Programs that have saved me 100+ hours - <AUTHOR> http://sadacaraveo.com/programs-that-have-saved-me-more-than-100-hours-by-automating-repetitive-tasks <comment><USER5> AutoHotKey

[https://www.autohotkey.com/](https://www.autohotkey.com/)

Create scripts to automate all kinds of things, usually triggered by keyboard / mouse conditions.

Here are a few - these are small things, but they can incrementally save hours and hours

\- CTRL+@ - pastes my email address at the cursor

\- ALT+MouseWheel - Page up / Page down

\- ]d - send the current date and time to the cursor

\- CAPSLOCK - sets transparency of window to 75 as long as caps is held down

\- #t - open [http://e.ggtimer.com](http://e.ggtimer.com)

It's also set up as a universal spell-correct and intellisense for SQL/ JS / PHP etc independent of IDE

\---

ShellJump

[https://github.com/kjerk/shelljump](https://github.com/kjerk/shelljump)

Set up jump locations and shortcuts so that you can quickly move between project folders in powershell

\---

Renamer

[http://www.oldware.org/software.php?swid=74](http://www.oldware.org/software.php?swid=74)

The original authors site isn't available anymore, not sure why because this was a super useful utility. Its like Ant Renamer or File Renamer or any of those, but I just prefer this one's simplicity

\---

Mp3Tag

[http://www.mp3tag.de/en/](http://www.mp3tag.de/en/)

Bulk edit Id3 tags on mp3 files (if anyone has mp3s anymore)

\---

NimbleText

[http://nimbletext.com/](http://nimbletext.com/)

Simple tool to repeatedly format text. Like foreach for plain text

<comment><USER6> BetterTouchTool ([https://www.boastr.net/](https://www.boastr.net/)) is kinda like an AutoHotKey for OS X -- but on top of custom keyboard shortcuts, it also allows you to configure custom trackpad gestures.

It's easily saved me 100+ hours -- a half-second at a time, 400 times a day. And probably a couple cases of RSI, a couple inches of finger contortion at a time.

The economy of motion is as far beyond keyboard shortcuts as keyboard shortcuts are beyond hunting around with a mouse. It's crime more people don't use it.

<comment><USER7> What are your favorite or most-used shortcuts?

<comment><USER8> This is a relatively fresh reinstall, and I've only been adding gestures as they come up [0] -- so this should be pretty representative of my top usage (slightly reordered for organization):

[https://i.imgur.com/qvAOmHA.png](https://i.imgur.com/qvAOmHA.png)

\----

I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that 3 Finger Tap (open in new tab), Pinch In/Out (close/open tab), and Rotate Left/Right (change tab) are my most used custom gestures.

With 3 Finger Swipe Left/Right (back/forward) configurable in vanilla system preferences, but done in BTT for consistency, and 4 Finger Swipe Up (Show Desktop)/Down (Mission Control) with their directions reversed from the system defaults [1].

Really, every one of the gestures on there is pretty indispensable to me feeling comfortable using a computer. Going back to keyboard shortcuts for the same actions (eg, when I'm using someone else's computer) feels like hunting- and-clicking menu items with a mouse.

\----

[0] Import/Export is a thing, but I usually use a reinstall as an opportunity to tighten things up.

[1] Because this way makes _way_ more intuitive sense to me. Swipe Up = Swipe Away = "GTFO windows". What hell, Apple HCI engineers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd have to throw most of the standard UNIX utils in there: grep, awk, cut, sed, sort, uniq, and of course, vim.

Outside of the tech world, people seem to think that grabbing some columns out of a file and rearranging them or pasting them somewhere else is some kind of sorcery.

<comment><USER10> One unix based utility that has saved me _incredible amounts of time_ is 'vimv'.[1]

You run vimv and you get your pwd, in the editor, and you can edit it _like a text file_. Then just quit and save and all of your filename changes get committed to that directory.

It's an extremely fast way to do a bunch of random and irregular edits to a big directory full of files.

[1] [https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv](https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv)

<comment> photon-torpedo This sounds similar to 'vidir', which is available in Debian/Ubuntu in the package 'moreutils'. Indeed very useful for editing large directories.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. It's packaged for macOS, too. Install Homebrew via [https://brew.sh/](https://brew.sh/) then type

$ brew install moreutils

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I came here expecting someone to recommend 'make' \- and some others to link to interesting make resources. I'm kind of surprised no one has.

Make is a utility that's seemed super useful to put into use for non- programming tasks. In my case: take a LaTeX file, create a PDF from it, run tex2html on it and ftp the results up to some web server, run pandoc on it to create a dated epub, etc. But my initial forays into learning make were frustrating and I gave up. Is anyone using make to automate workflow processes, or is that wishful thinking?

<comment><USER13> The thing about make is that it's a tool for reducing how much computation has to take place when an _incremental rebuild_ takes place.

This is done at the cost of great obfuscation of the build process.

If you can suffer the cost of a full rebuild each time you change something, it is far clearer to have a linear script which executes certain steps one by one.

Such a script can be sped up for incremental builds with some judicious checks like "run this command which makes A out of B, only if A doesn't exist or is older than B".

(P.S. I don't want to overlook make's ability to parallelize builds on multiple cores. That _can_ just be scripted too, with utilities like GNU Parallel.)

<comment><USER14> Make doesn't really force an incremental build. It's also quite trivial to have a semi-incremental build, where the build unit is libraries not object files.

I'm yet to see a tool that doesn't become just as obfuscated for complex builds though, you're script for instance (bash? python?), is probably just as illegible to someone new to it.

<comment><USER13> Make doesn't force an incremental rebuild, but that is what it is for. It lets us write a set of rules, which are evaluated as one big whole to determine the minimal set of actions that has to be taken to bring every implicated target up to date. That is pretty much the definition of "incremental rebuild".

If a program is made of libraries, such that when we change a single source file, the entire library which contains the .o has to be re-archived, and then the entire program made up of all those libraries has to be re-linked, that is still an "incremental build".

You might possibly be mixing up "incremental link" (optimized way to just update a function or object file in a previously linked program image) with "incremental build" (compiling only parts of a program in response to a small change).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man, I'm pretty convinced that Vim macros have single-handedly saved me years of my life. They're so incredibly useful that it's made Vim one of the first things that I install on any machine.

<comment><USER16> Am I missing out by not learning Vim? I know enough to get by for git purposes (renaming all picks to s is amazing), but I feel like I'm really productive with Webstorm. There's a ton of great shortcuts and great features (multi- cursoring, intelligent refactoring, customizable search directories, integrated terminal, etc.) that I feel outplay anything I could do with Vim.

<comment><USER17> No. I used vim for half a year and then went back to notepad++ and similar for plain editing. The bottleneck in programming is thinking anyway, and not typing. It does not make a difference. For serious coding, I recommend a serious IDE.

<comment><USER18> For me the bottleneck is finding where I need to read something to understand and then going back to where I need to add or change something.

<comment><USER19> An IDE with half-decent code browsing capabilities, then. Like VS with ReSharper, or IntelliJ and derivatives.

<comment><USER14> Any that don't suck at windowing? They all want to show only one, or at best two files at a time. They're primitive compared to the windowing capabilities of vim/emacs/tmux.

<comment><USER19> No, not really... prior to 2017, that was one of my biggest gripes with Visual Studio - opening multiple editor windows in one instance would quickly chew up enough memory to hit the 32-bit process limit and start page thrashing. Why, I have no idea, but that's what I've seen consistently the past few years in VS 2013 & 2015.

