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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 427 posts.

2023
303

Beautiful Documents with Groff (Part I)

Of course, I’ve used Word here and there when I didn’t have a choice, but not since MultiMate —and before that, WordStar —have I intentionally sat down with full possession of my faculties and opened up a word processor in order to write something I care about.

304

Gradle still sucks

I wrote a blog post a while ago complaining about Gradle, mostly from a position of ignorance: I had never really taken the time to properly learn the tool and I was frustrated while trying to stumble my way through working with it. But luckily, my company encourages learning and experimentation so I was given an…

306

SirTunnel, a personal ngrok alternative

From time to time I need to expose a development web site or web service to the world. In the past, I’ve used ngrok for that, and of course long ago I built ReverseHTTP which is somewhere in the same ballpark, but I recently got fed up with the state of affairs and decided to see whether there was something simple I…

319

Hands-Free Coding (2020)

Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.

321

Why Kakoune

Recently I’ve stumbled upon a video about Kakoune, a code editor: Idiot user tries to use Kakoune (for notes? Also Helix?). Funnily enough, I was mentioned in this video, which was a surprise, and made me laugh for quite a while: Let’s go back to the official plugins page.

322

State of HTML 2023 now open

While the survey will be open for 3 weeks, responses entered within the first 9 days (until October 1st) will have a much higher impact on the Web, as preliminary data will be used to inform Interop 2024 proposals.

323

Nix journey part 0: Learning and reference materials

In this series I'll be documenting my journey learning Nix and this first installment is more of a prequel. A common complaint when learning Nix is that the documentation "is not good", and I think what people mean by that is that the documentation is spread across several sources which may or may not be easy to find…

329

Building a Signal Analyzer with Modern Web Tech

An overview of the design of a signal analyzer module for a browser-based digital audio workstation built with modern web tech. The post goes over the specific web tech used (things like SharedArrayBuffer, OffscreenCanvas, WebAssembly, etc.) as well as the code design patterns used to build the interactive…