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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 227 posts.

2019
151

Lorem Picsum, death by a million pixel-gigabits

Updated 2023-04-16 Or how to serve half a billion placeholder images a month on a budget. Lorem Picsum is one of the most popular placeholder sites on the internet. It started as a small side project written in NodeJS five years ago to cover my own needs and has since gone through several iterations as it has grown…

153

Debugging in Vim

Vim 8.1 was released in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termdebug, which provid…

162

I do not use a debugger (2016)

I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do what I expect. I would struggle for a time, but I'd eventually give up and just accept that whatever "bugs" I had created were there to stay. … Continue reading I…

163

A Tiling Desktop Environment

I've been thinking about graphical shells recently. One of the great things about open source desktops is there is a plethora of choice when it comes to graphical shells. However they seem to fall into two camps: Full featured desktop environments that stick to the conventional stacking window metaphor. Narrowly…

167

Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Camera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M53eJI90ETE Update: this project was featured in issue 92 of the official Raspberry Pi magazine (download as PDF, buy the issue or subscribe). SSH-ing into a remote solar powered Raspberry Pi at the top of an apple tree has a special feeling -- almost like commanding a spaceship where…

169

Documentation – Your Secret Weapon

When you work on a software project, someone will eventually ask a variation of this dreaded question - "Do you know where I can find documentation for this feature?" or "Do you know why we implemented pattern x over pattern y?" or my personal favourite "What the heck does this piece of code even do?".

176

Why to use ‘python -m pip’

Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'

177

The Joys of Unix Keyboards

A decade or so ago while helping a friends father clean out an old building, we came across an ancient Sun Microsystems server. We found it curious. Everything about it was different from what we were used to. The command line was black text on a white background, the connectors strange and foreign, and the keyboard…