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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
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Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups
Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even…
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Bad Apple but it's 6,500 regexes that I search for in Vim
There's no reason I should exit vim just to watch a video
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Plan mode is dead
Earlier this year, I believed planning was going to become the most important part of building software with AI.
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History and Effective Use of Vim
This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.
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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task…
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I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery
What's the modern equivalent of flipping through CDs? Physical album cards with NFC tags that bring back the tactile joy of music discovery.
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I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
Reify: Sell More Software
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Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
(4 min read) Batching things by function can skyrocket your productivity.
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SSH tips and tricks
Since I joined Charm, I’ve been working and learning more about SSH, and I thought I would share a few quick tips and tricks with you.
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The ReMarkable Streaming Tool v2: Elevating Remote Work Efficiency
In this article, I expose the new version of the streaming tool for my reMarkable tablet. Originally crafted in 2021, this tool allowed me to stream sketches during video calls. Aiming for more user-friendliness, I revamped the design to a clientless implementation. This articles describes the implementation with some…
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macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
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OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …
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Tmux for Mere Mortals
Tmux is great. Tmux defaults are not. How to make use of a brilliant tool without breaking your fingers?
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‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems
As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to force people to work from home, countless companies are now holding daily meetings using videoconferencing services from Zoom . But without the protection of a password, there’s a decent chance your next Zoom meeting could be “Zoom bombed” — attended or disrupted by someone who…
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A dot a day keeps the clutter away
The simplest organization system I've tried is a sheet of colored dot stickers. It's also the best.
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Fridge 0.2
My offgrid, solar powered, zero-battery-use fridge has sucessfully made it through spring, summer, fall, and more than enough winter.
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The Curse of NixOS
I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. On the other hand, it's…
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Pair Locking Your iPhone
Learn how to pair lock your iPhone to break law enforcement forensics tools and protect your data.
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The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
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A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine
This project, the M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine, was on my to-do list for a long time. I finally managed to complete the project after working on it for several months in my free time. The machine uses an Arduino microcontroller, stepper motors, an RGB colour sensor and 3D-printed parts to sort several types of…
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My Email Canary
Despite the fact that I use really long passwords and two-factor authentication wherever it's available I still worry that someone might b...
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No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive
Microsoft is doing everything in its power to alienate users. When it's not enshittification, it's user hostility. You can't even dismiss forced reminders.
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Twitter Contest Winning as a Service
This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning on average 4 contests per day, every day, for about 9 months straight.
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Discord is not documentation
I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of…
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Using a "proper" camera as a webcam
It’s 2022, so many of us now have 2 years experience of online meetings. My experience is that the better that I can see and hear someone in an online call, the more natural the conversation feels. Put another way, I think one does a courtesy to the other person by improving the quality of how you appear in a video…