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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
Up until recently, it was a pain to defend againt WPA2 brute-force attacks by using a random 63-character password (the maximum in WPA-Personal ) mode). Thanks to Android 10 and iOS 11 supporting reading WiFi passwords from a QR code, this is finally a practical defense.
An Awk tutorial by example. Learn practical Awk incantations in just a few minutes.
rga is a line-oriented search tool that allows you to look for a regex in a multitude of file types. rga wraps the awesome ripgrep and enables it to search in pdf, docx, sqlite, jpg, zip, tar.*, movie subtitles (mkv, mp4), etc. ExamplesPDFs Say you have a large folder of papers or lecture slides,
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
10 Google search operators every developer should know: exact-match quotes, OR, minus, wildcards, site:, filetype:, number ranges, before: and after:.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For several years I ran MythTV , then XBMC (later known as Kodi).
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control
I have a long history with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, but yesterday I drew the final straw. I was on Twitter (in Safari on iPhone 6) and I noticed that somebody linked to my site…
I wrote a new tool this weekend, called Pipenv. Check it out on GitHub! Pipenv is an experimental project that aims to bring the best of all packaging...
Hand drawn data visualizations by artist Doug MacDowell.
When I was building the spatial “tool for thought”, Jade, one frequently requested feature was drawing arrows between blocks, so we could make mind maps, flowcharts, etc. Here’s how I made it.
In this post, we walk through my entire workflow/process for bringing Stable Diffusion to life as a high-quality framed art print. We’ll touch on making art with Dreambooth, Stable Diffusion, Outpainting, Inpainting, Upscaling, preparing for print with Photoshop, and finally printing on fine-art paper with an Epson…
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. In this post, I describe how I have set…
Overview of search tools for desktop and mobile; using Emacs and Ripgrep as desktop search engine
If you do any sort of creative digital work, screenshots and screen recordings are a great way to remember it.
Notes will appear here. Please view in Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is glitchy, Firefox is stuttery. Work in progress. :/
A huge stream of information and FOMO
Handy Git tricks and aliases: leaderboards, praise, word-diff, branch history, daily recaps, changelog generation, and more in one quick guide.
A developer automated job applications, sending 250 in 20 minutes using Python scripts and GPT
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
This blog post shows tips and tricks to write resilient and idempotent bash scripts.
A fun, if predictable and pointless exercise.
If you have a git repository on a server with ssh access, you can just clone it:
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out…
