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Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
Python, Pitch Shifting, and the Pianoputer
Record a sound, change its pitch 50 times and assign each new sound to a key of your computer keyboard. You get a Pianoputer ! A sound can be encoded …
Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Last year, I created Fake Parallel Printer , a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.
Creating a presentation by hand using calligraphy
I’ve been involved with PyCon India since the first edition of the conference in 2009 . This year, I was invited to give the keynote at the 2017 edition of the event in Delhi. This post is about some personal experiences preparing the speech and making the slides.
Inline previous result in Emacs Lisp
Artur Malabarba's Debugging Elisp Part 1: Earn your independence is nearly a decade old, yet it rings just as true today. Learning to Edebug really *"...
What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?
Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's
The Joys of Unix Keyboards
A decade or so ago while helping a friends father clean out an old building, we came across an ancient Sun Microsystems server. We found it curious. Everything about it was different from what we were used to. The command line was black text on a white background, the connectors strange and foreign, and the keyboard…
My 5.5 Months on Soylent: The Joys of Not Cooking
Expired Registration Recovery Policy
Slack's core flaws require topic modeling to fix
Chatops is a ladder
Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read
This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very…
Test driven development at Transloadit
You have probably heard a few talks or read a few articles where test driven development is depicted as a magic unicorn that watches over your software and makes everybody happy. Well, about 18.000 lines of "magic unicorn" code later, I'd like to put things into perspective.
Incremental Backups Using GNU Tar and S3
How to take snapshots of a directory and send to them as backups to S3 using Linux tools
My Agent Setup
Personal website of Chad Arimura - My agent setup
Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing
As someone who has from time to time written on parsing, and even published some parsing research , I get asked questions about parsing fairly regularly, some of which I’m even capable of answering.
PyOxidizer 0.8
I am very excited to announce the 0.8 release of PyOxidizer , a modern Python application packaging tool. You can find the full changelog in the docs . First time user? See the Getting Started documentation.
Absolute Zero Reasoner
Current reasoning models trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) often rely on manually curated datasets, raising scalability concerns and potentially limiting future AI growth beyond human-defined tasks. To address this, we propose the Absolute Zero paradigm, where a single model…
Zsh Configuration from the Ground Up
The personal website of Mark Hanford Nichols.
The Search for the Perfect To-do List
Beware the to-do list rabbit hole. It starts off with one or two innocent reminders and ends up with you tumbling down a long hole of procrastination in search of the perfect system. After many years of trying different software I’m glad to say that I’m finally climbing back out of the hole wearing a rather dashing…
Faster web fonts
Fine-tune your font files and optimise your loading strategy for maximum speed + minimum FOUT
Writing a Book with Unix
Developer and Author from Austin, TX.
Writing Effective Welcome Emails
Learn some tips and tricks on writing welcome emails that actually get responses.
Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)
I’m a keen user of Emacs and Org mode for a variety of tasks, including note taking, generating documents for exporting to LaTeX, Word, or html. creating blog posts (notably for this blog, us…
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Very funny, gdb. Ve-ery funny
Have you ever opened a core dump with gdb, tried to print a C++ std::vector element, and got the following?