewPipe on an Android phone for a while, and concluded I wasn't in their target demographic. I understand, but don't like their choice of not supporting Youtube accounts. Also wasn't a fan of the UX or the settings, everything felt more complicated than needed.

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

#500

Post by alenrozac »

zemoose wrote: post #285
eitland wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy useful. So useful I like it despite how it always goes out of its way to waste my time by trying to misrepresent a number of different types of strings and numbers as American dates :-|

Dear god, I would use Excel so much more if I could get it to stop mutating my data.

January, February, Maruary
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