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Open Thread: What's your killer app?
Merlin Mann | Aug 21 2006
The other day I was talking with someone about the novel and non-obvious ways that people use Excel in their work and home life. Gotta say, I've personally seen some pretty amazing stuff happen when people take a favorite app, get really good at it, then bend it to their will. (And Excel is perfect for this.) This tracks to Danny's Life Hack concept by which the alpha geeks were achieving lofty heights of productivity partly by mastering 1-3 "killer apps" -- then using them to solve most of their information and functional problems in fairly novel ways. So my question for you: What's your killer app? Is there one place where 80% or more of your activity takes place (by choice)? Vim? Excel? Perl? Firefox? Post-it Notes? What's yours and when did you realize you'd become a badass at using it? 106 Comments
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 I am a really techy...Submitted by Ronald Cook (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 11:01am.
I am a really techy user of Excel. I use a genetic algorithm add-in to doo all sorts of optiziation and regression work. For the genetic algorithm work I also use the frequency and histogram functions to calculate information theroretic values such as Shannon entropy and Mutual information for use in the genertic algorithm applications. These applications include stock picking, portfolio optimization chemical structure design, selection of the best training sets for self-organizing maps I also use a lot of neural network add-ins for Excel. » POSTED IN:
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