Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,417 posts.

Tools & Productivity
Any year
3811

Useful use of cat(1)

Rather special example: This was useful for me on a Redhat Linux, where man(1) otherwise annoyingly would intersperse the output with headers and footers for a print version, which is rarely used, though... I tried: ( echo -e ".pl 1100i"; cat "$1"; echo ".pl \\n(nlu+10\n" ) | tbl | nroff -man

3812

Making my bookshelves clickable

You can make regions of an image clickable with a number of techniques, from overlaying an SVG that contains onclick JavaScript handlers all the way to using image maps. I love this idea. I started to think about how I could create an image of my bookshelves that you could click to learn more about each book I am…

3819

Actually using ed (2012)

The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…

3836

Making Slides

I was asked to give a short talk in my Departmental Proseminar yesterday on the topic of giving presentations, and specifically about making slides effective. There is more than one way to give a good talk, and there is more than one way to make “good slides” or—better—make good use of slides and other material you…

3840

De-Clouding: Music

I’m going through a phase of figuring out what I can get out of the cloud and “own”. Particularly with regard to streaming services. I’ve never paid for Spotify. But I’ve had iTunes Match so that I can take all of the weird, not-on-streaming music that I have (I wrote about this back in 2013!!!!), […]