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Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#71

Post by armagon »

afiori wrote: post #67
armagon wrote: post #38

When working with React and Redux and Redux Sagas, I wish I could more easily figure out causal chains for what happens. When I previously did work as a game programmer, for most things (except, say, debugging why things rendered a certain way), you could just go to where the thing happened, put in a breakpoint, and you'd get a beautiful call stack making it easy to reason about how you got to where you are. In my cu…

Is there a reason why the browser debugger is not useful in your case? (or in any other case?) I found it useful for debugging simple jquery websites but I imagine a dozen things can go wrong between the debugger and webpack/next/react/jsx/redux/hot-reload

The browser debugger is still helpful, but it isn't able to link together the cause and effects (because the code in the system was designed that way -- it doesn't matter who fires off an action, it will (eventually) make certain code happen to respond to it. But, when you see the response code go off, it can be hard to figure out what action caused it -- moreso if your codebase abstracts things like the names of strings representing actions so you can't just grep for them.)

I think some sort of higher-level debugger ought to be possible, but don't know what it would look like.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#72

Post by armagon »

beforeolives wrote: post #42
armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

> Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations. > The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outs…

> > Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years.

> Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations.

Fair enough; it would be more accurate for me to say, "Our bodies are poorly adapted to sitting in chairs for 8 hours a day for 40 years."

> A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outside of that is still vastly preferable to any other combination. Non-sedentary jobs and manual labor will break and wear down your body in different ways, they aren't some ideal to aspire to.

I'll agree with you that many jobs will wear your body down, but it isn't obvious to me that a sedentary job with forced motion breaks is the best combination.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#73

Post by beforeolives »

armagon wrote: post #72
beforeolives wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations. > The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outs…

> > Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. > Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations. Fair enough; it would be more accurate for me to say, "Our bodies are poorly adapted to sitting in chairs for 8 hours a day for 40 years." > A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move ar…

> but it isn't obvious to me that a sedentary job with forced motion breaks is the best combination.

You left out exercise. With exercise it's the best combination because you're able to choose what kind of stress to put on your body, in what quantities and you can do so safely in a controlled environment. That's a huge luxury that many people who do manual labour don't have.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#74

Post by dole »

sgarrity wrote: post #35

A standalone hardware mute switch for Zoom/etc calls so you can prominently and reliably see your mic mute status, and quickly and easily flip it on and off. (I know there are a few do-it-yourself options for these, but I'd much rather throw a bit of money at it rather than time).

I have a Jabra Evolve (40?) USB Headset. The headset plugs into the USB dongle via stereo jack and has green/red backlit Pickup, Mute and Volume buttons and can be used without the headset to mute.

Tested it without the headset in a Teams meeting and mutes within the meeting and displays status as such, doesn't just mute system mic volume. Edit: seems to work the same in Zoom as well.

The dongle itself is model ENC010 and looks to cost around U$50.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#75

Post by k__ »

smokey_the_bear wrote: post #39
k__ wrote: post #37

Better Google Docs. It's hella slow.

Our support and marketing teams wont switch to Google Docs from quip because they hate Google Docs organization. But the engineers hate quip.

Never heard of quip. I'll check it out.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#76

Post by mamcx »

I think exist a lot of small things to improve of RDBMS, like native support for algebraic types, including a indexable view of enum-rows that could cover a lot of what "unstructured but in fact not" use cases exist.

Also my dream is build a Foxpro/excel like tool to recover what a true effective data-first programming environment can give in modern times.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#77

Post by cobraonmyleft »

Can someone create a countdown timer for Ghangouts/Zoom? I find that in most calls time is wasted and people don't usually get to the meat of things until way into the call. A timer for scarcity would make video calls/meetings way more effective

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#78

Post by dglass »

screye wrote: post #28

1. A reliable python env manager. Some sort of framework to visualize changes to my env as a visual graph with each update/clone viewable in a git-tree like format. 2. Jupyter lab, but that's as good as VSCode/Pycharm (VS code's jupyter extension is still very lacking. Something like Spyder that's not really a notebook would also work fine) 3. A real Inking->Structure app. Come on. There is money in this. Someone do…

Could you elaborate on your third point about Inking->Structure app? I've been thinking about this lately and am interested in what exactly you're looking for.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#80

Post by grok22 »

tuckerpo wrote: post #32

An actual real portable executable format, and standardized build tools. I hate having to jump through build system hoops to target the same piece of silicon with an annoying OS in the way.

Someone posted this a week or so earlier: https://justine.lol/ape.html -- that might meet your portable executable format?
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