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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,416 posts.
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How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
Learn how I saved $100 on Kayak flights by using a VPN to book from a different location. Discover this simple travel hack to slash your flight costs.
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Opt Out of Klout Now
Sites like Klout and Kred are perfect examples of social media frippery. A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long. When they're used as a silly little badge, or an informal competition with friends, they're a (mostly) harmless way of gamification. Of continual…
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Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other bash commands
By using a combination of curl, grep, cut, sort, uniq and other common bash utilities it is possible to extract structured data from Wikipedia and compute insights without writing a full program.
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The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap
In the previous post i discussed a bit the history of digital map design, in particular also outside of OpenStreetMap. I also wrote in the past about the history of OpenStreetMap Carto , the cartographic face of OpenStreetMap and without doubt the most influential map design project in OpenStreetMap – today as well as…
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KDE Connect 1.10 released
Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on. Targeting Android Oreo As of this month app updates uploade…
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What happens when you grep the file you've redirected grep to?
I was recently eating lunch with someone who asked a question that I became somewhat obsessed with: what happens when you grep a file and append the contents...
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Understanding Git Filter-Branch and the Git Storage Model
The other day Steve wanted git alchemy done on the Rust repo. Specifically, he wanted the reference and nomicon moved out into their own repositories …
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Why and How I use “Org Mode” for my writing and more (2022)
I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software program?!
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Who Uses To-Do Lists?
Successful people who use to-do lists and the boring takeaway.
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House Address “Twins” Proximity
In a previous post, I did a bit of analysis of the names of towns and streets . However, that clearly wasn’t enough to sate my bizarre interest in all things address-based, so here I am again with more street-name-based nerdery.
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Tests that sometimes fail
Over the years one of the most complex issues we have had to deal with at Discourse was flaky tests, in this post I would like to talk a bit about the various patterns we have come across and ways we tackle this issue.
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Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt
Over the years of troubleshooting performance problems in the Unix/Linux world, I have seen multiple cases where a regularly used command line tool in a customer server just stops working for some reason. The tool just returns immediately, doing absolutely nothing. No output printed, no coredumps and the exit code is…
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How I Use Notion
This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app) to organise various aspects of my life: project management, reading, academics, plans/goals, investing, and more. The post is not designed to be read linearly – pick and choose the bits that are relevant to…
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Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python
The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online . It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams" . I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this…
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Stop saying "just" (2019)
Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before?
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Getting syntax highlighting wrong
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
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Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini camera
I used Ghidra twice, so that means I'm officially an expert in reverse engineering
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How I'm using Helix editor
My Helix editor config and how I am using it
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Wood Joint Strength Testing
So I set out to do some more thorough experiments, this time using more samples and actually measuring the breaking force of the joints.
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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican: Here’s the SQL query that found me my …
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Magic Paper
Working notes by Michael Nielsen , November 2017. Followup to (but doesn't require) my notes on Chalktalk .