Ask HN: What's one of your favorite personal programs, and why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's one of your favorite personal programs, and why?

12 pointsh0ldnack17 comments

I have a python script that uses my phone's haptic motor to produce morse code. Its not at all important, but it feels cool to be able to read a notification covertly. So what are some of your favorite programs like this?

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My local newspaper publishes a puzzle called "The Challenger" (where you guess what numbers in a 4 x 4 grid will add up to the totals at the end of each row and column). It frustrated me because there's no one right answer -- you were just supposed to start guessing numbers until you stumbled onto a sequence that worked.

So I wrote a nice elegant program that crunched through every possibility (using 12 nested loops), eventually spitting out solution after solution after solution. The first time it produced a valid solution, I was thrilled -- and from then on I felt like I'd already somehow solved all the puzzles in advance.

Regarding that puzzle type...

There is a rule that lets you transform between valid solutions, right? What happens when you use that rule to help impose additional constraints onto the problem such that you are solving for a particular solution rather than a solution? I feel like that should sometimes let you choose pathologically transformed variants. For example - lets say you were stuck with eight and nine as your valid answers in a bottom left corner, but the constraints don't forbid nine. We ought to be able to pick nine in this situation under the logic that there will be a transformation rule which makes nine a valid solution. Such a choice means we are now solving for a particular solution - not a solution - because eight might have worked just as well.

In other words can you use the "do you know a related problem technique" to make your problem more specific?

Ha! I absolutely love solving stuff like this, automating it many times is more fun for me than actually solving a problem. But I'm always dissapointed/bored when I have automated it, suffering from success.

Would be cool if you win money for solving it!

Until iodine hit the scene I had my own DNS tunneller that could get a short "Sorry honey I'll be late home for tea" message out in situations where a nearby WiFi network would relay a DNS request.

I wrote my own web-based "scratch notes" program to aid my daily research activity with tons of quality of life features suited to my own workflow (autosave, autoscroll while typing, image paste, ergonomic fonts).

I have been using it everyday since i first developed it in 2018.

I wrote a program to implement a half-QWERTY keyboard on a full-QWERTY keyboard (holding the space bar horizontally flips the keyboard layout) while I was recovering from a serious bike accident and didn’t have any use of my left hand for several weeks. It was my first time writing a Mac app and my first/last in ObjC. I built it so I could work more efficiently while I was injured, and because I needed to work.

I didn’t release it to the public because:

1. It very probably would violate patent law, and I don’t want to find out.

2. It was extremely crashy, probably because I was more concerned about making something kinda work than learning memory management. (The only change I made restarted it when it crashed.)

I have an iOS shortcut that automatically re-builds and re-deploys a static site on Vercel at the start of every month. The site includes stats/visualisations for the current month, so the code finds the current month at build time and I just re-build it once a month. Completely unnecessary but it's pretty cool seeing that notification that my phone just re-deployed it for me :)

That's cool!

Unsatisfied with built-in folder-based bookmarks, I made a tiny site in Flask where I could add links, along with comments and tags. I can then search any of these fields. I'm sure it exists somewhere, but it was a nice learning experience and I use it an awful lot. It's quite satisfying to see my "library" grow.

I miss delicious.

But there are so many bookmark managers out there. I use raindrop, but there are many others. Do they not meet your needs?

My `cfg` script, which is bash script that wraps around GNU Stow and lets me

`cfg pull` - pull latest git repo and apply via `stow`

`cfg push` - push local config changes to git server

`cfg apply` - apply local changes with `stow`

There are a few other commands too but I don't use them often. This simple script + repo lets me manage my dotfiles across ~7 machines

I have two I run most days:

- A `daily` script that creates a daily notes markdown file with the current date and pulls in the tasks from the previous day of notes

- A `config` script that tweaks some files for a local development environment so I don't need to worry about using `git stash` for the things I always change the same way

I have been working on a Hacker News client app that can notify you when there’s a new reply to your post. Been using it daily rn.

gless: https://github.com/tpapastylianou/gless

it's such a tiny thing, but I can't imagine not having it on my machine. It's one of the first things i always download on a new system.

PS. The morse thing sounds cool! Care to share?

https://github.com/h0ldnack/Scripts/morse I did just rewrite it so it currently only "plays", I don't know the right word for feeling Morse code, each notification once. I'll be updating it in a bit.

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