Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you use?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 133 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#11
Windows Workstation

    I have a beefy workstation at home with 24" + 22" screens that I now 
    primarily use for resource intensive gaming that require a good GPU, 
    or ASM reverse engineering. The extra pixels really help keep 
    different aspects of the ASM available for a quick reference when 
    looking around.
Linux Server & NAS

    Next to that workstation, I have a dual quad core Xeon PowerEdge 
    server with Debian for serving up my side projects, and experimenting 
    with new languages & various web, load balancing, and DB servers. The 
    Linux server is connected to a 4TB RAID5 NAS for backups of the 
    server, my workstation, and my media files. I also have torrentflux 
    setup on Debian to download torrents to the NAS. All of this is 
    connected to a 30/30 FiOS connection with a gigabit switch for the 
    internal network so its a decent setup for production side projects 
    and backups.
Day-to-day

    Until last month I was using a 15" i5 MBPro with 6GB of ram, and an 
    SSD for my day-to-day needs and development, but the weight was 
    starting to get to me. So following the recommendations a few weeks 
    ago in a HN thread about development laptops, I purchased a Lenovo 
    X201 for my day-to-day needs. I dual-boot between Windows 7 (for ASM 
    work, and other work that I need Windows for) and Ubuntu 10.10 (main 
    OS, sysadmin work, development work). For anyone else considering a 
    X201, do it! It's a great setup, the screen resolution is not a 
    problem at all (coming from someone who went to a hi-res 15" MBP from 
    a 13" for the screen resolution upgrade) and 10.10 worked flawlessly 
    out of the box.
Software

    On Windows, I use InType for my texteditor, combined with ExpanDrive 
    for remote editing.

    On Ubuntu, I use Scribes as my primary texteditor, vim when working 
    in command line. No need for ExpanDrive in Ubuntu as Nautilus 
    supports SSH bookmarks. Tilda is a great utility if you need to be 
    able to pull up a Terminal window quickly, similar to Visor in OS X. 
    "Gnome Do" to replace Spotlight from OS X
Here's a script to enable two-finger scrolling with Synaptics touchpads: https://gist.github.com/667233

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#14
Hardware:

- a pre unibody MacBook Pro 17" with full hd resolution as the main machine.

- Grado headphones for music

- Contour Design Shuttle pro (http://retail.contourdesign.com/?/products/23) for video editing

- Panasonic GH1 with a firmware hack and adapted pentax 110 lenses for photo and video

- an Ipod with aTimeLogger for time logging (yeah, I track every second I am awake, helps me stay productive)

- a couple of arduinos for hardware sketches.

Software:

- Processing (from processing.org) for visual sketches.

- Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/) for fast idea management.

- Notify (http://vibealicious.com/apps/notify/) for easy and fast email.

- Nuke for video compositing

- Illustrator + Scriptographer (http://scriptographer.org/gallery/) for posters.

- forklift as a finder replacement.

Yes, I am more of a visual hacking guy.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#15
Who am I?

I'm a developer and a Computer Engineering student at the public university in Uruguay.

What hardware am I using?

* 15.6 HP G62 laptop (Core i3 / 4 GB ram / 320 GB 7200 disk / around 3.30 hs battery life)

* OS: Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit + Xmonad with Gnome integration

* Emacs / Chrome / Dropbox / Gmail / Google Docs / google reader / Flickr / Python / Ipython / Amazon S3

For music:

* Sennheiser MX470 / Sennheiser HD 212

* I've used to use Amarok, but I switched to Rythmbox just for simplicity

For photograhpy:

* Sony DSC-H3 (my old legacy camera, I didn't have budget to buy a new one right now)

* Shotwell + Digikam editor

Phone: iPhone 3G

What Is My Dream Setup?

* A Lightweight laptop with the quality of Mac's but cheaper and with hardware 100% supported by Linux.

* A DSLR camera, just mid-sized to learn more about photgraphy.

* A nice Bang & Olufsen headphones + speakers.

* Two 24" monitors

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#16
* Old white macbook

* Company-issued HP "elitebook" that used to be faster than it is now. Runs Win7, which I quite like.

* Anonymous LG 24" LCD

* I'm a loyal user of microsoft... peripherals. Natural Keyboard Elite, plus an Arc mouse when I'm on the go. I can't say enough good things about that mouse... even the little felt bag it comes in is useful.

* About half and half emacs and vim for general editing. Trying to be more competent at vim, for wrist reasons. (Not trying to start anything here) But I'm not very good at it yet and it doesn't have org-mode.

* I've lately been using https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt on the mac for keyboard-based window snapping. I like it.

* Visual Studio 2008 / C# 3 for most programming (corporate coder here), plus a mix of Java, Ruby, Python, and whatever else will get the job done.