<comment><USER14> Does it do better now? Can you have 12 windows arranged at once? If so, please tell me how because I spend most of my day in VS. but time and time again I need to open shit in vim, just to get a clear overview.

<comment><USER19> Far as i know, no. I was settling for having 2-3 editor windows open at once. 2015 was such a pig I avoided it. 2017 can handle it so far. I wouldn't bet on big solutions 100k+ lines of code though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some more I forgot about:

Chocolatey

[http://chocolatey.org](http://chocolatey.org)

Apt get for Windows, although I would argue its actually better because there's just one central repo, so you don't have to add some long repo before you can install Telegram

\----

Postman

[https://www.getpostman.com/](https://www.getpostman.com/)

The fastest way to test APIs - create GET and POST requests easily and view the results any way you like.

Most of the tools I've mentioned in this and my other comment are listed on Scott Hansleman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" \- ([https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDe...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx)) which is probably the most definitive list out there for this kind of stuff (for windows). It's not been updated since 2014, so there are a few newer alternatives - in particular Foxit reader is kind of a mess these days, there are far better alternatives.

Be sure to check out the comments for lots of extra tools in the format "I can't believe you didn't mention {x}, I can't live without it"

<comment><USER20> Thanks for your shares in this thread, Postman and Hanselman's list, which I had seen a few years earlier, but not checked recently.

In what way is Foxit reader a mess, and what are those alternatives?

<comment><USER5> It feels bloated in size, features and UI. Uses a big ribbon UI like office used to. Too much screen taken up by toolbars, status bars etc. Most recommendations you get for PDF viewers are for Foxit, Adobe, Sumatra or. CutePDF. I don't like any of them. I found Slim PDF, which is 5mb (!) installed versus Foxit at 150mb+. There's also Microsoft Reader which is a Windows 10 app, and has a _beautifully_ minimal UI. A good UI just stays out of the way

<comment><USER20> Just tried out Slim PDF. Looks good, thanks. And yes, it is small and light. Like the minimalism too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everything - instant search in Windows [https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)

<comment><USER22> I can't simply recommend "Everything" enough. Imagine the accuracy of `find` with the speed of `locate`.

My main PC has 8Tb of storage in 4 HDDs, with "Everything" I can find any file immediately.

Too bad Windows is the platform people love to mock. I hadn't been able to find a tool as efficient as Everything for Linux or OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Xplorer2 (or another TC clone) allow me to filter my folders under a shortcut. I have a set of custom filters for my tasks that directly show the files I need. Combine it with the other nifty power user actions in those Explorer replacements and I easily save an couple of hours a week. The dreadful wait when you see your colleagues having 10 explorers open finding your file to have a quick peek. Additional bonus points for the custom user actions to fire up different cmd shells in ConEmu under a shortcut, open the proper editor, open in your favorite diff tool without having to select etc.

Resharper (is that a tool?). No need to explain I guess. You use Visual studio, you get resharper. Can't live without it anymore.

The ability to write bash/powershell/your favorite script language. Everything I do more than twice turns into a script and is added as user action in my xplorer2 under a shortcut.

ShareX gif capture. My company has email attachment max sizes too small to send proper mp4 longer than 1 min. The gif capture has lower quality (sometimes Horrible) but is good enough for sharing bugs which require investigation before they can be submitted. Instead of having to type I capture the gif and send to our test engineers to turn into proper PR/ticket. Saves time writing it all out and makes me actually share random issues found during doing other stuff.

P.s. Try irvanfiew on Windows beats the bulk resize thing in OP.

</comment><comment><USER24> Intellij with PHP and Python plugins has saved me ~200 hours in 3 years (very conservatively assuming 15m a day 5 days a week 52 weeks a year).

I suspect in terms of lost time I _didn 't_ have to spend debugging and other stuff it's probably 3-4 times that minimum.

</comment><comment><USER25> Definitely ack ([https://beyondgrep.com/](https://beyondgrep.com/)). It basically is grep but designed for source code. First off it can be downloaded as a single file (Perl script FTW!), so easy to deploy. Secondly, by default it automatically searches recursively, prints out the filename, and line numbers of matches. It also uses PCRE for its regexes which is really nice.

But by far the most time saving feature I have is the type searching functionality in it! For example, one can type 'ack --java System.out' and it will search ONLY the java files! No more 'find . -name *.java -exec grep -Hni System.out {} \;'. And you can add custom types easily through your .ackrc, it is a very well put together piece of software.

(PS: If you're trying it, definitely try out 'ack --bar')

<comment><USER26> If you mention ack, you gotta mention silver search (ag):

[https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)

<comment><USER27> If you mention the silver searcher (ag), you gotta mention the platinum searcher (pt) :)

[https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher](https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher)

Since it's pure Go, there's your static binary which makes it easily deployable again.

<comment><USER28> If you mention ack, ag, and pt, you also have to mention ripgrep (rg) [https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep) which has the usability features of the newer grep-alikes but is as fast or faster than gnu grep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This freeware (for personal use) saved me dozens of hours renaming files: [http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php](http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php)

<comment><USER30> The OS X* equivalent is A Better Finder Rename: [http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/](http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/)

When installed, you can use the app or call it as a service.

Not sure if it's as full-featured as Bulk Rename Utility, but it's close. [regex replace is hidden under Advanced & Special, which will tell you a bit about their target market.]

* Available for OS X 10.[12]-11, and macOS 10.12

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> * 'set -o vi' in bash lets me search my command history with the same keys as moving around vi

* git + sql scripts

* simplenote (notes across devices) Semi-automation of pieces of my job captured in these notes.

* zapier if I'm trying to connect two web apis.

<comment><USER20> In bash:

$_ in a command gets substituted by the last argument of the last command you typed - happens to be useful surprisingly often. Simple example: copy a file to some other directory, then cd or pushd to that directory:

$ cp some_file /long/path/to/directory

# cd $_

But there are many other cases where I regularly find it useful.

_ also evaluates to result of the last expression in the Python interactive shell, and probably in IPython (command-line version) as well - need to confirm it about IPython.

Edited for formatting of commands above.

<comment><USER32> Another useful bash thing: !! (which substitutes the last command you entered)

cat /really/long/path/to/something/only/readable/by/root

cat: Permission denied (goddamnit)

sudo !!

<comment><USER33> What if you need to run a third version of the command, or a version that involves deletions, e.g. "less /really/long/path/to/..."?

      bash-3.2$ less /var/log/authd.log.0.gz
      "/var/log/authd.log.0.gz" may be a binary file.  See it anyway?
      bash-3.2$

I type: control-P control-A meta-D zcat control-E | SPACE less

      bash-3.2$ zcat /var/log/authd.log.0.gz | less

On the OS X terminal, you have to configure it to treat option as meta before the meta-D above will work. I forget whether common Linux terminals require such configuration. (Edit: zless would work just as well here, and on Linux "less" appears to basically have the functionality of zless.)

<comment><USER34> With set -o vi:

        <ESC> k cw zcat <ESC> A <SPACE> | <SPACE> less <CR>

Very natural for any Vi user: go up a "line", change the first word, then append.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For me it is i3wm - an amazing window manager. After using it for a few days you will never want to go back to using standard mac/linux wm, it is incredibly fast and convenient.

Another one is, of course, Emacs. By far the most useful and brilliant tool in my toolbox.

<comment><USER36> After wasting my life in IDEs like Borland , VS, Eclipse , NetBeans ( which I still consider ok ) I broke my resistance and moved to emacs, i3wm, and command line tools. I have become extremely productive last 5 years.

