Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 496 posts.
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching…
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
A comparison of Emacs and OS X keyboard shortcuts for editing text.
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name:
Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns
I usually I blog about Angellist but I have shown this “lifehack” to so many people that I thought it’s worth it’s own blogpost...
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
This domain is parked. There is no active website here.
App developers often forget to test how their apps perform under less-than-ideal networking environments. Learn how you can use the Network Link conditioner to simulate a spotty Internet connection on your device.
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
A sad example of how easy it is to dismiss certain design principles because it does not seem relevant at the time.
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
