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Git for Computer Scientists (2010)
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph .
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 66 posts.
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Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…
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Git from the Bottom Up (2008)
Welcome to the world of Git. I hope this document will help to advance your understanding of this powerful content tracking system, and reveal a bit of the simplicity underlying it — however dizzying its array of options may seem from the outside.
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Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
Microsoft Excel the programming language is evolving. With the recent release of LAMBDA, users can now define new functions in the program’s formula language. Learn about the capability and its role in the transformation of spreadsheet formulas.
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Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
Every ops team has some manual procedures that they haven’t gotten around to automating yet. Toil can never be totally eliminated. Very often, the biggest toil center for a team at a growing …
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HOWTO: Be more productive (2005)
“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…
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Text editing hates you too (2019)
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
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5M+ Wordpress sites use “Classic Editor” plugin
Enables the previous "classic" editor and the old-style Edit Post screen with TinyMCE, Meta Boxes, etc. Supports all plugins that extend this screen.
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GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
Over the past months, we’ve left our macOS model behind and moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.
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Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)
Computer users organize their files into folders because that is the primary tool offered by operating systems. But applying this standard hierarchical model to my own files, I began to notice shortcomings of this paradigm over the years. At the same time, I used some other information systems not based on…
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A look at search engines with their own indexes
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
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Modus Themes
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
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Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter . In online discussions about this, I frequently see…
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Fix Terminals
I want terminal keypresses to Just Work. What do I mean Just Work? I mean programs in a simple orthogonal way, can determine the key that was pressed, and this model should easily map to the user's expectation.
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Typing Is Hard
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
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JSON with Commas and Comments
Summary: JWCC is a minimal extension to the widely used JSON file format with (1) optional commas after the final element of arrays and objects and (2) C/C++ style comments. These two features make it more suitable for human-editable configuration files, without adding so many features that it’s incompatible with…
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TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem
A browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.
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Map of my personal data infrastructure
Well, it's been a year since I started the draft, so I guess it's about time to publish this! :)
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Working Off-Grid Efficiently
For the first 3 years we tested the limits of our space, and at first, it was difficult to create new things, as we had to make time to learn how to solve the underlying problems. Our boat was not just an office, it was also our house and transport. As for us, we were artists, but also had to be plumbers, deckhands…
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The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan
Designs for a quieter, more energy efficient purifier, and data proving it really works.
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Vinegar: Safari extension that replaces YouTube embeds with HTML5 video tags
Remember YouTube5? And a Dinosaur remembers. YouTube5 was a Safari extension back when Flash was still a thing and hated by everyone. It replaced the YouTube...
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Making Your Own Tools
Listen in your podcast player by searching for Feeling of Computing , or via Apple Podcasts | Overcast | RSS
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Various ways to include comments on a static site (2018)
Overview of different techniques to implement comments using a static site generator.
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Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020)
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
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Internet Search Tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.