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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)

#51

Post by teknopaul »

Apreche wrote: post #16

Of all the software I can think of quickly, the one I think may have saved the most time in my life is Google Maps.

How come it saves 100 hours for you?

In the old days we had paper maps and I checked routes before I left: not doing that anymore has cost me time rather than saved me time. Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place. Once to the middle of a mustard field in France which was a destination it changed to mid-route to a house called La Mutardier. 5 hours wrong lost there.

Less than useless on a motorbike due to its UI, actually quite dangerous.

I would say it has cost me many hours and saved me from carrying a map.

Evermore useless adverts, and now hiding places that it doesn't get a kick back from.

Oh and it's cost me money in fines from taking me the wrong way down streets I was not allowed to drive on. With no way to feed that info back into the system. When its wrong it stays wrong for years sometimes where I live, and we have street map, it ought to be half decent and at least safe for drivers.

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

#52

Post by usrme »

If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point.

---

[1]: https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3...

[2]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html

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

#53

Post by codetrotter »

JetBrains CLion.

I used to program in Vim/Neovim. Using a full-blown IDE is a real productivity boost when programming in for example Rust, which is what I write the most, and use CLion for the most.

CLion has Vim emulation also. So I still have normal mode, insert mode, and most other main features of Vim that I know and love :)

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

#54

Post by karencarits »

7952 wrote: post #43

I work as a consultant and have to do a timesheet. I use an old app called TimeSnapper that records screen grabs every few seconds. Works brilliantly for timesheets and has saved me numerous times.

The developer is also very kind and responsive, even here at HN. I was impressed! And it is a nice way to let go of "do I need to remember this" (in combination with the Ditto clipboard manager)

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

#56

Post by INeedMoreRam »

orthecreedence wrote: post #7

Vim. I can never leave modal editing now. Been using it since 2010 and I think in vim when editing. It lets me enter a flow state so much easier. My brain maps into writing and editing.

I feel similarly.

My journey has been: VS Code, to Codium, to Atom, to Sublime, to now Vim where I feel the most productive.

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

#57

Post by actinium226 »

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.

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

#58

Post by hedora »

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 least 10,000 hours:

https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.htm...

Other peoples' python has the distinction of being the only software in my -1000 hours saved category. (And if you consider maintaining code written in the above "write only" languages, you'll realize how big of a feat that is!)

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

#59

Post by jamesgreenleaf »

nikivi wrote: post #14

Still Karabiner and it's probably 1000 hours yearly at this point. https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner On order of 100 hours, this year I'd say it's Sublime Merge, VSCode, Height (to manage projects) and Telegram.

Karabiner and Keyboard Maestro have saved me a lot of time as well. Being able to remap consistent shortcuts for every application is really nice.

https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/

Alfred is another good one for Mac. Being able to add your own custom commands & workflows is useful.

https://www.alfredapp.com/

Hammerspoon too, which is great for scripting all different parts of Mac OS. I use it mainly for custom window layouts.

https://www.hammerspoon.org/

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

#60

Post by z3ugma »

Gong.ai - transcribes Zoom and Google Meet calls with very high fidelity, and identifies which callers are talking and suggest tips to your sales, customer success, and demo staff on how to improve their presence in online meetings and phone calls. https://www.gong.io/product/

This is the SaaS I'm most excited about this year.

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