When I see such productive articles coming I can't keep but smiling and thinking ( but you could to this or that easily using wdired or macros or...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Over the years I've found I've saved the most time less from apps I've found but more the ability to write off-the-cuff single-use Ruby scripts. Whether scraping, renaming, fetching, etc, it can be a huge effort saver.

<comment><USER38> Same, except

s/Ruby/Perl/

(One of the guys I work with does this with Java - which always seems an odd choice to me. The best sysadmin I've ever worked with did everything in bash, which feels odd to me for opposite reasons (ever seen anyone doing SQL database connections in shell???). But the underlying message holds: "learn and use a programming language, it pretty much doesn't matter which one, whatever you're most comfortable with - and then use it when the simple tools don't work for you...")

<comment><USER37> I was a Perl developer for 8 years before Ruby and I think it's where I got the habit from - it's a very 'Perl thing' to do! :-)

Java does seem an odd choice. I don't disrespect Java, but for very quickly loading in data, making changes, etc, it's going to be far from a few lines I suspect..

<comment><USER39> I wonder if people still voluntarily move from Perl to Ruby, other than for financial reasons. I had to dive into Python and Ruby for my dissertation. I didn't like Python, but I completely understood how it would be possible to. Ruby just felt like a less predictable Perl with more immature tooling.

<comment><USER40> I haven't used Ruby in years, but I used it a lot for toy projects at home, and I recently looked at a few of these, and I was kind of impressed - <USER2> after years, and almost without any comments, the code was still very readable and rather beautiful. Ruby can be very elegant and pleasant to use; I have never used it for web applications, though.

(At work, I use Perl quite a lot, though. I recently have started trying to use Go for problems I normally use Perl for. But the jury is still out on how well that works.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> re: entry #1, if you are at all proficient with a unix/linux/bsd command line, learn to use the command line tools for the ImageMagick library. There are a great many things you can accomplish with the "mogrify" CLI tool to batch manipulate images, and integrate it into workflow/shell scripts.

<comment><USER42> One of the problems with ImageMagick especially, but complex CLI interfaces in general, is that the _discoverability_ of features is limited by the separation between parameter-specification and documentation. No matter how streamlined or thorough (and there's often a tradeoff between the two!) your man page is, the documentation on a flag won't be at the same place that you type the flag, and unless you can speed-read a list of flags, you aren't hand- held towards the most common options. And if it's something you use in infrequent time-crunches (as with OP), then you won't commit the flags to muscle memory.

Of course, the tradeoff is that you can't easily script this way. If the software gives you complicated pipelines and allows you to save them, though, sometimes you don't need to. I'd love to see more GUIs that, instead of (or in addition to) doing processing internally with calls to the low-level library, allowed you to copy out a command line version of the command which you could further customize for scripting. But it's rare to see that kind of feature.

<comment><USER43> Just fyi

[http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop/scripting.html](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop/scripting.html)

And at least last time I used it you could record an action and convert to script.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Some top rated commands on 'commandlinefu.com' has saved many hours. The key sequence to kill a hung ssh connection has been a life saver.

</comment><comment><USER45> On the Mac, I think the combination of capability and customizability makes Keyboard Maestro well worth buying for any advanced user. Or, as the software overview describes it, "The only limit to Keyboard Maestro is your imagination!"

And while I have no idea how the information is calculated, the About dialog says the software has saved me 6 months (~4,000 hours). It may well be more than that since I've used KM for about 10 years now and that information is a recent addition.

<comment><USER46> Keyboard Maestro is indeed the best tool in its class, but I think the motto should actually be:

"The only limit to Keyboard Maestro is your ability to tolerate the disastrous user interface"

<comment><USER45> I've worked with the developer in the past on some aspects of the app, and he's responsive and open-minded. I wouldn't say the interface is disastrous—more like it's not well-suited to helping the user put its capabilities to use. Whether my assessment or yours is more accurate, the bottom line is that the interface has ample room for improvement. My problem, though, is that I've never conceived of a solution that's so much better it's worth sharing with the developer because 1) users will benefit, and 2) it's an interface that can accommodate the app's evolving capabilities through at least a few major revisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Apart from Emacs and Unix in general, lately I've come to depend on some simple readline shortcuts in bash:

$ cat ~/.inputrc "\e\C-k": shell-kill-word "\e\C-a": "awk 'BEGIN{OFS=FS=\"\\\t\"; } { }'\C-b\C-b\C-b" "\e\C-w": "\C-w\C-y > /tmp/temporary-inputrc && mv -f /tmp/temporary-inputrc \C-y" "\e\C-f": "find . -type f -print0|while read -rd '' f; do ; done\e-b\C-b\C-b\C-b\C-b\C-b\C-b" "\e\C-i": "\C-awhile true; do ( \C-e ); inotifywait -q -e modify -e close_write _; done\e51\C-b " "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history- search-forward "\ep": history-search-backward "\en": history-search-forward

So if I've typed "make -j && grep foo|sed 's,b,x,g'|./run", and then hit ctrl+alt+i, that'll turn into

while true; do ( make -j && grep foo|sed 's,b,x,g'|./run ); inotifywait -q -e modify -e close_write _; done

meaning whenever I save a file in that directory, the command runs again.

<comment><USER48> Looks like some of your text got a little mutilated by the pseudo-markdown parser; perhaps copying that into a gist or paste would be better? I'm really curious what some of what you've copied does.

<comment><USER47> Sorry, that was quite unreadable! My full inputrc is at [https://gist.github.com/unhammer/130df5f3ebf61724d36f60c4bb1...](https://gist.github.com/unhammer/130df5f3ebf61724d36f60c4bb19ba97)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> xargs is a remarkable time saver. jq for JSON parsing and selecting at the CLI. ^X^E at the shell to edit command in $EDITOR. for loops at the shell. until at the shell. atd for "run this in two hours".

IntelliJ for everything. Extract methods and interfaces auto-modifying to support close duplicates. Signature changes. That sort of thing.

Rsync. Zsync allowed me to even get Linux back in the day (thank you Ubuntu).

</comment><comment><USER50> When working with Excel, there is an addon (paid) called KUTOOLS that saved me a lot of time. It has a bunch of preset operations like removing duplicates, merging multiple sheets, bulking changing rows etc.

Another text editor worth mentioning is EMEDITOR that has tons of macros and handles larger files much better than Sublime

</comment><comment><USER39>
        > What are your 100 hour time savers?

`perl`

</comment><comment><USER51> Mostly:

      function ff() { find ${2:-.} -name "*$1*" ; }
      function gg() { grep -n $* ; }
      function ggr() { grep -rn --exclude-dir=.git $1 ${2:-.} ; }
      function ggi() { grep -in $* ; }
      function ggri() { grep -rin --exclude-dir=.git $* ${2:-.} ; }

Oh, and that one:

      # display a man page as pdf window
      function pman() {
        local pdf="/tmp/pman-$RANDOM.pdf" \
            (man -t $* | ps2pdf - >$pdf && mupdf -r 96 $pdf 2>/dev/null )&
      }

<comment><USER20> Speaking of man pages, this script is tiny but useful (IMO):

m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility- to-s...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-save- cleaned-up.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TXR!

[http://www.nongnu.org/txr](http://www.nongnu.org/txr)

</comment><comment><USER52> Beyond Compare

[https://www.scootersoftware.com/](https://www.scootersoftware.com/)

Especially with integrated source control and remote sessions to manage source on multiple server types and platforms. Very customizable rules for compares and folder structure / filename case etc.

