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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 496 posts.
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Style your RSS feed
How to make your RSS feed look nice and provide useful information at the same time.
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In Praise of AutoHotKey
People think it’s weird that I do all my development on a Windows machine. It’s definitely a second-class citizen experience in the wider development world, and Windows has a lot of really frustrating issues, but it’s still my favorite operating system. This is for exactly one reason: AutoHotKey. AHK is an engine for…
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Why Microsoft Word must die
I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...
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How to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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Useless Use of "dd" (2015)
tl;dr: dd works for reading and writing disks, but it has no "low level I/O" capabilities that make it more suited for this than any other shell utility. Like cat you should use it where it makes sense, e.g. to take advantage of its wide array of options, rather than try to ensure that all disk related commands begin…
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My Python Development Environment, 2020 Edition
<p>For years I’ve noodled around with various setups for a Python development environment. A couple of years ago <a href="https://jacobian.org/2018/feb/21/python-environment-2018/">I wrote about a setup I finally liked</a>; this is an update to that post.</p> <p>Bad news: this stuff still isn’t stable, and…
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The Microsoft MFA system almost brought me to a nervous breakdown
Update 12/10/21, 10:15 UTC: I never imagined this post would reach the front page on Hacker News and gather so much support. Thank you all…
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Minimal PDF
Most PDF files do not look readable in a text editor. Compression, encryption, and embedded images are largely to blame. After removing these three components, one can more easily see that PDF is a human-readable document description language.
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Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
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Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
It’s quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a “Markdown…
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Command-line tools for data science
Blog article by Jeroen Janssens. Sep 19, 2013. 21 min read. Data science is OSEMN (pronounced as awesome). That is, it involves Obtaining, Scrubbing, Exploring, Modelling, and iNterpreting data. As a data scientist, I spend quite a bit of time on the command-line, especially when there’s data to be obtained, scrubbed…
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Tools for thought: graphical algebra and Fourier analysis
" I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. […]
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ChatGPT in an iOS Shortcut: Smart HomeKit Voice Assistant
Ever since I tried ChatGPT and GPT-3, everything else feels painfully dumb and useless: Siri, Alexa, Google Home and all other “smart”…
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Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity
I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper , but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone . I actually remember struggling to grok tla , and being happy that someone took the time to write…
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Use GNU Emacs
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
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The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
Reflecting on my most successful open source project.
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My Tungsten Cube (2019)
A few months ago I bought a featureless cube of tungsten. It’s 1.5 inches across and cost $130, but I argue it was one of the best purchases I’ve made recently.
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A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
Narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources are superior to broadband (white) light for scanning color negative film; there are very good reasons why all commercial film scanners use RGB. ( film scanners were using blue LEDs at least a decade before they would be widely used in consumer products! ) Scanning film with…
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Jujutsu megamerges for fun and profit
A practical guide to creating and maintaining powerful megamerge workflows in Jujutsu for faster, conflict-free development.
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Chat Notebooks
Wolfram expands Notebooks, integrating LLM functionality into the new chat cell and Chat Notebook. Stephen Wolfram explains how chat-enabled and chat-driven versions work.
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How to stop Time Warner Cable sucking at Youtube
Experience: Capita Technology · Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Location: Australia · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Mitch Ribar’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.
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Short URLs: Why and How
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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How to Get Started with Tree-Sitter
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.