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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 330 posts.
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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…
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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
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Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
Back in Dec 2022, when inflation was running high, I built a website for tracking price changes in the three largest supermarkets of my home country, Greece.
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How I Use "AI"
I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them.
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Start presentations on the second slide
Aka "in media res"
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Why Scrum is stressing you out
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
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Enlightenmentware
Software that makes you a better programmer.
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How I configure my Git identities
This may be overkill, but it works on my machine
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Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"
This article is about a bit of surprising behavior I recently discovered using Python's regex module (re) while developing SBOM tooling for CPython. Folks who've worked with regular expressions be...
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Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of replies to email that I’ve sent are “reactions”.
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Bash Debugging
Here's a preview from my zine, Bite Size Bash ! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics !
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How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
When we are interrupted or need to hastily respond to a new demand, we often make quick decisions about where to place physical items. We always place them in locations which make sense given our current state of mind, but often that state of mind is fleeting, and so we forget where we put our things.
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Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts
6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts
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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer
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How Home Assistant is being used to protect from missile and drone attacks
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant
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How I run LLMs locally
I document how I run Large Language Models locally.
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Using static websites for tiny archives
I've been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files. It's a lightweight, flexible approach that I hope will last a long time.
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Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years
Today, Downpour comes out! In case you don't know, Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years. I started it after I left Niantic in October 2022, and I have been working on it ever since then (with breaks for illness
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I Like Makefiles
Fancy new build tools come and go, but I think I will stick with using makefiles to orchestrate everyday tasks in my projects.
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A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)
Kenji López-Alt posed a mathematical problem on his YouTube channel about how to best cut an onion. I present a detailed solution.
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So you wanna de-bog yourself
What I found in the mire
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Never Missing the Train Again
How I built a transit dashboard with Rust, Skia, and an old Kindle
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Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
Today I noticed via a tweet by @mitsuhiko that Mermaid Gantt diagrams are great for displaying distributed trace information like what you’d get from JaegerU...
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Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
Generate calendar entries from an image using Anthropic Claude 3.5. Convert lesson dates in an image to a calendar ICS file
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DuckDB as the New jq
Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project (like a SQLite geared towards data applications). And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.
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Interesting ideas in Observable Framework
Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework: Today we’re launching Observable 2.0 with a bold new vision: an open-source static site generator for building fast, beautiful data apps, dashboards, and reports. Our …