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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
One day Alan Eliasen read a fart joke and got so mad he invented a programming language. 20 years later Frink is one of the best special purpose languages for dealing with units. “But why do we need a language just for dealing with units?” Glad you asked! Intro to Units A unit is the physical property a number…
In this post I will describe my approach to C unit testing using pytest. In particular, we get to see how to gracefully handle SIGSEGVs and prevent them from stopping the test runner abruptly. Furthermore, we shall try to write tests in a Pythonic way.
I love everything about PICO-8. It's a fantasy gaming console that wants you - ...
Full disclosure: a lot of people have talked about this idea, this is just my implementation of it for our apartment. You can check out Buzzeromatic.com i...
I've got a reputation at work as being a skilled debugger. It's a frequent occurrence that the weird stuff lands on my desk [1] after it goes through another skilled engineer or two. To say my job is substantially "debug the weird shit" would not be an understatement and I'm here for it.
Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows
Long ago, I wrote git-subtree to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules. I've learned a lot since then, and the development e...
How to write an external tool for `git diff` to delegate complex diffs to.
Overview # This is the first part of many posts I am writing to consolidate learnings on how to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) to process audio, with the eventual goal of being able to build and host a LLM able to describe human voices. I am motivated to gain hands-on experience tinkering LLMs so, as much as…
A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.
Almost everyone I know who uses a computer, for...
I recently started using the Nix Package Manager on macOS and the process has been painful. In this post, I’m going to write down how I’m currently using Nix...
the secret is in the architecture
My personal website
Semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications require systems to be able to save lots of embedding vectors…
The trick to understanding awk in all its terse glory is to understand its defaults. Most solutions you see in the wild are a clever symphony of awk defaults stacked on top of each other. In this post, I break down one of the most popular one-liners which should hopefully make future awk-ing pretty straight forward.
Before the AI era, I wrote pretty long commit descriptions (or commit bodies) for major changes. It took me about five to ten minutes to draft and reread them to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I did that for several reasons.
Discusses the problem of Gmail takeouts as a single giant file and provides detailed background on the gmail-mbox-codec app that allows efficient incremental backups of said file.
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
Make parallel tasks print nicely with zero dependencies.
My brother is a pilot... ... and every so often he sends me a picture from somewhere in the world asking "So, smart guy, where is THIS ...
Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.
