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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,416 posts.
That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs. I still don’t know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I’d had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone…
Something that always annoyed me of the current state of technology is how easy and pervasive we let tracking become. Tens of connections to 3rd parties carrying Referer and Cookies just to load an article. (We give up our users to social media websites just to show a like button that looks worse anyway in a iframe…
Introducing Ruxguitar, a guitar tablature player written in Rust
Having spent a couple of decades in the Linux world, I have always had an interest in Linux desktop environments and how they are themed. I would often come across a post on /r/unixporn that inspired me to try to customize the look and feel of my desktop environment. So I would install Xfce, LXQt or Sway and try to…
Noting perhaps my largest personal career accomplishment, which is launching CodePen 2.0. Far more work, believe it or not, than the entire creation of the original CodePen. This isn’t the pl…
Debugging without source or symbols, alternatively, "Where there's a will there's a way"
How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science
From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist form it has. I tell them it’s a bad idea and that I use the Erlang compiler infrastructure for it, and they agree to look elsewhere.
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy. Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth…
I'm writing this post in what Google is euphemistically referring to as an improvement . I don't understand this. I managed to ignore New ...
You know what I want? I want my own private server, to run my own private software, and I want everyone else to have one as well. Let me explain:
I wanted to get a music streaming server running as I have in the past but with the scarcity of RasberryPi’s my I needed to try something new. I had a Samsung Galaxy S7 that had been taking up space in my junk drawer and this post is my journey to give it a new task.
VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…
I wanted to convert some .webp images to .png on my Mac. I asked ChatGPT:
Despite otherwise seeming to work correctly, I can't monitor a Back-UPS BX1600MI in Linux without seeing a constant stream of spurious battery detach/reattach and power fail/restore events that last less than 2 seconds each. I've tried multiple computers and multiple UPSes of that model. It doesn't happen in their own…
There is simply no way you can do calculations with fractions in bash without relying on bc , dc , or some hacks. Compared to simply being able to use a + b it’s ugly, slow, and difficult.
A sad example of how easy it is to dismiss certain design principles because it does not seem relevant at the time.
Your terminal can display color, but most diff tools don't make good use of it. By highlighting changes, icdiff can show you the differences between similar files without getting in the way. This is especially helpful for identifying and understanding small changes within existing lines.
Mailchimp was getting too expensive, so I moved this blog's newsletter to Sendy.
When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach
