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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 30 posts.
On Python packaging
So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …
Stephen Fry on the iPhone, Bold, Storm, and G1
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:- 7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard. 1 x Ethernet cable: […]
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim
Hi all. I am starting a new article series called Vim Plugins You Should Know About. As the title suggests, this series is going to be about Vim plugins that you should know about and be using. The first article in this series will be about one of my favorite plugins called surround.vim. So what is surround.vim plugin?
Announcing my free book on Vim
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Feedback Army: website feedback for $7, inspired by HN post
Feedback Army is an incredibly useful little website where you pay $7 for feedback to a given website of yours, and then get back 10 comments. Feedback Army uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the background. You enter the domain in question, say “example.com”, and then ask a bunch of question. Questions could be, “What…
LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer
I’ve earlier performed a little test , comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change…
Review of Intel's New X25M SSD (same one Torvalds has) in a new MacBook Pro
It has almost been a year since I wrote about the future of computing and how I thought that it was all about Solid State Drives (this was before I became infatuated with the cloud). Well I finally got my hands on one. It's Intel's new X25-M 80GB SSD and it is among the fastest consumer-aimed SSDs o
The not to do list: 9 habits to stop now
"Not-to-do" lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
Unlimited Virtual Assistant Tasks for $59 a Month - TimeSvr.com, a Review, Versus My Single Assistant
In a previous post I discuss how I outsourced my cooking for $60 a week . In this article, I discuss my experiences with a virtual assistant.
Outsourcing Cooking with Craigslist for $60/week
T hat’s right – for just $60 a week, I’ve bought myself some time to chase after some dreams: working out, playing guitar, and of course writing.
Iamelgringo's first big project using Mechanical Turk
I just finished my first big project using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. I'm in love. I had a list of over 6000 business names, addresses and url's of dubious quality that I needed to make sure was accurate. For a brief moment, I thought about checking them myself. But after doing several dozen by hand, I realized…
Follow Hacker News from the Console
Here is something neat that I hacked together – a `top' like Python program called Hacker Top that allows you to follow Hacker News from a UNIX terminal! Hacker News has become the 2nd source for news after programming.reddit for me. I have a couple of ideas for a startup myself and the tips I get from Hacker News...
Done, and Gets Things Smart
First off, I'm calling for a moratorium on Simpsons references until the writers over there are Done, and gets things funny . Secondly, is it possible to cluster DGTSers? Can they recognize each others' brilliance and form into a sort of hive mind, or do they end up abrading one another with slight differences?…
How To: Getting Started with EC2 (for beginners)
Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon's web services arsenal. You've probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the "elastic compute cloud." In layman's terms, it's a server. In slightly less layman's terms, EC2 lets you e
Programmer Dvorak
As a computer professional, you've probably done some typing over the years. A lot of typing. And your hands don't always love you for it. If you are concerned about catching the carpal tunnel syndrome, you should be looking into Dvorak keyboards. They have been designed to minimize the finger movement for the most…
Five whys
At 3:30 in the morning of January 10th, 2008, a shrill chirping woke up our system administrator, Michael Gorsuch, asleep at home in Brooklyn. It was a text message from Nagios, our network monitor…