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Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
rant about me wasting time
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
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My Favourite Git Commit
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.
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Please put units in names
Using strong types, or putting units in names, is a small effort that can make a tremendous difference for code readability.
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Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?”
36
Apple passwords deserve an app
First, let’s consider three random tweets: They already have. They definitely should. They seemingly won’t… but why? We all know that Apple has nice built-in password management in macO…
37
A receipt printer cured my procrastination
Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate on simple tasks? I finally cracked the code using thermal receipt printer and game design.
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Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
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Apple Photos app corrupts images
The Apple Photos app sometimes corrupts images when importing from my camera. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case anyone else runs into the problem. I’ve seen other references to this online, but most of the people gave up trying to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to debug the issue. I’ll…
40
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.
41
I still like Sublime Text
I still use Sublime Text in 2025 even after trying a lot of other editors
42
Disclosure: Unlimited Chase Ultimate Rewards Points
Documenting the white-hat disclosure, Chase Support DM transcript, Tom Kelly email, and the resolution of the false banking narrative.
43
DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
Google recently launched a desktop redesign. The favicon and URL breadcrumbs were turned into a header for organic search results. Ads had the same design, but were identified using the string "Ad" instead of the favicon. This design wasn't new. Google's mobile web search has served this design since May 2019. But…
44
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.
45
Dotfile madness
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn't belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can't place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear…
46
Please Make Google AMP Optional
I was reading some articles on Hacker News about how we’ve lost the internet to big companies and how we are not doing anything about it and it got me thinking about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages…
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USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
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Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
TLDR: Despite claiming to backup all your data, Backblaze quietly stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders - along with potentially many other things.
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I ditched Docker for Podman
Podman offers better security, uses fewer resources, and integrates seamlessly with Linux and Kubernetes, making it a superior Docker alternative
50
AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
I'm about as pro-AI as you can be, but this is becoming a pet peeve of mine (and I'm not alone). That's why I love the AI;DR acronym as my new solution for ignoring the walls of slop.
51
Did you lose your AirPods?
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
52
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
53
So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
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Use a work journal
You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task...
56
Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Dear Spotify. I tried to search for podcasts on your Desktop app. I know you're into fancy cross-platform Electron framework. I've come to terms with it. It's fine. It'll do. But, your understanding of interface design seems like it needs a bit of a history
57
Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
I recently noticed that Google Docs has a pretty full-featured scripting system called Apps Script . It lets you write JavaScript to do some pretty useful things:
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TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement
I'm trying to combine WebKit and Node.js into a new kind of terminal, with an emphasis on rich display and web/network orientation.
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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
GUI applications should be fully driven by the keyboard using shortcuts
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I used DALL·E 2 to generate a logo
Everybody has heard about the latest cool thing™, which is DALL·E 2 (henceforth called Dall-e). A few months ago, when the first previews started, it was basically everywhere. Now, a few weeks ago, the floodgates have been opened and lots of people on the waitlist got access - that group included me. I’ve spent a day…