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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 427 posts.
tl;dr annotated AHK scripts here. Anybody who’s spent time with me knows how much I love AutoHotKey, the flat-out best Windows automation tool in the world. Anybody’s who’s tried to use AutoHotKey knows how intimidating it can be. So to help with that, I’m sharing (almost) all of my scripts along with extensive…
This is a story of my journey learning to build generative ML models from scratch and teaching a computer to create fonts in the process.
Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide!
Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these…
Why tracking screen time doesn't matter and improving the relationship with your phone requires conscious decisions.
An introduction into symbolic computations in Python. Don't worry, it's much simpler than it sounds. It's about making Python do your math for you with very little investment in the technology.
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
AI multiplies your efforts. I found out by how much...
Thoughts for Nov 19, 2023
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…
Which is better for code reviews, a unified diff or a split diff?
tl;dr: OpenAI is testing the ability to run code and use third-party plugins in ChatGPT. OpenAI has announced that we’re developing plugins for ChatGPT that will extend its capabilities. [Link] Plu…
How to find out someone's phone number if you just know their email address and how it can be automated using a new OSINT tool: email2phonenumber
Anyone who posts silly lists like "15 AI tools you can't miss" is truly the one who is lost
I’ve wanted to automate my home for a long time… having a background in industrial automation and software development, it felt like I was in a great position to be an early adopter.
Here’s an HDR QR Code . If you’re viewing this on an Apple device’s built-in display, it should work. If the big QR code is brighter than the smaller one, it works.
git rebase: what can go wrong?
The major compilers have an enormous number of knobs . Most are highly specialized, but others are generally useful even if uncommon. For warnings, the venerable -Wall -Wextra is a good start, but circumstances improve by tweaking this warning set. This article covers high-hitting development-time options in GCC…
Creating a subconscious problem-solving framework.
Are there any other hardcoded folder names in macOS? Where would I even start looking?
If you're exploring or publishing data, you should give this open source tool a go.
Wiggling apps in Launchpad There's this thing called **Launchpad** on macOS which shows you all the apps on your Mac in an iOS like manner. You may already have it in the Dock, but you can also launch it as any other app. There's even a nifty trackpad gesture for it where you *pinch with thumb and three fingers*. ...
A step-by-step tutorial you can follow along, featuring ffmpeg, xrandr, tcpdump and a dhcp server running on a Raspberry Pi
A bit of reverse engineering goes a long way
A pragmatic way for you to start automating deployments of a Legacy system.
There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are…
A minimalist, non-commercial take on a handful of indispensable workshop tools.