I used to use Araxis Merge, but Beyond Compare, with a tiny bit of customization, is in my opinion a far superior tool.

</comment><comment><USER53> My current faves, far from exhaustive \- tac: for very large log files \- emacs: remote file editing, regex replace across matching files, macros, rectangle cut/paste, ... \- xargs -P <n>: use all the cores! for fanning work out across a pool of <n> processes; web scraping, processing lots of files at once \- docker: fast, precise and resusable image building

</comment><comment><USER54> For me, it'd have to be the fish shell, fishmarks (a directory bookmarks plugin I wrote), and vim/neovim.

</comment><comment><USER55> After spending last two days researching, followed by an hour of programming, this one can hopefully save you some time: automatize web browser tasks with imacros [1]. I use it to feed CSV data to database.

I tested multiple other options like Custom Style Script [2] and others but while being ok during initial tests, for some reason nothing worked on my typo3, js based backend website.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros- for-f...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/) [2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-NO/firefox/addon/custom- style-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-NO/firefox/addon/custom-style- script/)

</comment><comment><USER56> Are there other sites with these kind of automating tips and tricks? I would love to automate more in my life.

<comment><USER20> Lifehacker runs such articles somewhat regularly, I think. I don't read that site often, mostly when I come across such a tool published on it, that I get to hear about on some other site. But I've found some of the posts there to be good.

Interestingly, IIRC, Gina Trapani, who I think was/is an editor or writer there, had herself written a utility for to-do lists called todo.txt or some such name. It was supposed to be lightweight and only need and use text files, so could be used almost anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Windows here. * SharpKeys - swap capslock and escape. * Keepass - <USER3> manager. * AutoHotkey - a lot of stuff, ex. Escape + scroll truns volume up or dow, Alt + x closes windows * Wox - launcher with plugins * Everything - <USER4> file search by name * Tablacus - file explorer with plugins

</comment><comment><USER58> Greenshot - [http://getgreenshot.org/](http://getgreenshot.org/)

This is THE best screenshot tool on Windows, I've installed it on every machine I use. It also has an editor where you add text, highlight, circle things, etc.

<comment><USER52> Just tried it. It has fired my old capture tool, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> You can store screenshots in a custom folder like this:

        # Store screenshots in ~/temp/screenshots
        mkdir -p ~/temp/screenshots
        defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/temp/screenshots

</comment><comment><USER60> autohotkey ... task specific ad hoc scripting

* mouse moves

* keyboard input

* raising lowering windows

* one keypress -> multiple effects

create an edit -> launch -> debug tight loop ? no problem

dismiss annoying Lotus Notes dialog warning box -> no problem

enter 5000 multi tabbed entries from a CSV into a custom gui -> no problem !!

<comment><USER61> If you like autohotkey or autoit, I highly suggest trying out sikuli sometime. I have been able to do some pretty cool things with it due to the image recognition engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> FastStone Photo Resizer is an excellent batch image resizer/watermarker for Windows that is free [http://faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm](http://faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm) .No affiliation.

</comment><comment><USER63> Phatch on Linux can do a lot (all?) of what PhotoBulk does.

(Obv. ignoring more command line oriented tools.)

</comment><comment><USER64> The macro recorder in Notepad++ has saved me tons of time processing or parsing files.

</comment><comment><USER65> Unifdef

[http://dotat.at/prog/unifdef/](http://dotat.at/prog/unifdef/)

Saved me 100+ hours _this week_ :-). Thanks, Tony Finch &co!

</comment><comment><USER66> Apart from many unix utilities (grep, awk, vim) etc, tmux has definitely changed the way i work. Simple idea of session -> window -> pane takes away all the friction of switching between tabs and windows.

</comment><comment><USER67> Writing bash scripts and backing them up to github saves me tons of time.

<comment><USER68> I make a habit of writing any sequence of two or more commands as a shell file, no matter how simple. This way if I need to reference it later I don't need to grep through my history on every box.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h In the opposite vein, it can be helpful to stick something like ` #useful` or ` # description ` on the end of a command you expect to need again, so you can easily grab from history with C-r

<comment><USER69> Yep. Super useful. I figured it out only recently! I ssh into many servers with IP addresses and weird hostnames. Now I add #server-description at the end of the command and I can get back to it instantly.

<comment><USER70> I prefer to use a short memorable name as an alias in `~/.ssh/config`, so with keys set up properly ànd a suitable alias in .zshrc I can connect with 4-6 keystrokes, and take full advantage of zsh's auto-completion across hosts (way better than in bash).

<comment><USER68> I still have no easy solution to the "same box" changing IP's because you booted up a new test cluster. I guess that's the point of DNS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Napkin . I use it every day many times a day to make screen shots with quick annotations

[http://aged-and-distilled.com/](http://aged-and-distilled.com/)

</comment><comment><USER72> Does anyone know if something like Hazel exists for Linux?

I know I could basically write scripts and start them with SystemD timers/cron but.. not sure it'd be worth the effort doing it all myself.

<comment><USER73> Maybe this: [https://github.com/benjaminoakes/maid](https://github.com/benjaminoakes/maid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Gnu Parallel ?

</comment><comment><USER75> BBEdit (barebones.com) on macOS.

\- Perl regexp's

\- Worksheets for thing you'd want to remember

\- Process Duplicates Lines / Process Lines Containing

\- Nice set of Markup tools

\- Diff

\- Support all kinds of versioning systems

Araxis Merge (x-platform) for text, image, folder diffs.

</comment><comment><USER76> You can bulk resize in Photoshop, just FYI.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, you could also create a macro to watermark every picture, or create a special export setting. But I wanted to give tips that didn't require a lot of technical expertise, so that it is available for everyone. Also, getting photobulk ($10 once) vs getting photoshop ($10 a month) is cheaper if you don't have photoshop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> FME. Simply no better tool for slicing and dicing all manner of spatial data.

</comment><comment><USER78> how is photobulk better than irfanview?

also for renaming i find built in TCMD multi rename tool quite powerful

</comment><comment><USER17> Whoa, when I click on this link, it automatically closes the tab it resides in!

At first I thought this was an elaborate meta joke since not reading articles would save me thousands of hours, but I think it is a bug. I am using the latest google chrome with a very restrictive uMatrix that blocks pretty much all cross-site requests that are not images, and Ad-Block.

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird, I'm using posthaven.com it is pretty useful as a blogging tool. Check if you can open it :)

<comment><USER17> I tested some more. It closes/crashes the tab when I do not allow requests from facebook.com in frames in uMatrix. I didn't investigate further though, I'm tired from a long and busy day.</comment></comment></comment>


F-35 Scores Impressive 15:1 Kill Ratio at Red Flag War Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a25078/f-35-red-flag-war-games/ <comment><USER2> Readers of Blink might remember the "Millenium Challenge" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)) war games. In short, General Van Riper- commanding the simulated insurgent forces- decisively defeated and humiliated the simulated US forces in 24 hours... until the DOD decided to roll back the exercise and deliver instead a completely scripted (and useless) version where America won handily.

I don't trust this outcome one bit and suspect something very similar happened here. I'm guessing the Pentagon is getting very sensitive to the increasing volume of accusations that the F-35 is a trillion-dollar garbage fire, and wanted to do anything to try and save its reputation. This result seems very suspicious in light of the previous evidence that the F-35 loses to both current- and even previous-generation fighters. Not buying it.

