Topics /
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 371 posts.
I want to share some thoughts on my recent experience with OpenClaw. Over the past year, I’ve been actively using Claude Code for development. Many people believed AI could already assist with programming—seemingly replacing programmers—but I never felt it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work. Sure…
One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage?") is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment. Maybe you lik
Why you might not need Oh My Zsh for your Zsh configuration.
uv's CLI feels surprisingly clunky compared to its peers like pnpm or Poetry.
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific…
A reflection on returning to Kagi after trying some alternatives including the much worse search engine called Google.
I Made MCP 94% Cheaper (And It Only Took One Command)
Constructing a skyscraper is a massive undertaking. You need architectural blueprints, council permits, and safety audits before the first piece of steel is even ordered. It requires hundreds of people coordinating over months or years. You can’t just throw up some drywall and hope the building holds weight. Then…
Although I have to have a machine running macOS Tahoe to support our customers, I personally don't like the look of Liquid Glass, nor do I like some of the functional changes Apple has made in macOS Tahoe.
Modify your tools more!
Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or…
It's been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Here's an update on how things have been going after my move to Fastmail.
Why DuckDB has become my go-to tool for data processing, offering simplicity, speed, and powerful features.
For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have…
How I added Immich to my already robust photo management system to make it ridiculously robust.
Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript making HTTP range requests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives.
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
Erik Gahner Larsen
Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian's project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete . Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a te...
Some readers will know, but most will not, that I am a bit of a self-confessed foodie. I enjoy cooking, but especially so when others get enjoyment from it. Be it friends, family, or neighbours, and sometimes all three, I’m always up for putting something together.
I gave Claude Code access to my pen plotter. Not directly. I was the interface between the two machines. Claude Code produced SVG files that I plotted with my pen plotter. With my smartphone I captured photos that I pasted into the Claude Code session, asking Claude what it thought about the pictures. In total, Claude…
How do they fare with (not so) recent additions to HTML?
The toolkit for spec-driven development. Write feature specs, not prompts. Ship better software with AI agents that understand your requirements.
This was posted in the TIL section, the low-effort section of my website where I post things that I find useful, but that don't get the full quality checks content elsewhere on this site does.
Welcome to the digital home of Daniel Ball. Explore my portfolio to see the projects I’ve worked on and learn more about my professional journey.
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
TL;DR I use an Excalidraw, wrap the elements of interest with a frame, name it with export_ prefix, my forked excalidraw extension automatically generates SVGs for light and dark mode.
Discreetly modding my friend’s apartment intercom to work with Apple Home.
