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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 574 posts

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

#71

Post by hedora »

inasio wrote: post #44

Not really a program, but this year the Tabu [0] heuristic saved me at least on that order of time. I work on combinatorial optimization problem (think traveling salesman), typically we use local search heuristics like simulated annealing or parallel tempering that work well but require a lot of hyper parameter tuning. Tabu is super simple, has very few parameters to tune, and works great. [0] https://en.wikipedia.or…

How do you implement "tabuList.contains(sCandidate)"?

Has it been successfully generalized to problems with infinite / continuous search spaces? I imagine you could use edit distance or something for large combinatorial spaces.

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

#72

Post by Bekwnn »

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 try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes.

Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse navigation, feels great.

You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever. But you can also slowly add to it.

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

#73

Post by namuol »

alexchantavy wrote: post #68
namuol wrote: post #32

Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling… Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.

From that perspective, using Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S for reverse-i-search in a shell saves me so much time from writing commands especially big Kubernetes ones.

Cmd/Ctrl-F in general is probably the biggest invisible time-saver if you can count UX patterns.

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

#74

Post by elchief »

The Singer spec https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is, for data ingestion and loading

1. open source

2. hundreds of pre-built taps and targets (for apis and databases)

3. supports incremental and full refresh

4. don't need to write any SQL and it creates and loads tables for you

Stitch, Meltano, and (sort of) Airbyte also use it

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

#76

Post by hedora »

alexchantavy wrote: post #68
namuol wrote: post #32

Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling… Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.

From that perspective, using Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S for reverse-i-search in a shell saves me so much time from writing commands especially big Kubernetes ones.

The 'history' command is helpful the 1% of the time Ctrl-R and Ctrl-S fail you.

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

#78

Post by gtirloni »

usrme wrote: post #52

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

This should have been integrated into upstream Ansible a long time ago.

People say it's not a big deal these days but it still is.

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

#79

Post by CharlesW »

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #59
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 wi…

Along these lines, Raycast¹ is excellent. It's got lots built-in capabilities and available extensions² that I've used to replace several miscellaneous utilities.

¹ https://www.raycast.com/ ² https://www.raycast.com/store

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

#80

Post by konfusinomicon »

the moonlander keyboard and its customization software have been my biggest time saver this year. it's worth the hype, the price and the time investment learning to use it effectively. 100 hours maybe... but I bet I've saved 100 miles of finger travel distance and half a million key presses by now
Post reply on HN