EDIT: Thanks to jljljl for correcting my faulty memory about the book. I get my pop-sci insight porn confused sometimes :)

<comment><USER3> It's very simple to let the F-35 look good - stick to BVR combat. The scenarios in which it looked poor was in WVR combat where the F-35 has no benefit of stealth and an excellent radar, but all the drawbacks of stealth (fewer weapons etc)

I don't doubt the F-35 can dominate in simulations where there either is no WVR engagements or there are other aircraft to take care of those.

Also, aggressor aircraft were presumably 4th gen aircraft which leaves the question open how it would perform against other craft.

<comment><USER4> No aircraft looks good BVR against live targets. There have only been perhaps one or two air-to-air missile kills bvr against aware/equiped targets in the last 40 years (targets with trained pilots and realistic countermeasures). Most pilots assume a 10-15% hit chance in a realworld bvr situation. No aircraft looks good when launching all your bvr weapons (4?) will likely not score a single hit.

<comment><USER5> It looks like the historic kill rate with radar-guided weapons has been quite low, but the technology has advanced significantly since it's early deployments around and before the Vietnam war.[1] I would suggest that weapons like the AMRAAM would have a high probability of kill in real large scale conflicts if and when IFF issues are not present.

[1] [http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/11/09.pdf](http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/11/09.pdf)

<comment><USER6> In Yugoslavia war, all(6) air-to-air kills were performed by AMRAAM according to wiki.

<comment><USER4> But against what target? A poorly-equiped fighter with no EW capability, one that doesnt move becausr it doesnt see the threat? Lets see how the amraam handles a 4th or 5th generation fighter. There are stories of f22s having trouble downing f4 drones.

<comment><USER6> Against mig-29, modern enough for that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't believe military wargames anymore. They have become a mechanism to bolster the procurement status quo. A Trillion dollar industry has developed around military procurement--they resist disruption using political means. Military procurement is not a free market. Its a network of old boys.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)

<comment><USER8> That's pretty much the way it has always been. You can go back at least to the Civil War and find politics has had more to do with procurement than performance of the weapon systems in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you read between the lines you may see something. The F-35 still sucks at air-air combat. Period. But if you use its radar and software systems to feed tactical data to the "real fighters" the team becomes extremely lethal. So it's still a giant money sink and they should probably just retrofit some of the older planes with those more advanced info systems.

<comment><USER10> >The F-35 still sucks at air-air combat

It was never going to be good at air-to-air. It's a strike fighter by name, which means it's intended to be basically an A-10 that can also do some air- to-air in a pinch.

There's a reason they operate the F-22 in the air superiority role.

<comment><USER11> >basically an A-10 that can also do some air-to-air in a pinch

With four seconds of bullets? [https://defensetech.org/2015/01/02/a-tale-of- two-gatling-gun...](https://defensetech.org/2015/01/02/a-tale-of-two-gatling- guns-f-35-vs-a-10/)

<comment><USER10> It's designed to engage from well beyond the ranges at which guns are effective. I'm not necessarily saying I agree with the choice of gun armament, but... yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Since He threated the F-35 program with closure, I guess we will see more of these. The US$399,792zn that's been spent so far must have left at least some spare for PR

2\. There was an unofficial war hardware porn series on HN a while ago, front page full of Boy's Own stuff, one of them being an article by a pilot who sounded pretty positive about the F-35's capabilities. So this is either a long-running PR drive or the plane actually doesn't suck

3\. For US$401,722zn (since it's now a minute or two after I wrote point 1) I'd like to think that we can expect the plane to be, at the very least, OK

<comment><USER3> The question isn't really whether it's ok it's whether M F-35's are better than N alternative fighters at some task, for M<N.

A problem is that it needs to replace a lot of different planes (a-10, f-18, f-16, harrier...) and those have different roles. It's likely to suck royally at replacing the A-10 for example, or to act as an interceptor for defending the airspace Norway and Denmark which have no alternative fighters to back it up - but if a decision is made to e.f extend A-10 life, or buy a light attack plane for that role, then F-35 numbers go down, and unit price up.

Basically the F-35 has to be bought to do things it doesn't do very well or very cost effectively because otherwise not enough will be sold for it to be economical

<comment><USER13> Good points, but also consider the question of survivability in a world with increasingly sophisticated anti-aircraft threats. One F-35 might be inferior to four F-16s militarily speaking, and more expensive to boot, but are you willing to lose pilots in the latter scenario to accomplish the mission?

Additionally, are you factoring in the cost in training, maintenance and fuel for the larger force?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "It's stellar performance"

Am I the only one deeply troubled by Popular Mechanics articles making this ugly it's/its confusion in 2017. Is this really going to become a thing now?

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what it being 2017 has to do with it

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> But how would this compare if you had upgraded, let's say the F16 and F18, to have the same avionics and weapons systems capabilities as the F35? Or is that impossible without an entirely new triple-gold-plated air frame design?

<comment><USER17> Next-gen fighters are moving in the direction of quadruple-gold-plating

<comment><USER18> You probably love Norm Augustine's writings...

<comment><USER19> I hadn't heard of these before, the one you're referencing probably is:

"In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day."

but Law Number XI might apply to this audience the best:

"If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off."

<comment><USER18> Yes, and he wrote a really good article recently for Aviation Week's 100 year theme number that expands on that [1]. Basically, how could aircraft cost increase, when it's at the level of the aircraft's weight in gold? You can't add hardware that would increase cost... unless you invent something that uses no space and has no mass. It's software.

x: [http://aviationweek.com/defense/next-100-years-norm- augustin...](http://aviationweek.com/defense/next-100-years-norm-augustine) (paywall)

<comment><USER20> The weight-in-gold metric was first passed by the B-58 in 1956. So 60 years on and we're now at weight-in-platinum I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like the whole concept is outdated. Humans are a bottleneck that needs to be mitigated. Each F-35 should probably have a thousand drone missiles flying behind it, ready to swarm-attack any threat. Not just a few F-22s...

Send 20 missle drones at any fighter or 100 into any deep bunker. It shouldn't be hard or expensive to fly missiles around the world anymore. An aluminum tube, some fuel, and a computer.

The F-35 could be the swarm leader and have the big computer capable of serving its 1000 drones without any outside support.

China or Russia could build this today and the technology is only advancing.

<comment><USER22> If you wanted to go this route, there are probably better control aircraft than the F-35, or a fighter for that matter. The primary benefit of the fighters is their ability to get in and out of situations quickly, and the F-35 stealthily, keeping close proximity (mitigating some electronic countermeasure threats) for command and control.

An AWACS, C-130 refueler, or a long-range bomber is probably a more credible C&C platform for the mission, setting aside the preference for proximity. Longer times airborne, more space for controls and _controllers_ , meaning more missions can be managed simultaneously, more power (mitigating the electronic countermeasure threat by power in transmitters rather than proximity), and the potential capability of carrying many of these flying missiles within range of their target mission, reducing the range needs of the missiles themselves.

The refueler has the added bonus of literally being able to refuel them while loitering over a target area.

The downside, of course, are all the present downsides of drone weaponry (largely moral/ethical concerns). Cheaper to build, deploy, and use means a potential (I'd say probable) increase in their utilization (moral hazards here), without regard to potential casualties (rationalized locally as, "not our citizens/troops dying").

Ultimately, though, this is probably the endgame for weapon systems. It is financially the better option, it does reduce the risk to that side's citizens and soldiers (at least in the short term, long term political and economic fallout may be different), and practically anyone can already make a miniature airborne missile fleet now, though with poor range and precision at present.

