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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
It has come to my attention that people are Wrong On The Internet about password managers. This matters, because almost everybody should be using one. Herewith background, opinions, and a description of my own setup, which is reasonably secure.
<p>For years I’ve noodled around with various setups for a Python development environment. A couple of years ago <a href="https://jacobian.org/2018/feb/21/python-environment-2018/">I wrote about a setup I finally liked</a>; this is an update to that post.</p> <p>Bad news: this stuff still isn’t stable, and…
Learning new language or framework can sometimes be a struggle. Traditional approach is to read documentation which explains the concepts, and provides simple examples. Sometimes that might be enough, but what those documentations are often lacking are some advanced examples and usages in real projects.
Why agents need project documentation instead of retrieval from old conversations.
Many shell users, and certainly most of the people working in computer forensics or other fields of information security, have a habit of ru...
Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel ...
A co-worker watched me type the other day and noticed that I use certain Unix commands for purposes other than they are intended. Yes, I abuse Unix commands.
When Git first came onto the scene in the mid 2000's, I was initially skeptical because of its horrible user interface. But once I learned it, I appreciated its speed and features - especially the ease at which you could create feature branches, merge, and even create commits offline (which was a big deal in the era…
From Markdown to paperback and Kindle without proprietary software.
I was creating a Google Workspace account for my company, as everyone knows, it’s a pretty straightforward sign-up process, until I’m hit with a weird, confusing error when I type my domain name:
There’s a kind of zen flow that programmers unblock when they experience their software daily as an end user. There’s no better catalyst for ideas and experimentation, no better prioritization driver than having to face the bugs, annoyances, and limitations of an application first-hand.
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.
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
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed. What matters is ho
A developer's guide to downloading and running LLMs on macOS, for experimentation and privacy.
I used to dread setting up email automation and email campaigns. Why? Because before a single sales or marketing email could be sent, it needed a design. In my attempt to sidestep this time-consuming process, I learned that plain emails not only save time but work better. Why Design
In ZSH you can increase your productivity with aliases. This post explains 5 types of aliases that you should know. Boost your shell productivity now and make ZSH your own
I like Git. I use it all the time. As I sometimes do, I recently took some time to really dig in, read through documentation, and review my global Git configuration. Welcome to my fourth stack...
Aliases, etc that have made rebase-based workflows in Git much less advanced feeling.
If you’re on one of the cheaper Anthropic plans like me, it’s a pretty common scenario when you’re deep into Claude coding an idea, to hit a daily or weekly quota limit. If you want to keep going, you can connect to a local open source model instead of Anthropic. To monitor your current quota, type: /usage
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
Have you ever wondered which node consumes more resources? Managing a bespoke dashboard for your infrastructure. Learn how to create it.
We know, "no idea is a bad idea," but brainstorming is often unsuccessful. These prompts actually work. They could even lead to a unique business model.
