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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.

Tools & Productivity
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3633

Practical Tmux

Today I switched over completely from GNU Screen to the more modern BSD-licensed alternative, tmux . After making sure that tmux had replacements for all Screen’s key features, I took the plunge, and haven’t looked back. The project’s webpage has a complete list of features available under tmux, but as an everyday…

3634

OS X Command Line Utilities

The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you’re migrating from Linux, you’ll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren’t aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about…

3635

Bezier Curves and Type Design: A Tutorial

[2026/09/14]: This article became the most popular I've ever written. Since it was written a long time ago, I decided to rework it: polishing the wording to facilitate comprehension, fixing dead links and typos, and adding interactivity. Still, it remains faithful to the original — a lot of people discussed it and…

3641

Software Checklist

During the second World War, fighter pilots would scramble to take off. As they bumbled down the grass runway, engines open at full throttle, trying to take off on a short, bumpy track with a full load of fuel and ammunition, their heart would stop when the engine mis-fired. Was the fuel mix too rich, or too lean?…

3642

DigitalOcean Indicator

The other weekend I took some time to play around with the DigitalOcean API, and this is what resulted. The DigitalOcean indicator allows you to monitor and manage your droplets directly from your panel. You can: Quickly see which droplets are active. Reboot, power on, and/or power down you …

3653

Tarsnap price cut

This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…

3656

Git Source Code Review

Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams ( linux kernel , id Software , Epic Unreal ) to single individual ( Prince of Persia , Another world , Rick Dangerous ), many have adopted it as…

3657

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…

3660

Editing binaries: easier than it sounds

Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two models of the…