Ask HN: What do you use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#91

Post by ethank » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 4:30 AM UTC

ethank wrote: post #23

I'm an SVP at a music company, running our Emerging Technology group. It means I'm half CTO and half business development. What Hardware I use: Work Primary: - Mac Pro, 8 core, 3.03 ghz with 16 gigs of RAM. 4 TB of hard drive space, and dual Nvidia something or others. This drives two Dell U2711 27" displays and 2 23" Samsungs with those ultra high res PPI. Hooked to this machine I have an external BluRay, Drobo Elit…

Here's a picture. I should add what they do:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethank/5156591437/

I use the left screen for iTunes, Pivotal Tracker and a VNC console to a screen of "tops" running on all our servers. We call it the War Games Console.

Left screen is email and "communications/information" including NetNewsWire, some other feeds, etc.

Middle right is my primary display for browsers and coding.

Far right is where I keep rememberthemilk.com, Gabble (a Yammer client), Echofon (twitter client) and IM/Skype.

On my Ipad I usually have SkyGrid running, which is a realtime news client. My laptop on the left is just so I have it available.

The other thing about my home setup is the MacMini server controls our lighting and thermostat and other systems in the house. I designed the house infrastructure to be computer-like, including states and conditional actions.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#92

Post by pyre » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 4:42 AM UTC

Locke wrote: post #9

I've noticed that the more time I spend focused on work the more out of date I get with the cutting edge. I'm on a 3 or 4 year old thinkpad (love the keyboard!) running gentoo linux. I use fvwm, xterm, gnu screen, chromium, firefox, ruby, rails, postgresql, mysql... Blah, blah, blah depending on the project. But, please, don't copy me unless you want to be so four years ago! : )

xterm is 'so four years ago?' I don't remember a time when xterm was 'sexy' and I've running Linux since 2000.

I'd be interested in good resources on fvwm though. I know that you can do a lot to customize it, but whenever I tried looking into it, I never knew where to start. fvwm? fvwm95? fvwm-crystal? Are they forks? Add-ons on top of fvwm? Which are/aren't maintained anymore?

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#93

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 5:12 AM UTC

dkasper wrote: post #78

Inspired by usesthis.com and the response here I created this site: http://hnsetups.com/

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#94

Post by aberkowitz » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 5:21 AM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #48

( more here http://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use ) 2 pairs of rayban titanium glasses with anti-reflective coating for computer screens (or that's what they told me). worth the investment. i can't wear contacts for more than a few hours without pissing off my eyes. curious about trying "gunnar" glasses though. anyone have them? year old 17-inch MacBook Pro matte 2.8GHz C2D with 8GB DDR3 and RAID 0 X25-M SSDs http://p…

Multiple studies [1][2] have shown that Gunnar Optiks are at best a placebo. As you might have guessed, Gunnar released test results [3] contradicting these assessments.

[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/4282190

[2] http://commons.pacificu.edu/verg/ (see bottom two links)

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/909hn/h/c0b038u

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#95

Post by philfreo » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 5:25 AM UTC

seltzered wrote: post #38

What do you use for backups? searching for "backup" and "time machine" and "rsync" only reveals 3 results total.

Time Machine, Dropbox, and Backblaze

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#96

Post by mohsen » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 5:26 AM UTC

Computer: a 3 year old HP OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Editor: Vim/Komodo Edit - also trying to learn emacs Cell: Nexus One

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#97

Post by Mongoose » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 5:49 AM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #48

( more here http://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use ) 2 pairs of rayban titanium glasses with anti-reflective coating for computer screens (or that's what they told me). worth the investment. i can't wear contacts for more than a few hours without pissing off my eyes. curious about trying "gunnar" glasses though. anyone have them? year old 17-inch MacBook Pro matte 2.8GHz C2D with 8GB DDR3 and RAID 0 X25-M SSDs http://p…

Good to see I'm not the only one who uses assorted stackables for an impromptu standing desk.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#98

Post by achille » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 6:15 AM UTC

    Notebook:
    - 15" Macbook Pro, 8GB ram, hybrid HDD, antiglare (matte) display.
    - Quicksilver
    - MacVim 
    - SMCFanControl to control MBP Fan speed and cool it down.
    - gfxCardStatus to force use of Intel GPU (increases battery life to 10hr max)
    - Lastpass & Xmarks for cross browser sharing of passwords & bookmarks.
    - iTerm, gnu screen, irssi, zsh with a 500 LOC .zshrc, macports, VMWare
    - Time machine for backups
    
    Server:
    - Colocated Sun x4100, 16GB ram, runs 8 VMs using Xen 
    - Costs $40/month: 500GB/month bandwith, remote shutdown/reboot via LOM
    - Duplicity + S3 for backing up each individual VM

    Others: 
    - Stand Up Desk (at work)
    - Airport Extreme + attached usb printer for network printing. 
    - No external keyboards or displays to streamline work process.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#99

Post by awakeasleep » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 6:45 AM UTC

dgallagher wrote: post #24

Hardware: MBP 17" - anti-glare FTW Mac Mini - for code testing 52" HDTV - 2nd display iPad - 3rd display w/Air Display - avatron.com/apps/air-display/ Software: 1Password - multi-browser password manager - agilewebsolutions.com Base - SQLite manager - menial.co.uk Cinch & SizeUp - window management - irradiatedsoftware.com ClickToFlash - block Flash in Safari - clicktoflash.com Colloquy - IRC - colloquy.info iWork Nu…

Did you know that Quicksilver development has ceased? I believe the original dev now works on QuickSearchBox at Google.

http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/

In any case, qsb is maintained and has many new features.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use?

#100

Post by RK » Mon, Nov 08, 2010, 6:48 AM UTC

Who I am: Computational physics grad student, former scientific startup employee

Hardware:

- Home: 6 core AMD desktop, 23" + 15" screens, really old Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite

- Office: 4 core Intel desktop, 8 core Ubuntu server, 48 core server being built

- In between: Asus EeePC 900 netbook with 12GB of flash storage

- An n node cluster on EC2 (n Software:

- All machines running some form of Ubuntu except Fedora servers on EC2

- Firefox and Chromium

- Thunderbird + Gmail IMAP + university IMAP

- Editor: gedit with lots of plugins, nano for small edits

- Pidgin and Empathy for XMPP with Google Talk

- Gwibber for Twitter

- Texmaker for LaTeX (or gedit)

- mercurial

- Dropbox

- Mendeley to manage citations/Bibtex locally and online

- Ipython + Numpy/Scipy + Matplotlib

- Inkscape for figures and making plots look nice

- Bitbucket for private projects, Google Code for open source

- Lightning (Google calendar inside Thunderbird)

- Google docs

- Lots of physics software.