Ask HN: What are the most underrated tools you use regularly?
15Sourabhsss1205/26/2025, 12:20:18 PM
Comments (20)
Qem · 2d ago
Pen & Paper. For all the time that I spend daily in front of computers, when I must reason deeper and clearly about a problem, nothing beats sketching drawings and doing some quick calculations by hand. Typing in a keyboard, physical or virtual, doesn't give me the same feeling of "flow" to my thought process. Also distraction-free.
Sourabhsss1 · 2d ago
I also use pen and paper daily. Although people suggest I take notes online, my first thoughts tend to be on paper.
Unfortunately not; But to be honest: The episodes are titled after the tools they cover.
The podcast is a short-format that explains the problem, the tool as a solution and some side notes.
Example: "File renaming is annoying and complicated. Then I found the `renameutils` package and from that i use qmv. It opens your favourite editor with the names of all files you want to rename. Once you are done with the modifications, you close the editor and the files are renamed. That's it! Enjoy!"
I actually started it as I just LOVE cli tools and want to spread some love for them. Also I love telling people about them and so many people were thankful for the hints and later-on told me "oh that tool saved me so much time! i love it." And the podcast is just the idea to spread the knowledge of those tools
tootyskooty · 2d ago
Beeminder: Personal accountability through commitment contracts. Helps me stay on track with my goals, often serves as a little extra "push" to do something useful even if I'm really low on willpower that day.
Anki: Maybe not underrated, but seems like it only really took off in language-learning circles. I create a card for anything new that I'd like to retain, and have been doing so for almost 10y now. Really multiplies the long-term value of sitting down and learning, since I can be relatively certain that I'll keep the knowledge with me for a long time. Particularly useful for papers.
Sourabhsss1 · 2d ago
Yeah, I've heard about Anki.
cl42 · 2d ago
Does Zettelkasten count? I started using a more formal approach to note-taking and idea review and it's been fantastic in helping me generate ideas, hypotheses, topics to write essays on, and so on.
It requires a bit of rigour but it's helped my intellectual productivity immensely.
gaws · 1d ago
Do you index cards?
cl42 · 21h ago
I search through them via text-based/exact matches. I also try to review the notes every once in a while + do use tagging.
I'd love to add an LLM layer onto this at some point but haven't done that yet.
fsflover · 2d ago
Qubes OS, a security-oriented desktop OS with fewer vulnerabilities than in Xen thanks to a clever design and reliance on hardware-assisted virtualization: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#statistics
Sourabhsss1 · 2d ago
Have you seen any real-world examples of exploits being contained thanks to this design?
The podcast is a short-format that explains the problem, the tool as a solution and some side notes.
Example: "File renaming is annoying and complicated. Then I found the `renameutils` package and from that i use qmv. It opens your favourite editor with the names of all files you want to rename. Once you are done with the modifications, you close the editor and the files are renamed. That's it! Enjoy!"
I actually started it as I just LOVE cli tools and want to spread some love for them. Also I love telling people about them and so many people were thankful for the hints and later-on told me "oh that tool saved me so much time! i love it." And the podcast is just the idea to spread the knowledge of those tools
Anki: Maybe not underrated, but seems like it only really took off in language-learning circles. I create a card for anything new that I'd like to retain, and have been doing so for almost 10y now. Really multiplies the long-term value of sitting down and learning, since I can be relatively certain that I'll keep the knowledge with me for a long time. Particularly useful for papers.
It requires a bit of rigour but it's helped my intellectual productivity immensely.
I'd love to add an LLM layer onto this at some point but haven't done that yet.
- paper (especially in the form of A5 paper notebooks used as lab diaries)
- reading
- listening
- writing
- drawing
- plain text files (together with text editors and UNIX tools)
- full text search
https://github.com/rupa/z
justfile to avoid typing long commands.
sleek to format sql.
and many more.