* (guitar) Ibanez SV5470, Fender Japan Standard Tele, Boss ME-70 for effects. The latter is competent and relatively portable, but I may do a real pedalboard someday. I practice into Guitar Rig 3 on my mac, through an Echo Audiofire4, and heard through a pair of Sennheiser HD280 earphones. The Echo unit has great preamps but has issues with the mac firewire implementation.

* (web) Chrome with AdBlock, Shareaholic, and Rikaikun (japanese helper: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jipdnfibhldikgcj...)

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#17
I use:

Hardware: a 13-inch Macbook Pro MX Revolution Wireless Mouse Post-it Notes Regular iPod earbuds. I don't let myself enjoy music too much.

Software: Mind Node OoVoo Adium X Microsoft Office 2007 Google Chrome OS: Mac OS X (SOLID) On Bootcamp: Windows XP Pro SP3

I'm just a freshman at UCSD

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#18
I'm a freelancer/entrepreneur writing Objective-C (so I'm generally on Macs), JavaScript, ruby, clojure:

* 24" iMac

* Macbook Air for conferences/visiting clients (MacBookAir2,1 with SSD)

* iOS Testing: iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 2G, iPad

* MacVim, VMware, homebrew, Xcode

* cdargs, git, ack, jslint, screen

* A whole load of dot files in a git repo

* Android: Nexus One

* I use some of my own apps to manage myself (like Wingman, it's in my github account with the same username if you'd like to try it)

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#19
Who am I?

    Code monkey that runs a modest software sweatshop in Orange County, CA
    and is constantly scheming startups.
What Hardware Am I Using?

    27" iMac i7 w/ 16GB ram
        - Best Mac I've ever owned, hands down.

    2.66GHz Quad-core Mac Pro w/ 8GB ram w/ 20" Cinema Display
        - Surprisingly don't use this much
          ever since I got my iMac. Mostly for testing third party hardware
          like videos cards, etc with what I'm working on.
     
    Dell Precision T3500 Xeon 2.4 GHz w/ 4GB ram
        - My guinea pig machine for random shit
        - Various Linux distros (FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and testing of new 
          builds of various)

    Asus Rampage Gene III 3.06GHz i7 w/ 6GB ram & AMD Radeon HD5830
        - Prototype hardware for a project I'm working on, picked for it's
          north/south bridges and socket.
And what software?

    Tons...On Mac-native I use a ton of terminal/vi, Smultron, Xcode suite, 
    CS5 suite, and various others. VMWare and Parallels both...Some projects
    only work in either/or, plus I just genuinely can't make up my mind.
    Cyberduck for ftp. I use MAMP Pro to control a self-updated version of
    my web services (apache, php, etc)

    Don't know if you care, but of course I use all the normal command line
    programs any nerd does...and for repos I prefer SVN only cause I used
    CVS (don't hate on me yo) but I use git, hg, etc daily and love them
    as well. Ultimately I'd be happy if everyone would just pick ONE.
    I wouldn't care which cause they all have their strengths..
    
    Browser I use Safari for casual, Firefox for primary development
    (Firebug > Webkit Inspector) and I've got a verion of Chromium that
    a buddy of mine and I made some cool changes to, but I haven't used it
    recently cause it was forked from such an old trunk.

    Web apps I use gmail (for all my mail), google docs, and mobileme.
    Probably some various others from time to time.
What Is My Dream Setup?

    I used to have a Macbook Pro that got ruined in an apartment flood
    6 months ago, so I've been thinking about replacing it with one of
    those new 11" Macbook Airs. So sexy.

    I'm actually working on my true dream setup as a startup.  We've
    only recently begun so it's a little self-absorbed to report much
    more then that: http://mythologylabs.com

    Like jesusabdullah said, almost limitless internet would be great
    for a bajillion reasons.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#20
Most frequently used software:

Debian, xmonad, emacs, rxvt-unicode, conkeror, bash, git, perl, ghc, xmms2. Gnus for email, rcirc via irssi-proxy on a remote server for irc, bitlbee (via irssi) for Google Talk and AIM. Github and Gist for collaboration. (Github is such a good tool that I pay for it, despite not needing any of the paid features! Irrational!)

The idea is to reduce overhead; anything I want to do is always a keystroke away. Most of my time is spent working or relaxing, rather than fighting with my setup. It Just Works, and is easy to interactively fix. (Want a different window arrangement? Just code it and hit Mod-Shift-q. Want an Emacs utility? Just type it in and hit C-M-x. Easy. No overhead.)

Hardware:

Intel i7 (4 cores), 30G SSD for /, 1TB 3-way RAID-1 for /home, 24" Dell monitor, Embody chair, crappy desk, and iLift monitor mount. Topre Realforce 87U keyboard. HeadRoom Micro DAC/amp (fed from the digital output of an old EMU10K1 sound card) and DT880 headphones.

It will be the perfect setup when I get a Steelcase Airtouch desk, Ultimate Ears custom headphones, and a 30" monitor. First I need to win the lottery :)

Post reply on HN