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Plain text journaling in Vim
oppiliappan's μsings
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 427 posts.
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Archive your old projects
In this post I describe how I wish I had archived all my old projects and my approach going forward.
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A Short 100-Question Diligence Checklist
Plus! Bank Capital; Where Venture Funding is Squeezed; Free Shipping and Marginal Costs; Chinese Apps and Data Advantages; Many Funnels; Diff Jobs
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My favorite Vim oneliners for text manipulation
Vim one-liners for fast text edits: count words, format JSON, delete blank lines, sum the numbers in a file, extract IP addresses, and open files in splits.
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How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
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Multi-Layered Calendars
Calendars cover the entire spectrum of time. Past, present and future. They are the closest thing we have to a time machine. Calendars allow us to travel forward in time and see the future. More importantly, they allow us to change the future.
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Transparent telemetry for open-source projects
How do software developers understand which parts of their software are being used and whether they are performing as expected? The modern answer is telemetry , which means software sending data to answer those questions back to a collection server. This post is about why I believe telemetry is important for…
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Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering
Language models have rapidly improved in recent years, with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 taking center stage. These models have…
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Wait, what's a bookmarklet?
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades.
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How to Get Started with Tree-Sitter
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
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New make --shuffle mode
I implemented new --shuffle option for GNU make to simulate non-deterministic build order in parallel makefiles.
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Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
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The bash book to rule them all
I ♥ to /bin/bash and last week I came around the one bash book to rule them all.
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ssh whoami.filippo.io
I updated the whoami.filippo.io dataset! I explain how it works, and how I fetched the new data.
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Guide to Software Architecture Documentation
This guide shows you how to write, structure, visualize and manage software architecture documentation in a lean way using appropriate documentation tools.
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Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
Researcher interested in usable security and privacy.
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Making my own bed sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if
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What's new in Emacs 29.1
What's new in Emacs 29.1? I go through every change and annotate the ones I feel are interesting or worth knowing more about.
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Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
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TODO apps are meant for robots
What if I'm a left-handed person in the world of right-handed tools?
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Is this a good book for me, now?
I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.
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Photogrammetry on commercial flights (2021)
Airplane window seats are great! Not only are they more comfy and easier to take a nap in, but they also have the most quaint form of in-flight entertainment: The outside world!
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Getting things done in small increments (2022)
Many programmers subscribe to the belief that they need large blocks of uninterrupted time to get anything done. Paul Graham wrote about this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule :
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Comparing Hobby PCB Vendors
An not-for-profit roundup of affordable PCB manufacturers. Originally published in 2023 and last updated January 2026.
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Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking
Writing drafts via retrieval-augmented generation. Also reflecting on the week's journal entries.
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