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As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
A blog about software craft and quality
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 371 posts.
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Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
We can mostly blame Internet Explorer, as always.
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Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer
Understanding large codebase can be incredibly difficult. In this post I walk through how I learn a codebase use turbopack as my case study.
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It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
It all started in the winter of 2024. There was a burglary in our apartment building and we decided we needed to invest in our home’s security. The …
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Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
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Sandwich Bill of Materials
SBOM 1.0: A specification for sandwich supply chain transparency.
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First impressions of Claude Cowork
Plus Fly’s new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time
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Assorted less(1) tips
In a recent discussion on Reddit I shared a number of tips about the common utility less(1) that others found helpful so I figured I'd aggregate some of those tips here.
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Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
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OTel isn’t going well
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put it charitably, idiot-
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Make Tmux the OS
I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+
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TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
So… Here we are again. Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently ...
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Better Models: Worse Tools
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.
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Hand Drawn QR Codes (2025)
I really like QR codes. Recently I purchased a new sticky-note-like pad from a new local stationery store in Minneapolis. The sheets have a 10x10 grid and 2x10 grid. I knew what I wanted to...
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Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
A programmer's text editor is their castle
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Do not apologize for replying late to my email
Do not apologize for replying late to my email par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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The End of Eleventy
Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same …
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I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone
I built a small tool that turns my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper, so I can read my favorite blogs on a pocket e-reader instead of my phone.
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Building a TB-303 from Scratch
Code music in the browser.
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Rebasing in Magit
I read Ian Whitlock’s article on why he can’t quit Magit and it inspired me to share more about Magit from my perspective. This article will focus on rebasing.
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Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell …
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Have you restarted your computer this week?
There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …
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Molly guard in reverse
A blog about software craft and quality
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The Orange Pi 6 Plus
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
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Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst
Gribouille 0.3.0 gives guides and axes a much finer on/off switch, lets compose() carry its own theme, and makes geom-area() stack by default. A long list of legend and annotation fixes rounds it out.
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Take better notes, by hand
Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back…
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Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
Plain text is portable, inspectable, searchable, easy to back up, and remarkably resistant to obsolescence. Its simplicity has helped it survive decades of...
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Tractor
The electric tractor is finished! I have been working on this on and off for about 6 months. It is a toy for children (and me) to drive around the garden.
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Introduction to Obsidian
An introduction to Obsidian. Why you should use it, how to keep it simple, and how you can use it.
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Prospero: A new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been…