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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
Feedback Army is an incredibly useful little website where you pay $7 for feedback to a given website of yours, and then get back 10 comments. Feedback Army uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the background. You enter the domain in question, say “example.com”, and then ask a bunch of question. Questions could be, “What…
"Not-to-do" lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
My musings on Emacs, economics, technology, and spiders.
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:- 7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard. 1 x Ethernet cable: […]
Compleat is an easy, declarative way to add smart tab completion for any shell command. It’s written in Haskell but requires no programming knowledge. See the GitHub repository for a quick description, or read on for a complete explanation.
This post will show exactly how one start-up improved their homepage conversion rate (visitor to sign-up flow) more than 20%, then 16% again, with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer. Once reading this, you will know more about split-testing than 90%+ of the consultants who get paid to do it… There are a…
I really like Gmail, but I also like having backups of my data just in case. Here’s how to use a simple program called getmail on Unix to backup your Gmail or Google Apps email. We’ll b…
This is the fourth post in the article series "Vim Plugins You Should Know About". This time I am going to introduce you to a plugin called "snipmate.vim". If you are intrigued by this topic, I suggest that you subscribe to my posts! For the introduction and first post in this article series, follow this link - Vim...
So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …
A comparison of Emacs and OS X keyboard shortcuts for editing text.
Do you have a wearable computer? Are you interested in alternate keyboard layouts but too lazy to learn Dvorak? Do you masturbate at your desk? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you ma…
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
Find and mark the next part of the buffer matching the currently active region, while also keeping the current region. Get it here .
App developers often forget to test how their apps perform under less-than-ideal networking environments. Learn how you can use the Network Link conditioner to simulate a spotty Internet connection on your device.
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
As a computer professional, you've probably done some typing over the years. A lot of typing. And your hands don't always love you for it. If you are concerned about catching the carpal tunnel syndrome, you should be looking into Dvorak keyboards. They have been designed to minimize the finger movement for the most…
If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...
This page offers a better way to create a strong, yet easy to remember, passphrase for use with encryption and security programs. Weak passwords and passphrases are one of the most common flaws in computer security. Take a few minutes and learn how to do it right. The information presented here can be used by anyone…
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
