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VisiCalc on the Apple II
In 1978, Bricklin and Frankston took out a loan to develop "Calcu-ledger," a tool that could project the fiscal health of taking out that very loan
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
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What Shell Am I Using?
I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…
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Just Write
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
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LaTeX Finite Automata and State Diagrams with Tikz
This short guide collects some examples of drawing finite state machines using the Tikz LaTeX library.
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Thoughts on Video Editing (2022)
I’ve been thinking about editing for the last 5 years. Not just thinking, also editing. Trying out what works. You may have noticed different editing styles in the 65 videos I have posted to …
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Creating standalone Mac OS X applications with Python and py2app
In this tutorial we’ll be using py2app to create a standalone OSX application from a Python 2 or 3 source code with a simple Tkinter user interface. "py2app is a Python setuptools command which will allow you to make standalone application bundles and plugins from Python scripts. py2app is similar in purpose and…
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The Wolfram Prompt Repository (2023)
Curated collection of prompts for use with LLMs. Accessible interactively in Chat Notebooks and programmatically in functions like LLMFunction. Initial categories in the Prompt Repository cover personas, functions, modifiers.
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IBash Notebook
Did you know that there's a Bash kernel for IPython Notebook? It even displays inline images. Could it ever be a convenient environment for doing data science? Would it be worthwhile to publish my book Data Science at the Command Line as a collection of notebooks?
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I quit editing photos
Editing photos as I press the shutter.
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Why does storing 2FA codes in your password manager make sense?
Modern login systems require a second factor (2FA) to log in, in addition to the standard username and password combination. A Time-based one-time password (TOTP) as a 6-digit number is often used. Password managers like [1Password](https://1password.com/), [KeePass (or respective forks)](https://keepass.info/) and…
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QWERTY-Flip: The better keyboard layout your fingers already know
The 10 most frequent letters in English are ETAOINSRHL . This layout gets most of those letters onto the home row while making use of existing muscle memory. According to Carpalx , QWERTY-Flip scores about as well as the famous Dvorak layout, but while Dvorak is very hard to learn, with QWERTY-Flip you'll be up and…
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Changing my relationship with GitHub Copilot
I've been using GitHub Copilot on personal projects since March. It's been an interesting experience, and one that I realized I have to change. Using Copilot nearly full time has had some positive and negative impacts on me, and it's time to take control of how I interact with it.
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Make your own build system
On this page I present a robust, custom build system for a software project written in C, in less than 500 lines of Python code. I think it is about as minimal as a practical dependency-tracking build system can get. Although it adds to the code that must be maintained as part of the project, I think that having a…
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My Beef with RuboCop
Consider a hypothetical class that filters out unsafe HTML elements:
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Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable
Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro . But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to…
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TextEdit vs. Pages
Allison Sheridan is right when she says TextEdit can usually do the job. But I'm sticking with Pages anyway.
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Adieu google
The first thing I searched for in Google, back in 1999, was probably "linux", followed by my name.
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SSH Do’s and Don’ts
Do Use SSH Keys When ever you can use a key for SSH. Once you create it, you can distribute the public side widely to enable access where ever you need it. Generating one is easy: ssh-keygen -t dsa Don't Use a Blank Passphrase on Your Key This key is now your identity. Protect it.