<comment><USER21> If distance was acceptable you could use satellites. I think you need to escort your drone swarm into hostile territory using something like an F-35 so the whole package can penetrate as a unit.

You might even want the drones to fly behind using a wire-guided system so they can't be jammed.

Imagine the F-35 trailing a cable that spreads out to 1000 wires. It's basically just a way of giving one F-35 a thousand smart missiles that it could never fly itself.

The basic idea is used by MIRV ICBMS. You get the whole thing into enemy territory quickly and then launch more attacks than the defense can hope to counter.

1\. Fly to the edge of enemy territory.

2\. Launch your F-35 towards the enemy.

3\. Launch 1000 drone missiles following the F-35 (maybe from a C-130)

4\. Split off drone missiles in variable sized chunks according each target detected.

Just imagine an F-35 with a dozen F-22s vs an F-35 with 1,000 flying missiles behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Against the ramped-up threats, the F-35A only lost one aircraft for every 15 aggressors killed"

Wait does that mean like one aircraft for 15 aggressor PEOPLE and sites on the ground? They mention SAMs and things that sound like ground forces. That sounds like an awful ratio. You lose 120 million dollars for every 15 aggressors killed? A hostile state can cheaply churn out aggressors 15 at a time all day long.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you read the full article this is comprehensive exercise where the F35 is shielded from airborne threats by the much more vaunted F22s, and the fourth gen aircrafts were used for most of the actual striker roles.

I have no doubt the F35 is a capable platform, but this does not represent its standalone performance. If anything, the enemy forces will be primarily targeting the F22 and other strike crafts.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ho! A wargame situation.

What about a real situation?

Insurrection in a city, and a budget of 10M$ for the defenders.

Cheap old schools baloons (like WWII), drones maybe, 1000 persons paid to watch and use high EM beams to direct at planes, maybe 2-3 hackers asked to read the papers on how iranians where able to spoof GPS signals to steal drone ....

I don't know, but war is assymetric. It has never been about who has the best weapons, but who can take with an inferior budget the expensive weapon of the opponents, using any trick possible.

The allies attacked the nazis on their weapon's greatest vulnerability: resources and energy.

That's the reason why the dam in Germany were bombed, and africa was invaded to cut access to oil/lubrificants.

Having complex weapons to fight in situation you don't know is stupid.

IED for instance are costing 100$, AK47 way less then USA guns. Still, Iraki & Afghanistan have proven they are efficient... against a better doted army.

Vietnam with cheap radars and missile batteries was a pain for USAF. And aerial domination did not helped win the war.

And well, given how it is a mess in middle east and how USA may not have the most solid allies there, what would happen if someone attacked the oil tankers or ridge?

F35 would still fly, but what about the economical situation? How long can USA debts inflates and still stays sustainable for USA's economy?

Remember Reagan triggered an arm race that resulted in USSR fall, not a military win. But, USSR army after that was way less of a threat.

So, yes, cool F35 can export and if you buy it you probably have a super weapon. Will it be a good cost/benefits investment though?

</comment><comment><USER26> Since when have our political leadership allowed for BVR kills? The F-4 didn't have a gun as it was supposed to be the age of the missile, and the maneuverability was built into the missiles. Then the pilots were required to close up and identify the targets before shooting. I can think of one missile kill BVR and they already knew the opfor was hostile. As long as there is ambiguity in the conflict there will be no BVR kills.

In my opinion we should scrap the whole manned fighter thing, as sad as that thought is, and create an army of expendable maneuverable drones that are affordable enough to throw them into combat.</comment>


Volunteers aid pioneering Edsac computer rebuild - m-i-l http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34996402 <comment><AUTHOR> Computerphile had done a couple videos on this project.

[https://youtu.be/C97MtJWDNX8](https://youtu.be/C97MtJWDNX8)

[https://youtu.be/Yc945sNB0uA](https://youtu.be/Yc945sNB0uA)</comment>


Mount Google Drive as a Virtual Drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.expandrive.com/mount-google-drive-as-a-virtual-drive

<comment><AUTHOR> Also wanted to point out that a Linux version is in testing for those interested - email@example.com</comment>


The Rise of Meta Learning - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/the-rise-of-meta-learning-9c61ffac8564 <comment><AUTHOR> OpenAI's rubik's cube solver shows that Meta-Learning Data Augmentation is very powerful for Sim2Real transfer. This article relates Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR) to Neural Architecture Search and Data Augmentation, arguing in support of Meta-Learning research.</comment>


Show HN: Comparing JavaScript search engines: lunr, sifter, fuzzyset - <AUTHOR> http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/js-search-engines-comparison/

<comment><USER2> Nice. It'd be interesting to see the comparative performance of the three libraries under test, e.g. time to results and possibly memory usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. I'll do it. Do you have suggestions of other libraries?

<comment><USER2> I've come across these two:

* [http://reyesr.github.io/fullproof/](http://reyesr.github.io/fullproof/) * [http://www.tipue.com/search/](http://www.tipue.com/search/)

Might be interesting to see how these also stack up.</comment></comment></comment>


Implementing PyLucid - <AUTHOR> https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/12/04/implementing-pylucid/ <comment><USER2> ...and what is it?

a Python implementation (by the original author) of:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_\(programming_language\)) "Lucid is a dataflow programming language designed to experiment with non-von Neumann programming models. It was designed by Bill Wadge and Ed Ashcroft and described in the 1985 book Lucid, the Dataflow Programming Language."

<comment><USER2> It's rather unfortunate that there are already two other unrelated projects called pyLucid:

      - https://github.com/jedie/PyLucid https://www.pylucid.org/en/about/
        "An Open Source web content management system written in Python using Django-CMS."
      - https://github.com/yelantingfeng/pyLucid
        "A python implementation of Lucid Data Dreaming.
        "Lucid Data Dreaming is a data augmentation technique for semi-supervised video object segmentation"</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Domain Names: Better to be clear or witty? - <AUTHOR>

In your experience, is it better to have a straight forward domain name like "carprices.com" or something witty, original and completely off topic like Google.com? <comment><USER2> Things to considder no matter what.

1\. Is it short?

2\. a. Is it easy to spell / misspell?

2\. b. Can a person _tell_ a friend about it and is there a chance the friend will actually be able to just type it in?

3\. Is the .com version available? If not, are you trying to do the delicious thing?

4\. Is it really witty, or have you just convinced yourself that it is cause it's all you could find?

5\. If you're going for the straighforward thing, is it really straight forward? Or again, have you just convinced yourself it is.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does short really matter? What if its something incredibly obvious, but still relatively long... like "ISoldMyHouse.com"?

<comment><USER2> Yes, short matters. If you can say the same thing, with fewer syllables / less letters, while keeping 2 - 5 in check, it's a no brainer.

Of course, if you can support your long domain, such as "ISoldMyHouse.com" with hundreds of weekly radio placements featureing a "catchy" tune, you can probably drive home a longer name too.

There are no hard and fast rules, but the guidelines that I mentioned above are tried and true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't like straightforward names, as you've described them, period. For one thing, they aren't really straightforward with the way human brains work. For instance, is it carprices or carprice? Similarly, I'd recommend you stay away from cute names like karprices.com or qarpricez.com. I realize that their intention is to describe their business category, and let the user figure out what the business is about from the name, but what you really end up with is something generic, something that doesn't stick in the mind, and that is vulnerable to a competitor with a memorable brand that can stick in a consumer's mind.

