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MathBox 2
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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 158 posts.
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AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started
A collection of random tips for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that I wish I'd been told a few years ago, based on what I've learned by building and deploying various applications on AWS.
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OS X Command Line Utilities
The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you’re migrating from Linux, you’ll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren’t aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about…
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SSH Kung Fu
An extended look at SSH features that can serve a variety of purposes for different use cases.
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Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi
Learning the lesson of vi
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Better bash in 15 minutes
The tips and tricks below originally appeared as one of Google's "T esting on the Toilet" (TOTT) episodes. This is a revised and augmen...
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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over several years and nearly seven thousand notes. Every day ideas flit through my head, ideas for essays, for characters, for jokes. Just now I catch a glimpse of […]
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4K is for programmers
My name is Brian Hauer and these are my rants about technology, politics, and anything else that irks me.
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CSS Shapes Editor for Chrome
CSS Shapes allow web designers to wrap content around custom paths, but authoring them is not trivial.
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Don't run 'strings' on untrusted files
Many shell users, and certainly most of the people working in computer forensics or other fields of information security, have a habit of ru...
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How to Think
Read this article to discover how chess is used to teach people how to think. "It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at."
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A Hacker’s Guide to Git
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
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My Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player
Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.
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Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible
Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment , and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Microsoft, Lenovo, and any number of Lenovo’s business partners intended for it to have. Now all you need is an SSH client so…
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Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python
Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator. The code is here on github .
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Useful Unix commands for exploring data
While dealing with big genetic data sets I often got stuck with limitation of programming languages in terms of reading big files. Also so...
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Tarsnap price cut
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
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What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
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Transcribing Piano Rolls, the Pythonic Way
In this post I use Fourier transforms to revive a forgotten Gershwin piano piece. Piano rolls are these rolls of perforated paper that you feed to …
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Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
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Emacs, naked
When it gets too cold, you can always put on more layers of clothing. But when it gets too hot, after a while you can't take off any more. -- RMS This is GNU Em...
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Hints for writing Unix tools
The workaday world of a modern programmer abounds with Unix tools, stitched together in myriad ways. While good tools integrate seamlessly with your own environment, bad ones will constantly frustrate your efforts. Good tools have a seemingly limitless application, constrained only by your own imagination. Bad tools…