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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 168 posts.

2012
67

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…

70

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…

72

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 >

79

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

82

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…

83

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 …