Some specific advice would be:

1) Make it impossible to mis-spell. I know, this was said before in one of the threads above. 2) Does the name have the potential to be used in a sentence, like, "can you google that for me?" or "can you xerox that for me?" or "Did you see x's latest twitter?" 3) Does the name suggest the business category? For example, twitter sort of suggests what it is that the product does, if only on a subconscious level? Same for a lot of Proctor & Gamble brands.

Probably the best thing to do is pick up Ries & Trout's "Positioning." I know Ries has some newer stuff out that speaks directly to naming Internet companies.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> If you look past the incredible success of its products, "Google" is not a great name. It's only witty to math nerds; to the public at large, it's just a nonsense word, unrelated to internet search, and not all that memorable. Its saving graces are that it's short and sounds like a plausible verb. AOL and Yahoo! both had much better names but inferior products.

Google was also fortunate to be early in the trend of nonsense/misspelled domain names. The recent ones are largely forgettable. If you are thinking of going this route, I'd suggest making the name at least tangentially related to the site's function; reddit and flickr do this and are IMHO great names, short and memorable... wufoo and meebo, not so much.

<comment><USER3> I disagree strongly with you on this. Google is a great name, better than all the examples you've mentioned for one simple reason: How many times have you been lost and called a friend and asked her to google an address for you? How many times have you googled a girl you met to see where she works of if she has any pictures you can send to your friends?

Back when Yahoo was the only game in town for search, nobody ever aked me to Yahoo something.

Flickr is a great product with an easy to mis-spell name.

Reddit is good, though.

Regards,

Fred

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen two schools of thought on that, going for a keyword name (rent.com) or going for a brand name (Google).

It seems to be the companies that choose a brand name, witty or not, and build a great product or service associated with the name that do the best overall. Those that get recognized will get more than enough search engine love to rise to the top or the results anyway.

"How to pick a good brand name" is beyond the scope of this comment. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thats a hard one. Something witty will get you recognized if it sticks. But a lot of startups these days have 'witty' unusual names and it doesn;t stand out as much anymore. I would shoot for a straight forward domain name thats easy to remember and is short.

</comment><comment><USER7> depends on your audience. if you're making a trendy, for-the-web-community type of application, go original/witty. if you're looking to hook the grandmas and the soccer moms, an easy, descriptive name is better.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends on who your target base is. Go for the hip and witty if you're looking to attract the TC crowd.

If you're going for mainstream America, you probably want to go direct. It not only conveys what you are trying to serve, but it's very useful in organic seo. People looking for car loans will try car loans dot com or throw it into google.

It's all subjective of course, and it depends on how you want to brand out.

<comment><USER9> "The TC crowd"??? What the hell is that? This is all about marketing... To normal people who will be your consumers... Who the hell does a startup aiming it at the commentators?

Face it, the TC crowd are people who like to watch things happen. Nothing more.

If TC hates your startup, but it's a hit with consumers, who gives a $&&%??

Go to the corner until you realize that a business is about revenues and cash flow. Commentators do not give you that, your market does.

The market rules everything. The market is the only thing that matters.

EDIT: LOL... modded down because you guys did noty like to read what I typed... At least tell me where I am am wrong. Or are you guys all creating startups to please the "TC crowd," whatever that is, and my post hurts your ego?

<comment><USER8> It's not the content, it's the delivery.</comment></comment></comment>


Michael Flynn, Trump National Security Adviser, May Have Mislead on Russia Ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/michael-flynns-disaster/516285/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Writen by David Frum, neocon and speechwriter for George W. Bush. Not someone who's interested in peace but someone who is a proven warmonger.</comment>


5 Things Every DBA Needs To Say To A Developer - <AUTHOR> http://thomaslarock.com/2013/12/5-things-every-dba-needs-say-developer/ <comment><USER2> Clearly this goes both ways. If I had a buck for every time I encountered a developer that was a douche to my dba's, I would be a very rich man. It's a two way street my friends. I think this speaks of an environment primed for devopsification.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is kind of a dumb post no? Suprised to see it on the front page.

Basically don't be a dick and be humble? Sounds like universal advice. I thought this would be more technical.

<comment><USER4> > Basically don't be a dick and be humble? Sounds like universal advice.

Certainly not in the DBA realm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Things Every X needs To Say To Every Y They Encounter"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking it works everywhere. But given that I don't hear these words enough on my teams, it was worth a share. Especially between people who are rewarded for different goals.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's a "DBA"?

<comment><USER7> I think he's referring to an LLC 'doing business as' another entity. Right?</comment></comment>


Austin's First Electric Streetcar Era (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://notevenpast.org/austins-first-electric-streetcar-era/?

<comment><USER2> > Soon after he had engineered the merger, Shipe withdrew from the streetcar > business. He knew the real money lay not in collecting nickel fares, but in > using the availability of streetcar service to boost the value of the land > he was trying to sell. It was a wise move. After the early 1890s, Austin's > streetcar companies struggled financially; though they experienced > occasional periods of profitability, generally after receiving an infusion > of outside capital, these were inevitably followed by stagnation, losses, > bankruptcy, and reorganization. In 1902 the Austin Rapid Transit Railway > Company gave way to the Austin Electric Railway Company, followed in 1911 by > the Austin Street Railway Company and in 1921 by Austin Transit.

A pretty succinct example of the free market naturally underinvesting in things that generate positive externalities, like transit.

<comment><USER3> If you see the phrase _positive externality_ and think to yourself, "Oh, that's good!"—then I hope I can help you see things differently.

Externalities, both positive and negative, mean that somebody other than the owner of an economic resource is affected by its use. A negative externality means that somebody else bears part of the resource's cost, and a positive externality means that somebody else reaps part of its reward. In this sense, positive externalities (just like negative externalities) are a failure of property rights with perverse consequences; part of the return to the investor's investment is placed in the public domain, as economists say. So positive externalities lead to underinvestment, as rayiner noted, because the externalized benefit is captured by someone other than the investor.

And indeed there is an emerging narrative that claims a combination of corruption and over-regulation contributed to the demise of America's early streetcar systems by eroding the property rights of streetcar operators to the point that they could not profitably run their lines. That is, regulation externalized the benefits of streetcars to such an extent that their owners went bankrupt and streetcars disappeared.

A recent article from Vox makes the case [0]. It goes like this: (1) streetcar operators sought monopolies from cities, accepting regulation in return; then (2) regulators fixed fares at a nickel and required streetcar operators to pave and maintain the roads along their lines (because streetcars were originally drawn by shod horses and mules), but (3) when the value of a nickel fell, politicians would not allow fares to rise, even while the paved roads provided by streetcar operators subsidized the automobiles that began to compete with them [1].

History and economics are complicated, but it's clear that private property rights in public transit have just about disappeared in America over the past century or so. And so private, market-directed investment has disappeared too. As a result, today almost every dollar that goes into our core transportation infrastructure comes directly out of taxpayers' pockets and passes through a political process that allocates investments in a way that gives scant attention to their marginal benefit. So in cities like mine, we have rather more billion-dollar suburban highway interchanges than we should have, and rather too little public transit infrastructure.

0\. [http://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history- demise](http://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demise)

1\. A blog post from Market Urbanism offers more details (together with an excoriation of left-liberal politics): [http://marketurbanism.com/2010/09/23/the-great-american- stre...](http://marketurbanism.com/2010/09/23/the-great-american-streetcar- myth/)

<comment><USER4> There was also a simple _economic_ analysis of the effects of Jim Crow in the original article. Basically, the streetcar operators opposed segregating transportation because it would greatly increase their costs (more cars, segregated seating, etc) without increasing ridership.

