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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 371 posts.
Last week I wrote a thing about how to run Claude Code when you don’t trust Claude Code. I proposed the creation of a dedicated user account & standard unix access controls. The objective was to stop Claude from dancing through your .env files, eating your secrets. There are some usability problems with that guide- I…
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
The '90s-era digital camera metadata format, still useful in 2026.
Give any AI agent a persistent memory in minutes. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, OpenRouter, and any MCP-compatible agent. Open source, self-hosted, model-agnostic.
Thoughts on an experiment that I've been running for about a month.
The git flag I assumed was an LLM hallucination
Chest fridge Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only…
Stop re-learning things you've already figured out. Two simple ways to document any process, and find it again when you need it.
A tour of erm, a local CLI that removes disfluencies from English speech recordings using faster-whisper, a few detectors that look at the audio directly, and ffmpeg.
How Counter-Strike map credits led to my email address being harvested by worms, and why I had to ask my ISP to blackhole it.
The website of Ike Saunders
An attempted improvement that only makes things worse. It is time we start naming this phenomenon in software engineering.
Using the wiki on GitHub makes life more difficult for your users, and you as a maintainer. Use the `/docs` folder and GitHub Pages instead and keep your docs in sync with code
Spotting differences in code is an important part of what we do, Delta is by far the best CLI diff tool I ever used.
Learn how to get a free .arpa domain by abusing IPv6 reverse DNS delegations on Hurricane Electric, configuring deSEC, and hosting a live website.
A working tmux setup for running Claude Code and other AI agents: session-per-project naming, pane layouts, send-keys for scripting an agent, capture-pane for reading one back, and the status-line monitor. Plus the limits you hit at four agents.
Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again.
What code complexity can mean — from Big O notation and Cyclomatic Complexity to the surprising insights psycholinguistics can offer software developers.
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
A writeup on implementing my own terminal viewport component in Go, which is used in my Terminal pager robinovitch61/lore and in my Kubernetes log viewer terminal application robinovitch61/kl.
I built buildprof (Github), an open-source tracing tool that shows where the time goes when you compile software on Linux. Here’s a realtime video of it profiling a clean build of ripgrep: Watch the …
Range Requests Are All You Need
Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick
An idea for PDFs that render normally for humans while exposing clean markdown structure to extractors and LLMs in the same file.
Anthropic is silently A/B testing Claude Code's plan mode on paying users. This isn't a consumer app. Stop treating it like one.
Productive procrastination is real. But understanding why we avoid the work we actually love might be the key to getting more of it done.
~15 years ago, we had Balsamiq Mockups (2008). Deliberately sketchy. Intentionally low-fidelity. The comic-sans-looking wireframes were a…
About a couple months ago I purchased an Arduino Nano ESP32 dev board. I had this sudden itch and I wanted to play around with hardware. I don't really have much experience in this space, besides working on firmware for an IoT company over a decade ago, but I've written tons of software over the years. I was very…
