Ask HN: What site or tool is your "can't live without?" | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What site or tool is your "can't live without?"

13 pointsphlux29 comments

What do you find to be the best site/resource/tool that you find indispensable and use daily, and would recommend to other HNers?

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1Password is an incredibly valuable tool for me that I use all the time. Before I started using it, I had moderately weak passwords that were roughly the same on every website for which I had an account. But now I can have randomly generated passwords unique to each website and not have to worry about knowing them--I just need to know one password (a randomly generated, strong one) and that allows me to securely log in to any site.

And the Dropbox syncing is a killer feature--I have the iPhone app as well as the desktop version, so I can view the passwords anywhere if I need to log in on a computer at school (for example).

And, of course, supporting and augmenting that is Dropbox: it lets me easily sync not only my passwords but also my files--I've stopped carrying around a flash drive now--if I'm working on a file at school, I can just upload it to my Dropbox (in the correct folder) and then it's there when I get home, without me having to think about it at all. It's very convenient and I've become somewhat dependent on it.

BitBucket https://bitbucket.org

StackOverflow

The dictionary

Mnemosyne (for spaced repetition)

A pad of paper

Google Calendar (it integrates with my phone! and I integrate it with org-mode agenda)

Nice to see someone else using Mnemosyne. I was going to make an Android client for it as part of the Google Summer of Code, but Google rejected Mnemosyne's application. I guess it doesn't have the same weight as OpenOffice or Chrome or whatever :(

*Evernote - specifically the Clip to Evernote chrome extension which allows you to save links, specific text/pictures, and/or whole webpages while browsing the web. God knows a good idea can be as transient as the time it takes to open up a word document or email yourself a note. Plus, having a single place where all your notes go, whether you're on your iphone (evernote iphone app) or laptop makes it much easier later to find that idea, article, etc.

You may laugh, but I still use Delicious religiously and will until I export it to something equally as effective, simple, and useful. Close 2nd and 3rd are Dropbox (I could use a shared FTP server and mount it as a drive, but why?) and Gmail (I guess I could use any other email if I had to).

EDIT: forgot to add beanstalk for git hosting.

Git as source control. I am absolutely in love with Git and wouldn't want to go back to anything else. I've used CVS, Subversion, Perforce, Mercurial and now Git and I never knew what I was missing until I got to git!

As someone who has tried mercurial and are now firmly in the git supporters camp, can you relate how git is superior to mercurial? I've used git for a long time now and I really like it, but it's very hard for most developers to wrap their heads around and it seems like mercurial has a better cross platform toolchain than git, these things have made me frequently ponder how mercurial compares to git.

What I like about Git over Mercurial is some stuff that may seem weird to others.

- The octopus tree merge, I use it much more than I previously thought I did looking at some of my non-public repositories.

- having branches that have completely different history (never did figure out how to do this with Mercurial)

- read-tree, filter-branch, and a whole range of other tools to re-write history or change somethings location and all that fun jazz.

- tracked branches, makes git push/pull easier

- the staging area and being able to select different parts of a patch to commit separately (This is by far one of the most important ones)

- amending a commit, rebasing and altering history isn't just supported it is recommended, and makes commits from multiple different sources look much cleaner in a tree view (more linear history). This is definitely great in a company where mainline may move fairly fast and rebasing by developers is a way to have the history look linear, without merging "master" into a feature branch.

- Git has support for short-lived play branches, Mercurial has this as well with hg strip, but it is an extension and not part of the core, or you have to clone a full repository, makes working with others harder too as I can't just push the play branch up to my clone on the server (assuming a Github model).

I've found that once I realised how Git works under the hood that it made so much more sense, not only that I feel that it is more powerful, for example here is a gist of something I recently did for a repo at work:

https://gist.github.com/878192

This helps with other internals projects in that we are not pulling in the full "master" branch, instead we are just pulling in a very specific sub-set of files, which is easy to keep updated with git pull -s subtree.

I'm sure that I have only touched the least significant parts of what Git has to offer, and that there is so much more waiting for me, but that is my reasoning and why I like it so much.

Honestly? Facebook.

I would be embarrassed to tell you how often I open it up each day but I've found it the best way to stay in touch with my friends back home and schedule/rsvp to events.

* DropBox

Simple file syncing between my home and office computers? Versioning, when I need it?

Dropbox tops the list.

* SimpleNote / nvALT

The easiest way to take a note and have it available anywhere.

* Instapaper

I do more reading through instapaper than I do through RSS feeds. The new feature that shows you articles liked by your twitter / facebook friends? Amazing.

There's also some great browser add-ons/extensions that act similar to Evernote's "clip to evernote", in that it just saves a webpage to read later. This helps me a lot with productivity, etc...

Evernote and Google Docs are my two that I couldn't live without. Especially with Google Docs' new comment system (much more like a conversation, and more unobtrusive), and the Evernote's ease of use makes it a no-brainer.

gmail, hands down. Not only do I use it for communication, but I also store a lot of notes and cross-computer bookmarks in the form of e-mails to myself.

LastPass fills in all my forms and Passwords ...

I cant single them out but here are the ones I use daily - Chrome (and firefox with firebug) - Gmail and Google Calendar - Stackoverflow - Workflowy - Dropbox - Wikipedia (and Quora increasingly)

Vim.

The bulk of my work involves writing - be that emails, articles or code. Vim provides an efficient, RSI minimizing way to rapidly tweak and edit text. I couldn't imagine living without it.

Is VIM integrated with your email client or do you just copy and paste?

I copy and paste, although integration might be worth looking into.

I haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about Vmail (Gmail for Vim)

http://danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html

Notational Velocity with Simplenote syncing. An awesome combination.

+1. Sync it with iPad, iPhone and Mac OS. Definitely can't live without it.

Google

I presume the answer "HN" is too meta?

pastebin ftw.

I find github second only to the sonic screwdriver.

Dropbox No Nees for USB drives anymore

Google Docs easy collaboration within our startup

and of course Twitter

Pen and notebook; Emacs; org-mode; Gmail; Git (and GitHub); Dropbox.

a whiteboard, a moleskine notebook

for scribbles I haven't found an adequate app replacement for either of these.

Mercurial.

github

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