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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
A "Build tool" is a catch-all term that refers to anything that is needed to get a piece of software set up, but isn't needed after that. Different programming communities have a wealth of different tools: some use stalwarts like make , some use loose collections of .sh scripts, some use XML-based tools like Maven or…
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 …
Projects and Writings of Marc Carson.
Introduction Last week, the all-knowing Mako inspired me to give zsh a shot. He started me off with a .zshrc file, and now a week later, I’ve been spreading the word to as many people as I ca…
Bringing back mid-2000s Video conferencing in Apple iChat
A recent post [http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/still-hatin-on-git-now-with-added-actual-reasons/] that was highly ranked on Hacker News complained about common git workflows causing him serious pain. While I won't get into the merit of his user experience complaints, I do
One significant productivity-enhancing feature that arrived with Tiger was Spotlight. On its own, it changed the way some (if not most) Mac...
A compelling idea in the Transient UI package is the ability to craft interfaces where commands specific to a context can be discovered and used. Such contextual interfaces enable a user to...
To debug your program, you may be tempted to pepper your source code with print() calls to display the values of variables as your program runs. It's quick and easy to do this, but the problem is that once you see the values in the variables, that'll give you ideas for more places to put print() calls, then you run…
Node.js debugging with Chrome DevTools in parallel with browser JavaScript
While making a proposal to update Noto fonts for OpenStreetMap tiles, which fixes an issue with Kurdish labels using ڵا , I noticed a street with mismatched parentheses and was anticipating a deep dive into the tile renderer. But the actual problem was somewhere else:
Visualizations are awesome.
In the aftermath of my previous blog post about using Nextjournal's clojure-mode for better highlighting, I tried optimizing the JS output and got a look at the internals of CodeMirror 6 . I realized that writing a Clojure highlighter from scratch wasn't that hard if you had the right tools at hand:
Yes, mocking has a mostly negative meaning! Only this - to imitate (someone or something) closely - doesn't feel negative.
Monday’s little diatribe on git seemed to stir up quite a bit of strong opinion, both agreeing with me and disagreeing. As is often the case, they two camps seem to be split about 50-50, whi…
Print good, not bad!
Blog of Agatha Mallett: A post in which I provocatively argue that test-driven design results in worse code. I cite real-world examples, discuss why these failures occur, and suggest alternatives.
As a computer engineer, my job is to use computers to solve important problems. Ideally my solutions will be efficient, and typically that means making the best use of the resources at hand. Quite often these resources are machines running Windows and, despite my misgivings about the platform, there is much to be…
After using the awesome window manager for 10 years, I have switched to i3, another tiling window manager with a different philosophy.
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", …
Ars Technica gave three experts a 16,000-entry encrypted password file, and asked them to break them. The winner got 90% of them, the loser 62%—in a few hours. The list of “plains,” as many crackers refer to deciphered hashes, contains the usual list of commonly used passcodes that are found in virtually every breach…
