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Inline previous result in Emacs Lisp
Artur Malabarba's Debugging Elisp Part 1: Earn your independence is nearly a decade old, yet it rings just as true today. Learning to Edebug really *"...
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 330 posts.
242
Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read
This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very…
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Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing
As someone who has from time to time written on parsing, and even published some parsing research , I get asked questions about parsing fairly regularly, some of which I’m even capable of answering.
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Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)
I’m a keen user of Emacs and Org mode for a variety of tasks, including note taking, generating documents for exporting to LaTeX, Word, or html. creating blog posts (notably for this blog, us…
245
Listening with LLM
Overview # This is the first part of many posts I am writing to consolidate learnings on how to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) to process audio, with the eventual goal of being able to build and host a LLM able to describe human voices. I am motivated to gain hands-on experience tinkering LLMs so, as much as…
246
Install Asdf: One Runtime Manager to Rule All Dev Environments
Almost everyone I know who uses a computer, for...
247
Neat Parallel Output in Python
Make parallel tasks print nicely with zero dependencies.
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The Modern CLI Renaissance
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line…
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How to print your Guild Wars 2 character
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
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Postgres locks explorer
All of the data in this page is derived from these tests , so is true by some definition of true. Notable is this test - given an arbitrary SQL statement, it determines via runtime inspection which locks are taken.
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GRC SpinRite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
253
Demystifying Git Submodules
Demystifying git submodules by showing exactly how they work.
254
Speech Dictation Mode for Emacs
T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…
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QMK and Keyboards
A collection of QMK firmware libraries, macros, and thoughts on ergonomic keyboards.
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The Second Golden Age of Emacs
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarrell
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My (Neo)Vim workflow
A guy decides to show off his Neovim setup.
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Fallout style RPG made in Excel
fallout-like-excel-rpg_v2Download Check out the video here: Story It is the 145th year of the second age. Life in Mercer is unrecognisable to that which came earlier – The bombs saw to that. …
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How to write a novel using the snowflake method (2013)
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
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/usr/bin/env -S uv run
This is a really neat pattern. Start your Python script like this: #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "flask==3.*", # …
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Some notes on Firefox’s media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
Blog about Software Engineering
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ViHN: Vim for Hacker News
tl;dr: I made ViHN to read Hacker News without having to move my hands away from the keyboard. It’s freely available on Firefox and Chrome. This is about yet another Hacker News extension. But other people with my obsession for killing the mouse might enjoy it. Most of the content of this article is just […]
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I Made a Rubbish Clock
With separate plastic, metal, paper, and glass recycling, composting, and pick up of all the rest, knowing which days to put out which bins ...
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My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
Photography is arguably my oldest hobby. I’ve loved taking photos for as long as I can remember. I reflected on my first encounter with digital photography in 2003 in a recent post, but I’m old enough…
266
Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
Sometimes, programming projects are too easy and boring. Sometimes, they're too hard, never ending or producing subpar results.
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Making my local LLM voice assistant faster and more scalable with RAG
If you read my previous blog post, you probably already know that I like my smart home open-source and very local, and that certainly includes any voice assistant I may have. If you watched the video demo, you have probably also found out that it’s… slow. Trust me, I did too. Prefix caching helps, but it feels like…
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Emacs commands I got by with for years
As far as I know, the next meeting of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group , has a planned topic: Org mode . I was going to make a post about the common Org functions I use frequently, but I thought that I should start with common commands I used for generic Emacs when I started using it more than twenty years ago…
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Using Two ReMarkables
I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any…