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

Post by manv1 » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:27 PM UTC

towawy wrote: post #135

Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code. Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in a pinch. Obligatory Spolsky intro to Exce…

Post by 5e92cb50239222b » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:27 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #13

huseyinkeles wrote: post #3

Home Assistant [0] through bunch of automations we have around our home must’ve saved 100h in total for me and my partner so far. [0] - https://www.home-assistant.io/

What kind of automations have you found necessary? Any time I think about getting into it, I can only think of automations that sound silly or extra but nothing truly time-saving.

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #119

jodrellblank wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point " I clicked on your link with 16 pages of just contents links to find what the point is, and found "the make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them". What's the point you see?

It automatically parallelizes any large scale data processing pipeline (assuming that your data set is already broken into files). People use it for things like documentation generation. I've used it to process the results of web scrapers, large scale data cleaning tasks, etc, etc. It takes about an afternoon to set up NFS + SSH primitives that automatically distribute the computation across clusters of machines. Sin…

Post by NDizzle » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:30 PM UTC

heipei wrote: post #122

Bekwnn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nav…

I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme, barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc). Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors (VSCode et al), especiall…

Post by jmcgough » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC