Topics /
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 330 posts.
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating.
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line.
On Friday we had an internal policy violation that affected three companies. I’ve been in touch with the founders and I’m appalled we made…
I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard, not to save keystrokes but to save mental energy for the project at hand.
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer. It’s called sqlite-utils-ask. Here’s …
Some notes on my note taking device
My personal website
I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf t…
Or the 'Matt Godbolt shows us some compiler magic' edition!
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Yesterday on Twitter the inimitable Morten Just posted a preview of a tool he’s created that wrap ffmpeg to allow movies, such screen recordings but pretty m...
I’ve been on a weird kick lately making images using Excel. [Here’s one post. I hope to post more soon.] If you add a background color to each cell in a spreadsheet and resize the cell …
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…
Exploring different ways to make sense of OpenStreetMap data.
*This post has been significantly updated since it was originally written. The most recent update was in September 2026; a …
A deep dive into Anthropic’s new Computer Use API.
A compelling idea in the Transient UI package is the ability to craft interfaces where commands specific to a context can be discovered and used. Such contextual interfaces enable a user to...
Print good, not bad!
learning a lot about sed, awk and other commands by making a spotify statusbar widget
Sound Lab is an analogue synthesiser, consisting of six modules that can be combined in a variety of ways. It uses a single printed circuit board that doubles as the front panel and wiring, with surface-mount components and PCB-mounted controls to make the construction as easy as possible:
UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst. Please see the new post (Mar 26, 2025) at A New Typst Template for Pandoc
Why backspaces sometimes don't work the way they should.
Use DIY CAN bus tools to convert your car into the best sim rig ever
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they're really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I've seen...
