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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 199 posts.
After my recent vitriol about unit testing, a couple of people sent me Why TDD is Crap as a thorough debunking of TDD and unit testing. As someone very interested in software correctness, I ended up writing a debunking of his debunking. Transcriptions will be in quotes, my responses below. Some important notes: From…
A solid text editor is a developer’s best friend. You use it constantly and it becomes like a second pair of hands. The keyboard commands you use daily become so engrained in your muscle memory that you stop thinking about them entirely.
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
Many websites these days ask you to provide some form of verification when you want to sign up to a service. This includes most things like shopping sites, email accounts, discussion forums, gaming services, blogs, social media and etc. Basic forms of verification are just supplying an email address or perhaps solving…
This is a simple function that can be called from the command line, just like if it was a regular com...
Using the right tool for the right job
It's difficult to get the Windows Console to display Unicode characters, so here's a C++ WinForms program that will display the arguments in a TextBox.
How I hacked the office WiFi to play entrance theme music for my colleagues (and myself!)
Thoughts on FOSS and fintech, layered by Mahmoud Hashemi
In this article I examine human- and machine aspects of typing latency (“typing lag”) and present experimental data on latency of popular text / code editors. The article is inspired by my work on implementing “zero-latency typing” in IntelliJ IDEA.
All about making life easier and efficient with Linux
IFTTT supports hundreds of services and you can use any of them to automate your blog posts! For this example, we're going to setup a trigger that automatically cross-posts new images from Instagram on our blog.
I was enjoying some pizza the other day with some buddies that know a bit about my research and understand where I am coming from with regards to my own computing aesthetics. They understand that I have always pushed for the smallest code that I can get, and to simplify
You love rebasing, right? Rewriting history might be appealing, but there are good reasons not to.
For the impatient, feel free to skip to the TL;DR summary.
In another post, I laid out my reasons for building a personal logging system. Here, I’ll go into the strategy and tactics issues.
Introduction Firstly I want to note I’m not a security researcher, ethical hacker or at all competent at reverse engineering. I’m currently working as a Java developer but I’ve al…
I should start by saying that yes, I’ve used the word processor you’re about to mention. I’ve tried them all. From yWriter and Scrivener, to Hank’s Writer and OpenOffice, to FocusWriter and Page 4. I’ve probably tried writing apps that you’ve never heard of. I’m the guy in the middle of the Venn diagram […]
I’ve been involved with PyCon India since the first edition of the conference in 2009 . This year, I was invited to give the keynote at the 2017 edition of the event in Delhi. This post is about some personal experiences preparing the speech and making the slides.
How to take snapshots of a directory and send to them as backups to S3 using Linux tools
The personal website of Mark Hanford Nichols.
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
In this post we will set up a virtual lab for malware analysis. We’ll create an isolated virtual network separated from the host OS and from the Internet, in which we’ll setup two victim virtual machines (Ubuntu and Windows 7) as well as an analysis server to mimic common Internet services like HTTP or DNS. Then…
Last week, I created a small script to aid my workflow which left me wondering why I didn't make it earlier. It adds an option in [Finder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder_\(software\))'s context menu to start a static web server in any folder which makes it easier to preview static websites. Technically, it's…
