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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 371 posts.
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote…
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra
Next week in Manhattan, the sunset will align perfectly with the east-west streets of the city grid. It’s beautiful, and people know it. Twice a year, crowds gather to see the brief moment when the sun sits perfectly on the horizon, framed by skyscrapers on either side. It’s called Manhattanhenge , after Stonehenge.
Lessons learned from piloting in the third dimension
It's possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet and do a bit of IP configuration:
My blog just scored a perfect 100 on every Lighthouse category. I love blogging. I wanted to build a blog that’s light, fast, free of clutter, able to run multiple blogs, and fully accessible on top of that. And finally, at long last, I’ve more or less pulled it off. It was quite a tedious proces...
A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects.
Rahul's Blog
Recently I came across Lunduke post about some mysterious Vendefoul Wolf Linux distribution that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan as base (no systemd(1) here) and XLibre X11 server along with IceWM wind…
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again.
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
In my predictions for 2030 I wrote that tech writers would be using specialized LLMs, running locally on powerful hardware. I …
Some thoughts about my experience getting my parents' new devices up and running, and how bad it keeps getting today.
A few months ago I became obsessed with a silly question: why does my Emacs, on a laptop with a perfectly capable GPU, draw all of its text using the…
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…
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…
VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.
When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
A post by Eshel Yaron introducing the Emacs Trust Manager
A blog about software craft and quality
An opposite view on .gitignore files.
I set all of Vim's configuration options, and I still feel far from mastery. But I did learn that it used to be called Vi IMitation...
When family TV show night became systems debugging night.
