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Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 168 posts.
How I went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day
When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother'...
Programmer Time Translation Table
An experienced project manager I used to work with claimed that he took the programmers’ time estimates, multiplied by pi and converted to the next time magnitude to get the true number. 1 day converts to 3.14 weeks. He had learned the hard way that programmers are bad at estimating times . To get a more precise…
Light Table Playground Levels Up
I’m happy to announce the release of v0.0.7 of the Light Table Playground . This version is a serious upgrade to the Instarepl that brings the ability to manually evaluate things and work in your own projects.
Master Keys
Earlier this month, a retired New York City locksmith was selling a set of “master keys” on eBay: Three of the five are standard issue for members of the FDNY, and the set had a metal dog tag that was embossed with an FDNY lieutenant’s shield number, 6896. The keys include the all-purpose “1620,” a master firefighter…
The perfect email
As you might imagine, I get many random inbound emails. Last I checked, I was getting about 500 emails a day, and about 50 of them a day are from people I don’t know. They often ask for advice, or just want me to look at their startup for investment. This is fine, I try … Continue Reading >
Netflix on Ubuntu Is Here
˅ GO TO THIS LINK ˅ http://www.webupd8.org/2013/08/pipelight-use-silverlight-in-your-linux.html ˅ SKIP THE OLD INFO BELOW ˅ THE...
Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the Windows Team. I installed Windows 8 on my home ...
Zsh is your friend.
Why you should consider switching from Bash to Zsh
Adobe's Source Code Pro Font
Source Code Pro is a new font released by Adobe. It does wonders for technical fixed width and source code text readability. I highly recommend to use this font with your text editor, terminal and other software development tools (Especially if your eyes are getting old like mine). UPDATE 2: I am not sure how
Startups, Fix Your "From" Field
A short rant. I have seen this problem happen too many times to stay quiet anymore. I have reached out in private when this happens, but I'm going to write a public rant so I can stop repeating myself.
How I Program Stuff
My method for writing code I care about: isolate myself for confidence and energy, eliminate every distraction, then code ruthlessly with no regrets.
A Tour of the Acme Editor
People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen. That's the text editor acme, written by Rob Pike for Plan 9 in the early 1990s. Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface. It's difficult to explain acme without seeing it…
Use Zsh
Zsh is the new hotness. Well newer and hotter than Bash anyway, since the first version of Bash was released in June 1989, while the young and peppy …
No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson’s Law to Kick Procrastination’s Ass
Sean Gransee is a full-stack software engineer from Chicago offering consulting services. He's also building some apps on the side.