Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can also get expensive really fast

Asymptotically, it's only O(N) for a meal priced N. In practice, since you only need to put in a few extra currency units, it's O(1). So it really can't get expensive fast.

Big O.

Sometimes it is nice to just bask in the way disagreements are carried out on HN as opposed to e.g. Yahoo news.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#62

humanized enso. I usually drop this in every "best tools" thread. for windows users: I recently learned to like installing the console app and set the startup path in it to cygwin. I'm sure most of you HNers do this already, but I've spent a loong time looking for a decent console setup on windows x64, where andlinux/colinux isn't supported yet.

Sure, while using windows I always setup Console2 + Cygwin killer combo. This way I don't need putty/Secure CRT/whatever and I can create tunnels so that I can connect to remote databases using TOAD.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#64
post #50

I rarely cook a meal for just myself. Either I cook for my housemates, or one of them cooks for me. It saves a lot of time, because cooking scales sublinearly. It's also cheaper and tastier (I put more effort in if I'm cooking for others).

That's a good one. My wife usually cooks our dinners for the week on Sunday all at once and freezes some of it. Mon/Tue we eat left-overs, Wed/Thu/Fri we eat what was frozen (and to keep from eating the same thing over and over, we mix up the frozen stuff).

She used to spend an hour a night making meals, now she gets the week done in a couple of hours (she is a stay-at-home mom and the only one capable of making a meal that's edible in my house).

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#65
post #4

1) 9 - 10 hours sleep 2) reduce multitasking 3) eat like a bird 4) exercise 5) don't commute more than 20mins each way

Research suggests that 6-7 hours of sleep correlates most strongly with longer life.

Not that your way doesn't sound great (it truly does), just a matter of priorities :)

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#66

Cheap program launcher for Windows users, but I've had something similar on Linux at one point: 1) Create directory "shortcuts". 2) Map path to that directory. 3) Drag shortcuts into there, for e.g. documents, folders, programs. The further-from-your-desktop the better, because that saves the most time. Rename them to 'ideas', 'timesheet', web', 'projects' etc - note that the shortcut name can be quite different to t…

I've been using humanized enso for two years, it does this task and periodically checks through the start menu folder for updates.

I sift through a huge file network at work and have a number of shortcuts to cut through the directory hierarchy there.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#69
post #52
post #4

1) 9 - 10 hours sleep 2) reduce multitasking 3) eat like a bird 4) exercise 5) don't commute more than 20mins each way

>> 5) don't commute more than 20mins each way I walk to work. Free 1.5 hr of exercise every day and I don't have to spend money on transportation.

You can get to work some quicker way and run instead. Running is much more valuable than walking.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?

#70
post #33

If you want to force yourself to tidy your apartment, invite a girl over for dinner.

If that doesn't work, you can invite your parents over. I always clean my apartment for my parents, because they won't be shy in telling me immediately if it's dirty, and then they'll nag me about it the rest of the night - and I definitely don't want that.
Post reply on HN