Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,415 posts.

Tools & Productivity
Any year
781

No Config for Old Men

Ask anyone who's really into cooking and they'll tell you how important it is to have a kitchen that's arranged just right. To someone who rarely cooks, a kitchen is probably just a place to store a few pots and a toaster, and the placement of such stuff doesn't matter much: canned soup and microwave dinners are…

798

DuckDB as the New jq

Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project (like a SQLite geared towards data applications). And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.

802

Minimal PDF

Most PDF files do not look readable in a text editor. Compression, encryption, and embedded images are largely to blame. After removing these three components, one can more easily see that PDF is a human-readable document description language.