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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 267 posts.
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You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
I envy economists. Unlike computer scientists, they seem to be able to publish best-seller books with innovative research. One such book is Piketty's Capital. The book is reminiscent of Marx's capital in its scope. If you haven't heard about the book yet, it has a simple message: the yield on capital is higher than…
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A Hacker’s Guide to Git
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
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Control-R, my favorite Unix shell command
Search your bash or zsh history incrementally with Control-R, step back with repeated presses, go forward with Control-S, and tune HISTFILE and HISTSIZE.
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Pain we forgot
Much of the pain in programming is taken for granted. After years of repetition it fades into the background and is forgotten. The first step in making programming easier is to be concious of what makes it hard. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a smart but inexperienced end user trying to build, test and…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Transform any text into a patent application
[Hello everyone! Thanks for taking a look at my blog! If you want updates on this project or other things I’m working on, just follow me on twitter ]
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Rich text editing with WriteLatex
An online LaTeX editor that’s easy to use. No installation, real-time collaboration, version control, hundreds of LaTeX templates, and more.
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org-drill.el – flashcards and spaced repetition for org-mode
Org-Drill is an extension for Org mode . Org-Drill uses a spaced repetition algorithm to conduct interactive "drill sessions", using org files as sources of facts to be memorised. Each topic is treated as a "flash card". The material to be remembered is presented to the student in random order. The student rates his…
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Firefox Developer Tools – Editable box model, Sublime Text keys
A new set of the Firefox Developer Tools features has just been uplifted to the Aurora channel. These features are available right now in Aurora, and will be in the ...
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Magic mirror: One way mirror with a monitor behind it
I build stuff. Virtual and physical. For both business and pleasure. Join me in my development, design and electronics journey.
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When TDD Doesn't Work
Over the years many people have complained about the so-called “religiosity” of some of the proponents of Test Driven Development. The recent brouhaha over TDD has, once again, brought these complaints to the fore. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about when TDD does not work.
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A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
We present a new type of augmented mechanical keyboard, sensing rich and expressive motion gestures performed both on and directly above the device. A low-resolution matrix of infrared (IR) proximity sensors is interspersed with the keys of a regular mechanical keyboard. This results in coarse but high frame-rate…
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SSH Kung Fu
An extended look at SSH features that can serve a variety of purposes for different use cases.
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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?…
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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 …
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LyX 2.1.0 released
Note that we have an announcements mailling list in case you want to be automatically informed about news. RSS feeds are here .
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My new favorite vim/tmux bug
This week, I'm grateful that my coworkers know to come grab me if something seriously weird is going on, because it...
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