Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 892 posts

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

#641

Post by flukus »

bottled_poe wrote: post #627
vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #158

https://shellshare.net I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born. Shellshare allows you to run a single c…

What a great way to create huge amounts of IT maintenance work for yourself.

How so?

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

#642

Post by viraptor »

flukus wrote: post #636
viraptor wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just SSH + shared screen / tmux? Not sure why you need to involve the browser.

Incoming SSH connections can/should be blocked by the router. There is also likely to be no static IP.

Connect them to a private zerotier network (https://www.zerotier.com/#try_zerotier) it's free and you can bind sshd just to the zt0 interface. Instant access from anywhere.

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

#643

Post by justinsaccount »

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.…

That reminds me, I keep meaning to look into seeing how hard it would be to add a reverse mode to spiped.

Right now it acts like a ssh -L tunnel, but doesn't have a mode where it acts like ssh -R, right?

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

#644

Post by bottled_poe »

flukus wrote: post #641
bottled_poe wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great way to create huge amounts of IT maintenance work for yourself.

How so?

Linux tends to require configuration/debugging from the console. Don't get me wrong, I use linux every day, but I would never push it on someone who is not interested in solving their own tech problems.

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

#645

Post by justinsaccount »

detaro wrote: post #640
justinsaccount wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. rsync.net is a cloud service that provides a remote filesystem and ssh access. How do you envision using a remote storage provider to backup your laptop to your local server?

By using the cloud service to manage data transfer from one computer to the other, even if they are behind NAT, have changing IP addresses, ...? You know, just like CrashPlan, which otherwise also provides remote storage, does? (rsync.net doesn't offer that, but it is not a totally outlandish idea that they could if you just know them as "cloud backup services")

> (rsync.net doesn't offer that, but it is not a totally outlandish idea that they could if you just know them as "cloud backup services")

Ah, if that is what you wanted to do, they don't need to offer anything more than they already do. There's no reason why you can't rsync your laptop to rsync.net and then rsync the fs on rsync.net back to your local server.

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

#646

Post by wagmo »

SteveNuts wrote: post #357
josho wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone about to write a cron job, what ways do you see Cron fail? My assumption is that cron is robust and reliable, it's the job script itself that may fail silently and need monitoring, yes?

The most common failure I've seen is when people forget to use full paths in cron. bash instead of /bin/bash (or similar)

There's other weirdness in cron-land too. Cron will completely ignore files containing "." .

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

#647

Post by mappum »

ksrm wrote: post #563
cperciva wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wget -qO shellshare http://get.shellshare.net && python shellshare Please don't tell people to do this. This is an idiom called "curl pipe sh"; you're asking people to run whatever code someone on their network decides to send them. As an absolute minimum, you should change that http to https , so that they're merely running whatever code YOU decide to send them; but even that doesn't quite fit with the "share your t…

What's a better alternative?

You could use hashpipe (https://github.com/jbenet/hashpipe), from Juan Benet (the author of IPFS). It simply checks that the input to the command matches a given hash, so you can do `curl | hashpipe | sh`, and if the output of the curl command is different than expected it won't be passed in to `sh`.

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

#648

Post by dfex »

Tobias42 wrote: post #566

http://bearbushkas.com I spent most of my free time the last 1.5 years to make this 4-player iPad game together with my brother (developer) and two cousins (graphics). Considering that it was our first Swift and SpriteKit project (my dayjob is programming business applications in Java), I am pretty proud of the outcome. It even got some reviews (one with a 92% rating!). The only problem is, we completely underestimat…

That looks awesome - purchasing now :)

For what it's worth, I much prefer the pay once play forever model for good games. It would seem I am in the minority though

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

#649

Post by saamm »

jmbmxer wrote: post #363

https://unshorten.link I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to expand the…

Does anyone know of a Firefox equivalent of this extension?

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

#650

Post by Curiositry »

mstipetic wrote: post #11

I have some sideprojects around the internet, but so far the most useful thing I made has been http://paralleltext.io A tool that helps you learn languages by reading public domain books. I should continue working on that...

Very, very cool! I’m teaching myself Spanish, and I’ve been looking for something like this for ages.

I’d be curious to know more about how it’s built, and where you found the source texts. It it open-source?

Post reply on HN