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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 381 posts.
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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
Hot take after a year or so of trying to build a developer community. If you can pick only one, use forum software rather than synchronous chat software for community building around a developer platform.
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TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem
A browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.
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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Last night I was listening to the latest Under the Radar , where Marco Arment dove into nerdy detail about his recent Overcast server issues. The discussion was great, and you should listen to it, but Marco's recent server troubles were pretty similar to my own server issues from last year, and so I figured I'd share…
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Getting better at Linux with mini-projects
The first thing I wanted to learn more about was UNIX since Linux is a UNIX-like operating system. I also never really felt that I fully understood what exactly UNIX was, besides being a family of fairly similar operating systems.
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Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong
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A visual guide to SSH tunnels
This page explains use cases and examples of SSH tunnels while visually presenting the traffic flows. For example, here's a reverse tunnel that allows only users from IP address 1.2.3.4 access to port 80 on the SSH client through an SSH server.
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The most underused browser feature: reader mode
A great feature that is available in almost every browser allows you to reject the cookie consent popup.
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New in Git: switch and restore
To my surprise, I recently found out about 2 new additions to the list of high-level commands: git restore and git switch
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Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers
How to be a pro programmer
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Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
Every ops team has some manual procedures that they haven’t gotten around to automating yet. Toil can never be totally eliminated. Very often, the biggest toil center for a team at a growing …
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Git undo: We can do better
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
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Neovim 0.5 is overpowering
Home page and blog of David Zhang (@crispgm), a minimalist programmer, photographer, and lifehacker.
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Why is Excalidraw so good?
The product factors that make it work so so well
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Get better at Googling
10 Google search operators every developer should know: exact-match quotes, OR, minus, wildcards, site:, filetype:, number ranges, before: and after:.
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How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes
When I was building the spatial “tool for thought”, Jade, one frequently requested feature was drawing arrows between blocks, so we could make mind maps, flowcharts, etc. Here’s how I made it.
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Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
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Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…
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A Vim Guide for Advanced Users
We continue our walk on the path leading to Vim mastery by reviewing crazy Vim functionalities which will increase even more your productivity.
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Practical SQL for Data Analysis
What you can do without Pandas
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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
There's something happening in the E Ink space, somewhat quietly, but ...
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Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups
Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even…
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Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
(4 min read) Batching things by function can skyrocket your productivity.
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The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
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I hate password rules
The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password: :s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q~ Which was rejected by the site, because it didn’t meet its password security rules. It took…