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Hosting a website on a disposable vape
Someone's trash is another person's web server.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 496 posts.
272
An NFC movie library for my kids
When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangibl...
273
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image generation
Nano Banana allows 32,768 input tokens and I’m going to try to use them all dammit.
274
Avoid Non-Microsoft Antivirus Software
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
275
Git undo: We can do better
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
276
iPhone dumbphone
I used Apple Configurator to turn my iPhone into a dumb phone. I can only access the apps and websites I want to use, and it’s feeling great!
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Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code
Overview of search tools for desktop and mobile; using Emacs and Ripgrep as desktop search engine
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Effective Spaced Repetition
“To flash conviction on the mind.”
281
macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and…
282
I’m Not a Robot
Prove your humanity once and for all
283
GNU Recutils
Fred and George, Turtles in love There are hundreds of cool command line tools that have been made over the years built on the unix philosophy. Plain text is powerful, ubiquitous, and human-centric. It was also the only option for computing for quite a while. It’s no surprise that some of the most sophisticated tools…
284
Shortest URLs on the Internet
What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me. But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at…
285
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single…
286
How I Use "AI"
I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them.
287
Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner
an adventure in image processing and taking very wide photographs (blog post; 4,600 words)
288
What I Hate About Git
Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things wit…
289
An opinionated approach to GNU Make
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
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Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
292
Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
293
A Hacker’s Guide to Git
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
294
Hypermodern Python
A guide to modern Python tooling with a focus on simplicity and minimalism.
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Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures
Typographic ligatures are when multiple characters appear to combine into a ...
296
Xkcd Password Generator
The button below will generate a random phrase consisting of four common words. According to yesterday’s xkcd strip, such phrases are hard to guess (even by brute force), …
297
How to Learn Nix
It's like a Let's Play, but for obscure software documentation. I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.
298
Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
299
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
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Git in six hundred words
(This essay is a companion piece to Gitlet, my implementation of Git in JavaScript.)