I wonder how much longer - if any - options like streetcars would have worked if they hadn't been forced to follow laws like that.

<comment><USER5> Probably not much— streetcars disappeared in Northern cities at the same time as in the South.

A huge problem for many private transit systems was that they signed contracts specifying a nickel fare in the pre-inflation era, so once inflation became part of monetary policy, they were unable to properly fund operations.

Beyond that, most streetcars were built before automobiles were common, so they could move relatively efficiently down the middle of the road, unencumbered by traffic. Once auto traffic congested roads, streetcars became much slower, and they weren't able to change lanes to get around an obstruction. That problem could be solved by reserving lanes for streetcars, as bus service could be dramatically improved in most cities by striping exclusive bus lanes and camera-enforcing them, but that wasn't politically feasable at the time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A reply to Perl 6 FUD - <AUTHOR> http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=836349

<comment><USER2> When it's valid and constructive, negative feedback is a good thing. When it's neither of those, and repetitive on top of that, you can't help but leave civility at the door and tell the complainers to shove it.

I get a lot of bitching and negative outside feedback in my project too, including some very uninformed and unreasonable comments, boiling down to "$past_competitor released much more often than you do" and ignoring the fact that their releases were much buggier and less polished. I am not sure what I can do to reduce the amount of complaints like that...

<comment><USER3> _I am not sure what I can do to reduce the amount of complaints like that_

Nothing. Those commends look like they're about you, but they are really about the author trying to prove something about themselves to themselves. Searching for and commenting on perceived faults in other people's work is a valuable therapeutic exercise, and shouldn't be confused with genuine, constructive feedback.

If absolutely feel the need to respond, say "Yes, those are absolutely valid concerns, and you're welcome to work to fix them. However, they're perpendicular from my personal vision for this project (link to vision), so I'll keep working on things which I, personally, consider more relevant."

Unless the exchange is in public, in which case, something more thorough (like the article) may be proper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A more valid criticism of the perl 6 development model is that it's a big-bang approach. They have sunk enormous resources into the components of this system with limited capacity to test either the compatibility of the components they're generating or the utility of the features they're implementing. Sounds like a recipe for disappointment.

<comment><USER5> I'll start this with "I'm a Perl programmer" but I'm not looking for a flame war. I am interested in hearing an expansion of your statements. I am going to admit I don't understand this one.

What do you mean by "Big Bang"? That Perl 6 is being developed on top of Parrot? That Perl 6 is a reinvention instead of re-iteration?

What "enormous resources" are you referring to? The Perl 6 team isn't huge and it's all volunteer with very little financial backing (only some relatively small grants from the Perl Foundation).

Which components are you referring to? Where are the "limited ability to test the compatibility of the components"? Which components? There are a lot of tests though... a truly massive test set. I'm assuming you're not referring to these.

From my understanding the "utility" is a pretty big part of what they're testing. There are folk writing Perl 6 (November wiki <http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?november>). The implementors are going back and forth with Larry about things. A lot of the ideas aren't new, just new in Perl.

I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The standard grammar doesn't need a frozen specification to be implemented, because its implementation is considered part of the spec." Huge step backwards in semantics/specification.

<comment><USER3> If I understand what he's saying correctly, it's quite the opposite: because of a frozen specification, Python needed to halt syntax changes [1] as secondary language implementations catch up. Perl 6, on the other hand, will never have this problem, as the standard grammar will be executable in the language itself.

1\. <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3003/>

<comment><USER6> I don't agree. Python is also suffering from the "we don't need a specification because we have a reference implementation" problem. A very small part of the problem is mitigated if the reference implementation is frozen and is self-hosting (a plus). You really want something you can reason about, otherwise all you have is "that didn't work because the reference parser barfed" versus "you need a close brace."

<comment><USER7> Perl 5 also suffers from the "reference implementation as specification" problem, which is why Perl 6 is actually being quite careful to avoid designating a "reference implementation".

I think our (Perl 6's) notion of "standard grammar as specification" is more of a temporary designation than a permanent one. For now we need a rough guideline to follow when the prose description isn't matching the implementation, both of which are still undergoing a fair bit of revision and updating as we work through the implementation details.

The ultimate arbiter in the Perl 6 specification is the official Perl 6 test suite (<http://perl6.org/specification/>), which is to be shared among all implementations. Basically, if something is to be considered "official Perl 6", it has to appear in the test suite, and any implementation that then passes the test suite is considered a valid Perl 6 implementation.

Pm

(Yes, the test suite is also evolving. But the test suite certainly gives us something that can be reasoned about without having to also adopt all of the quirks of a specific reference implementation.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Asking Me for My Email Address - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2014/01/10/stop-asking-me-for-my-email-address/?from=mostemailed <comment><USER2> [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/stop-asking-me- for-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/stop-asking-me-for-my-email- address/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Stop linking to pages that don't exist...

</comment><comment><USER4> Stop forgetting your password...</comment>


Wireless Data Could Travel Twice as Fast Using a New Circuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532616/simple-circuit-could-double-cell-phone-data-speeds/ <comment><USER3> There's a lot of PR / excitement aroung full duplex operation on the same channel (by opposition to what's usually called full duplex and use separate donwlink and uplink channels), so let me be the Grinch a bit here.

The high level view of FD is that one removes the transmitted signal from the receive path, allowing reception. This must be done at two levels: 1) a big chunk is removed in an analog way 2) the remainder is removed in the digital domain. The reason is that no A/D converter is good enough to work only in the digital domain. Depending on the team, there is a claim of 85 to 100 dB reduction in the Tx to Rx loop. That's impressive, but still a bit short when in LTE a device can receive at ~ -100 dBm (YMMV) and transmit at +23 dBm. And the analog removal part will have a tricky calibration: not a problem for a controlled demo, but tricky (and potentially costly) in real life.

On top of this, all those techniques remove the internal looping of the Tx signal to the Rx. That's already a challenge, but then there are the external reflection: the Tx signal has a direct loop in the device, but can also bounce on surrounding walls/stuff and get back the the Rx path this way. The issue then is that there is a serie of time lags and distortions, so the UE doesn't really know what needs to be subtracted. En the power level of such reflections is big enough to kill the reception, on its own. This reflection issue doesn't exist for some devices like line of sight micro-wave backhaul, but is very common for all user devices (used in-door or in urban environment: no line of sight, a lot of multi-paths).

The reflection issue makes me pessimistic for consumer devices applications. And for other application with little / no reflections, there may be more cost efficient ways to improve things that do not require the tricky analog calibration.

So the teams working on FD do impressive technology, but the road to a profitable business case is still to be proven. Good luck to them, although I'm skeptical (but would be glad to be proven wrong ;).

<comment><USER4> The device they're describing is already known in microwave engineering, it's not a new circuit. It's a parametric-modulated circulator - the capacitance is modulated. Not very useful in real-life: the PR-heavy letter neglects to mention (1) the poor instantaneous bandwidth <0.5% (figure 4c), (2) the poor linearity / poor power handling: Vm and Vdc are few volts in high-Q environment, which translates into maximum power handling well below 0dBm (3) the high sensitivity to analog component variation (fig 4c again) - <USER2> something you want in mass-produced components operating at commercial/industrial temperature ranges.

They neglected to mention the power level they used to measure the S-parameters in the letter or the supplementary material. No self-respecting RF engineer would forget to mention power levels - it again hints at very poor linearity / poor power handling. Typical university "research".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Travel twice as fast" is clearly not what's going on. The article is about full-duplex mode, i.e. doubling the throughput. The data are travelling just as fast as before.</comment>