Topics /
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
Intro The goal of this tutorial is to describe Python development ecosystem. It can be helpful for someone coming to Python from another programming language. They say that you should stick to algorithms and data structures, that you can learn a new language in just a couple of weeks, that it’s just a new syntax. I…
How to take advantage of Signal for secure messages and calls
It all started with Instagram Reels showing me too many yummy cooking videos. I wanted to try some recipes out myself. But I didn’t want to have to keep my phone in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to have to keep unlocking it to see the next step. I wanted to print the recipe out, and have it on the counter while I was…
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3…
Using SMS and MMS gateways we can send text messages to phones from a computer via email. With this strategy we can use a combination of the Python SMTP and email library to send text messages programmatically for free! This not only includes short text messages, but also multimedia messages with pictures, videos, or…
Many spam trends are cyclical: Spammers tend to switch tactics when one method of hijacking your time and attention stops working. But periodically they circle back to old tricks, and few spam trends are as perennial as calendar spam, in which invitations to click on dodgy links show up unbidden in your digital…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
When I write shell one-liners that transform the contents of some file, they often look something like
Jul 30, 2010 • Paul Singh If you spend just a few minutes on Hacker News, you’ll come across Patrick McKenzie in one way or another (I’m convinced that he must comment on every single HN post). He lives in Japan and recently left his cushy full-time job to focus on Bingo Card Creator — … Continue reading Back Office…
So many people I’ve worked with have used multiple displays – typically a matched pair side-by-side – and sworn by them. It’s always mystified me, to be honest.
The Graphics Interchange Format ( GIF ) is over 30 years old but is a pervasive part of internet culture. We use GIFs to serve short, silent, and looping videos, which frequently become memes . Entire services exist to create and share them, and many smartphone keyboards have built-in GIF support.
A CLI tool is not an app, and none of you are reading the docs as carefully as you think you are
I am overjoyed to announce MaskerAid, my latest iOS app, which you can use to quickly and easily add emoji to images.
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
Sometimes called a to-done list.
