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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
A magic mirror is a raspberry pi powered monitor behind a double sided mirror. A mostly black web page allows you to add some widgets to the mirror’s reflection as if by magic. This version includes widgets for displaying the weather forecast, the date/time and a nice randomly generated greeting. No low level hardware…
After Yahoo! acquired Summly and Google acquired Wavii, there is no doubt that auto summarization technologies are a hot topic in the industry. So as a NLP freak, I decided to give a quick overvie…
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
Eduardo Ochs http://angg.twu.net/#eev eduardoochs@gmail.com (HTML version: 2007oct01)
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line…
The team is targeting May 2024, but it's going to be tough, and here is why
After Arc's pivot to AI left power users behind, I found the browser I actually wanted.
The process of building a remotely controlled tractor.
On how I progressively removed myself using Claude Code out of the development cycle - or did I?..
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
Natural language is a wonderful interface, but just because we suddenly can doesn't mean we always should.
Over the decades I’ve been using the shell, there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up from looking over others’ shoulders and googling.
This week I built datasette-ripgrep—a web application for running regular expression searches against source code, built on top of the amazing ripgrep command-line tool. datasette-ripgrep demo I’ve deployed a demo …
I’ve been saying for years that it’s bad security advice, that it encourages poor passwords. Lorrie Cranor, now the FTC’s chief technologist, agrees: By studying the data, the researchers identified common techniques account holders used when they were required to change passwords. A password like “tarheels#1”, for…
How I secured a ThinkPad: a Windows honeypot with Prey for thieves, TRESOR against cold boot, a USB boot stick for evil maids, and a separate Firefox user.
The other weekend I took some time to play around with the DigitalOcean API, and this is what resulted. The DigitalOcean indicator allows you to monitor and manage your droplets directly from your panel. You can: Quickly see which droplets are active. Reboot, power on, and/or power down you …
When we first started porting Chrome away from just Windows, we intended to use Scons to build Chrome on all our platforms. But early on in development I discovered that Scons, despite its admirable goals of correctness and ease of use, was quite slow — it could take 40 seconds from starting Scons before it decided to…
Hacker News displays comments in a tree. This can be frustrating if you want to keep track of a particular conversation, as you constantly have to seek through the tree to find the latest comment.
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
All of the data in this page is derived from these tests , so is true by some definition of true. Notable is this test - given an arbitrary SQL statement, it determines via runtime inspection which locks are taken.
I’m an entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI developer tools and data systems. My principal role is Founder at Kenn Software . I am also a Principal Architect at Posit , where I contribute to Python and AI strategy. I was a founder of Voltron Data , Ursa Labs (with Posit ), and DataPad. I wrote Python for Data…
We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from holistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movements, the developers I talk to seem to have developed a folk wisdom around tests. That consensus seems to boil down to…
