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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.

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3482

Add Latency to Localhost

Pádraig Brady taught me a great trick in a comment to a previous blog post and it was so neat I feel a need to highlight it further as it also makes it easier for me to find it again later! To simulate a far away server, add RTT time to the localhost device. For … Continue reading Add latency to localhost →

3486

The Case for Bash (2021)

Bash is oft-maligned: you hear it sneered at in sentences like “our continuous integration pipeline is just a pile of bash scripts .” It is commonly regarded as unintelligible and thus unmaintainable. The pile of bash scripts are the toxic byproduct of an infrastructure team understaffed, pressed for time, unwilling…

3488

Some sanity for C and C++ development on Windows

A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly…

3494

On CAD

With cheap 3D printers and PCB manufacturing services you could conceivably design something and have a physical prototype on your desk in the same week. It is quite common to see hardware projects on github that contain firmware source code, STLs for 3D printed parts, and Gerber files for PCBs. To assemble them you…

3496

What's wrong with the default build tool for Scala

SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…

3501

Creating a Slack app that uses fewer resources

I recently created a macOS app called Slack Lite, which beats Slack's desktop app across a few performance metrics. Slack Lite uses Slack's official UI, so it's visually indistinguishable from the official client. Even so, Slack Lite uses 5x fewer threads, 3.5x less time to startup, and significantly less CPU. In the…

3503

I hacked my clock to control my focus

I often get distracted. I obviously don’t like it. So I decided to turn my computer’s clock into a constant reminder to help me focus. Implementation This hack requires: Ubuntu with GNOME desktop environment The Panel Date Format extension A simple bash script 1. Install the Panel Date Format extension # If you don't…

3506

Using the Google Cr-48 for Coding

The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one. In the request form I made it very clear that I would be attempting to use this laptop for development (easily my primary activity). Surprisingly the laptop arrived this…