Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,416 posts.
Backing up 18 years in 8 hours
Max Goodhart's personal journal and sketchbook.
Nine coding harnesses vs. your laptop
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks
In the heart of winter, our family found joy in transforming freshly fallen snow into giant Lego-like bricks using the tops of storage bins. The children eagerly assembled these into a grand snowfort, crafting an impressive igloo with walls sturdy enough to host their snowy adventures. As dusk fell,
Getting Organized with Org Mode
I’ve been using Emacs Org mode for nearly a year now. For a while I mostly just used it to take and organize notes, but over time I’ve discovered it’s an incredibly useful tool for managing projects and tasks, writing and publishing documents, keeping track of time and todo lists, and maintaining a journal. Project…
PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools (2021)
This post is an attempt to bring together my go-to open-source PDF analysis and processing tools and commands for a variety of common tasks.
Appreciating Exif
The '90s-era digital camera metadata format, still useful in 2026.
Customizing tmux
I have been exploring some new tools here and there. When I started watching Primeagen, I took a note of several tools that he was using and advocating for. One of them was tmux. What is tmux? tmux is a terminal multiplexer. What that means is you can have many terminals in one. According to tmux wiki: tmux is a…
I lost my data trying to back it up
This is a story about how I lost my data when trying to prevent it by backing it up.
Ennui: How to Overcome Chronic Boredom
Ennui (pronounced on-wee ) is chronic boredom that involves weariness, apathy, dissatisfaction, and lack of fulfillment. Some people experience a general sense of ennui in life, whereas others experience it in a specific domain, like their hobbies or work. For example, someone might experience ennui when it comes to a…
Zig build system
As the popularity of zig cc, more developers may realize Zig is not only a programming language, but also a toolchain to help maintaining C/C++/Zig project. Today I want to discuss one vital part of this toolchain: Zig's build system, build.zig the first non-trivial Zig program for newcomers. Note: This post is based…
Open source memory layer so any AI agent can do what Claude.ai and ChatGPT do
Give any AI agent a persistent memory in minutes. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, OpenRouter, and any MCP-compatible agent. Open source, self-hosted, model-agnostic.
Why I recommend Renovate over any other dependency update tools
Explaining why Renovate is going to be my solution to keeping up-to-date with dependencies and it's not likely to change any time soon.
A guide to prompting AI, for what it is worth
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
Build your own Siri locally and on-device
That doesn’t spy on you
Using email wrong
If you don’t like email, try a different strategy.
Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
Thoughts on an experiment that I've been running for about a month.
git's –end-of-options Flag
The git flag I assumed was an LLM hallucination
Chest Fridge (2009)
Chest fridge Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only…
Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog