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Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
Vim Creep
It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier—closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level…
High quality GIF with FFmpeg
About two years ago, I tried to improve the support of the GIF encoding in FFmpeg to make it at least decent. This notably led to the addition of the transparency mechanism in the GIF encoder. While this is not always optimal depending on your source, it is in the most common cases. Still, this was merely an attempt…
Escaping strings in Bash using !:q
TIL this trick, via Pascal Hirsch on Twitter. Enter a line of Bash starting with a # comment, then run !:q on the next line to see what that would be with proper Bash escaping applied.
DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
De-Googling my phone
I’ve been a professional Free Software developer in the GNU/Linux area for 14 years now, and a hobbyist developer and user for much longer. For some reason that never extended much to the smartphone world, beyond running LineageOS on my older phones (my current Sony Xperia is still under warranty and I’m fine with the…
Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
*Please see the associated Hacker News comments for some interesting discussion related to this article.*
Using uv as your shebang line
An article by Rob Allen
How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list
We like lists because they are an objectively good way to organize information. They allow readers to quickly and easily get what they want.
Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
This article is part of a series: Seven years later, I bought a new Macbook. For the first time, I don't love it How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop This article The M1 Macbook Air, one year later Due to very bad
Tired of note-taking apps
I’m tired of note-taking apps. It’s not because of limited choices. But it’s the other way around. There are so many note-taking apps you could try but end up sticking to none. At…
Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi
Learning the lesson of vi
Better bash in 15 minutes
The tips and tricks below originally appeared as one of Google's "T esting on the Toilet" (TOTT) episodes. This is a revised and augmen...
Zsh and Fish’s simple but clever trick for highlighting missing linefeeds
tl;dr: We look at how Zsh and Fish is able to indicate a missing terminating linefeed in program output when the Unix programming model precludes examining the output itself.
Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.
Rules for Autocomplete
Autocompleting text with known values seems like an easy problem to solve, but so so so many UIs get it wrong. I see this frequently enough that, rather than complain about them individually, I though I’d just write down the set of rules they often break.
HyperDev – Developer Playground for Full-Stack Web Apps
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well). Today we’re announcing the public beta of Hyper…
Why I switched from OS X to Linux
I'm not writing macOS because I switched before the new name came along. But let me start at the beginning.
The Tools I Use to Write Books
This article has been translated into Russian: Полезные инструменты для написания книг Thank you Vlad!
You can use C-Reduce for any language
C-Reduce is a tool by Regehr and friends for minimizing C compiler bug reproducers. Imagine if you had a 10,000 line long C file that triggered a Clang bug. You don’t want to send a massive blob to the compiler developers because that’s unhelpful, but you also don’t want to cut it down to size by hand. The good news…
How to Hack an Expensive Camera
Disclaimer
Ditching Obsidian and building my own
Tired of migrating notes apps like Obsidian or Evernote? Learn how to build your own private, long-term PKM using self-hosted Directus for control & longevity.
Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …
Please stop recommending Gitflow
Git-flow is a branching and merging methodology popularized by this blog post, entitled “A Successful Git branching model”. In the last ten years, countless teams have been snookered by…
Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better
You know the nagging feeling that your product, project, or company has become more complicated than it needs to be? You can solve many problems and get better results by doing something unthinkable to many: removing parts that once seemed essential. My crusade against complexity continues with this short story
Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI
So we have yet a new UI overhaul. This time, bringing consumer-grade UI practices to the world of professionals. Announcement: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new-ui-preview-for-your-jetbrains-ide/ We're professionals. We can handle the complexity and the density