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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?

#81

Post by clooless »

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…

When the newspaper prints what time is sunrise, I don't write it to protest that the sun doesn't go anywhere; it's the Earth that is spinning on its axis. Sunrise is just the way we refer to that phenomenon because it looks like the sun is rising.

I think it's perfectly fine to say that your body was designed to do this or that. It may have been the result of random mutations, but evolution has done such a good job it damn well looks like it was designed.

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

#82

Post by deviance »

craftydev wrote: post #27
izolate wrote: post #15

> And it was most frustrating when they had like 100 columns or so. Having to change column 63 at line 58 is not something you do easily in Notepad++. Import to Excel was my way to go, but since the file was not a standard CSV file (e.g. also had sections like an .INI file) it was time consuming: first just select a subsection from the file, save to a different file, import to Excel, modify, paste back, etc. Suggesti…

Visidata is great for this kind of thing, exploring and editing csv. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/docs/edit/

(OP) I've had a short look at Visidata. Maybe it works or not on my described scenario (I should read the docs more carefully and make a test to be sure), but it's definitely in the direction I had in mind (a simple yet customizable enough tool for the job).

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

#83

Post by deviance »

runjake wrote: post #8

I don't know. I already have them (shell, shell utils, Python, Go, jq, JS, Ansible, etc). I do what you mentioned all day, every day. I don't like the idea of "a more general product" because that's the power of the tools I use, they are small tools designed to do one or a few things only, but I can chain them together to do complex things. And if one of my small tools doesn't work for a particular task, I can swap i…

(OP) I agree with the point you are making. Smaller tools that can be chained together to obtain new functionality is better (in my opinion also) than "bulky" feature-rich tools (which can never be truly feature complete).

But! If you look at it from the perspective of someone who is a non-software developer (e.g. scientist, accountant, graphic designer, etc.) who just wants to do a specific task, it makes more sense to have dedicated tools for the job. Even if those tools, under the hood, are a combination of smaller tools, the end user should not be concerned with anything other than his/her field of expertise.

With my question I was trying to get some insight into people's (who are not necessarily software devs) workflows and how we can improve those workflows (if we can).

The question applies to software development as well: someone who is specialized, say in compilers (broadly speaking), for example, can help the workflow of many who don't have the time / resources to do it themselves. It comes to mind a feature that someone posted above: "List what packages have functions that can get called when I call function X".

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

#84

Post by deviance »

(OP) I woke up this morning and I was pleasantly surprised at the large number of answers to my question. I saw some pretty insightful ideas. Thank you! Also, it would be nice to hear about hurdles that non-software devs are facing.

It may be a skewed opinion of mine, but I think that more value can be added, more easily, by software into other domains, than what can be added by software in software development itself.

Software "divorced from reality" is pretty useless. It becomes useful when: it helps drive a real process (e.g. factories, cars), it helps better understand a phenomenon (e.g. data analysis), provides entertainment or education (e.g. games, animations), gives answers or predictions (AI, machine learning), facilitates communication (messaging, video calls), etc.. A god-like software running in a box (e.g. general purpose artificial intelligence), but not plugged into anything (e.g. at least a monitor, speaker, etc.) will literally offer nothing (even if it could, should it be connected)

Say you make an application to facilitate selling of tickets to a business. Then you may go optimizing the database/website to handle more users, etc. Then you may go optimizing the build-tools, the programming language, etc. The more you continue down this chain (which goes more abstract) the less you directly and meaningfully impact the initial requirement. I'm not saying it's a bad thing! I'm saying:

-> The more "meta" you go, the more broader impact you have on a whole area, rather then just the initial requirement. This is the good part! But also the harder and more complex it gets! Exponentially! This is the "bad" part.

I guess the ultimate point would be to reach general purpose AI. When we get there, the whole purpose of this discussion thread is useless anyway.

But until we get there, I personally think we should focus more (or at least just as much) on fixing the actual problems (in a clean way, with few dependencies), rather then going to deep on that "meta" chain I mentioned. There are good outcomes of course, but one bad outcome of going too "meta" is the increasing bloat and complexity we seem to be experiencing in all modern software.

"Inherent Complexity: The Ways the Problem You’re Solving is Hard" "Incidental Complexity: When Programmers Make Their Lives Worse" https://pressupinc.com/blog/2014/05/root-causes-software-com...

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

#85

Post by softwaredoug »

On OSX I miss notepad. The dumbest possible text editor. No cloud syncing of notes, no attempt at being optimized for code, no intellisense behaviors, no spell checking or word processor functionality, no WSISWYGness. Just the dumbest possible text editing window to paste things, scratch a few notes, open raw text, etc. I haven’t found the equivalent in OSX even their basic tools are too smart by half.

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

#86

Post by moystard »

softwaredoug wrote: post #85

On OSX I miss notepad. The dumbest possible text editor. No cloud syncing of notes, no attempt at being optimized for code, no intellisense behaviors, no spell checking or word processor functionality, no WSISWYGness. Just the dumbest possible text editing window to paste things, scratch a few notes, open raw text, etc. I haven’t found the equivalent in OSX even their basic tools are too smart by half.

You could use TextEdit I guess, but I agree that it's not a good experience; it just does slightly too much and not very well.

Ten years ago, this same frustration led me to release Fraise, a fork of Smultron, for quickly editing files.

I now use vim with a terminal to quickly edit a document, as I find most modern editors to be too slow to start (Visual Studio & co.).

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

#87

Post by 41ice »

softwaredoug wrote: post #85

On OSX I miss notepad. The dumbest possible text editor. No cloud syncing of notes, no attempt at being optimized for code, no intellisense behaviors, no spell checking or word processor functionality, no WSISWYGness. Just the dumbest possible text editing window to paste things, scratch a few notes, open raw text, etc. I haven’t found the equivalent in OSX even their basic tools are too smart by half.

Try using 'Stickies'??

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

#88

Post by codegeek »

softwaredoug wrote: post #85

On OSX I miss notepad. The dumbest possible text editor. No cloud syncing of notes, no attempt at being optimized for code, no intellisense behaviors, no spell checking or word processor functionality, no WSISWYGness. Just the dumbest possible text editing window to paste things, scratch a few notes, open raw text, etc. I haven’t found the equivalent in OSX even their basic tools are too smart by half.

I know, me too. The closest in Mac is TextEdit but then you have to do "Format -> Make Plain Text" when you open a new one.

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

#89

Post by dTal »

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…

There are plenty of jobs that consist of not much more than walking around - beat cop, traffic warden, security guard, park ranger, even janitor. I find it unlikely that walking around for 8-12 hours is going to damage your body more than spending the same time mostly sitting down, not moving. Speaking personally, I've held both types of job, and I know which kind leaves me feeling healthier (it's not the sedentary kind).

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

#90

Post by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf »

dTal wrote: post #89
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…

There are plenty of jobs that consist of not much more than walking around - beat cop, traffic warden, security guard, park ranger, even janitor. I find it unlikely that walking around for 8-12 hours is going to damage your body more than spending the same time mostly sitting down, not moving. Speaking personally, I've held both types of job, and I know which kind leaves me feeling healthier (it's not the sedentary k…

If it paid as well as my current job I think I would much rather be a mailman.
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