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Dealing with APIs, JSON and databases in org-mode
A practical Org-mode workflow for calling APIs, working with JSON responses, and querying the resulting data with databases and executable blocks.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 391 posts.
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Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming
An Introduction to Statistical Process Control.
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Zettelkasten, linking your thinking, and Nick Milo's search for ground
Linked thinking and the many "tools for thought" apps that have been released over the past few years, have changed the discourse on how we take in and proce...
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A tool for capturing captions and transcripts from online videos
I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online …
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Tools for a Culture of Writing (2021)
A set of useful tools for cultivating a culture of writing, namely the RFC, the Decision Record and Decision Log, and the Pre-mortem/Prospective and Post-mortem/Retrospective
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Writing good performance self reviews
It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means… performance review time!
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My Contribution to Markdown
At long last revealed.
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Programs that have saved Hacker News 100+ hours by automating repetitive tasks
The top programs that have saved HN 100+ hours.
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Melrōse, a language to program and play music (2021)
Melrōse is both a language and a tool to create and listen to music interactively, The language uses musical primitives (note, sequence, chord) and many functions (map, group, transpose) that can be used to create more complex patterns, loops and tracks. Melrōse uses MIDI output to produce sound by any (hard or…
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About using Nix in my development workflow
TL;DR If you don’t want to read how I’ve got to use Nix and general information about it but only focus on its use to setup a development environment, please jump to Using Nix. Even from that part, the reading can take some time as I wanted to share what I’ve learned and found useful accross two months of intensive…
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Cooklang – Managing Recipes in Git
A plain-text recipe format that generates shopping lists and keeps your recipes in git. Cooklang is like markdown for recipes. It lets you write recipes in a…
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A few new things in Emacs 29
Everybody with an Emacs blogs raves about Emacs 29 these days. Things like Eglot, tree-sitter, SQL support and the like. Well, this is all nice – more than nice, brilliant! – but let’s not forget a few minor advances which are coming with Emacs 29. Let me mention a few things that I especially like.
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Everyone should learn the slide rule (2021)
The obsolescence of the slide rule is mostly un-mourned, but as with many technological obsolescences, we have lost something valuable with its demise. The type of thinking which goes along with us…
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Drag and Drop from Terminal
I have built up a pretty good workflow in the terminal. The main thing that I was missing until now was an easy way to drag and drop the files that I am looking at in a terminal to other apps.
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Explaining modern server monitoring stacks for self-hosting
In this article, I'm exploring four different servers monitoring setups involving Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus and Collectd.
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Basic Network Troubleshooting
A quick explanation of the differences between network failures most commonly observed in day to day operatoins. And no, it's not (always) DNS.
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Email Is Async
Email is often used as a synchronous (real-time) comms channel when it shouldn't be. Learn why email is async and how to keep it that way.
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Using Mypy in Production
At Spring, we maintain a large Python monorepo with complete Mypy coverage configured under Mypy’s strictest available settings. In short, that means every function signature is annotated and implicit Any conversions are disallowed.
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Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging
There are still many situations where it's not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn't learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For now, let's pretend that's axiomatic: a certain amount of debugging (and even testing)…
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Event-driven access to my home after a run
I always run with my phone on me, so accessing my home afterward has been convenient since installing MyQ W-Fi connected garage doors several years ago. No need to remember to carry a separate house key anymore and getting into my house is (usually) an app launch away. It has worked great, until one day …
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The Hipster PDA (2004)
This domain is parked. There is no active website here.
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GNU ed ate my homework
If you have ever ventured into the archives of old UNIX books and mailing lists, you will have undoubtedly come across the legend of ed. ed (pronounced /iː …
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Giving Haiku Beta 3 a try
Projects and Writings of Marc Carson.
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What's in a good error message?
As software developers, we’ve all come across those annoying, not-so-useful error messages when using some library or framework: "Couldn’t parse config file", "Lacking permission for this operation", …