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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 391 posts.
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Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
rant about me wasting time
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Please put units in names
Using strong types, or putting units in names, is a small effort that can make a tremendous difference for code readability.
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USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
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Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Dear Spotify. I tried to search for podcasts on your Desktop app. I know you're into fancy cross-platform Electron framework. I've come to terms with it. It's fine. It'll do. But, your understanding of interface design seems like it needs a bit of a history
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I used DALL·E 2 to generate a logo
Everybody has heard about the latest cool thing™, which is DALL·E 2 (henceforth called Dall-e). A few months ago, when the first previews started, it was basically everywhere. Now, a few weeks ago, the floodgates have been opened and lots of people on the waitlist got access - that group included me. I’ve spent a day…
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Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things
This article is about a few quick thumb rules I use when writing shell scripts that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Very opinionated....
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Outdated vs. Complete: In defense of apps that don’t need updates
On August 22nd, I got an email out of the blue from Apple that notified me that I had a new App Review message. It was for my app, WorldAnimals, a light-hearted game for guessing animal onomatopoeia sounds in different languages.Usually, you receive a message after you submit a new version to the...
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A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
Staying in touch with people is one of these asymmetric habits that require little effort, time and resources but has an unlimited upside.
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I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues
I wanted a way to have physical tickets from GitHub in front of me. One Epson printer, a Raspberry Pi, and some PHP later, I had a working system in place.
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I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information
What will happen when our phones record everything we say 24x7 using AI to process that information?, before someone else does, I tried to do it myself, and this is the result. First of all some clarifications. It’s not really 24x7 because I didn’t find it useful to leave it
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Productivity porn
I have a pornography problem, but it’s not what you’re thinking. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might too.
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How to build a personal webpage from scratch
An opinionated introduction to designing and deploying a modern static webpage.
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New(ish) command line tools
A list of new(ish) command line tools
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Stretch iPhone to its limit: 2GiB Stable Diffusion model runs locally on device
Every year, we have a new iPhone that claims to be faster and better in every way. And yes, these new computer vision models and new image sensors can exercise the phone as hard as they can. However, you could already take good pictures on an iPhone 10 years ago. These are incremental improvements.
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One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite
I figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility:
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Write plain text files
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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What are your most used self-hosted applications?
The list that's always growing. What are your most used self hosted applications? Here's mine.
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Difftastic, the fantastic diff
programming, language design, and human factors
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Find a good available .com domain
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Take more screenshots
If you do any sort of creative digital work, screenshots and screen recordings are a great way to remember it.
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Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore
A fun, if predictable and pointless exercise.
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Git Notes
the short of it is: they’re cool for appending notes from automated systems (like ticket or build systems) but not really for having interactive conversations with other developers (at least not yet)
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You can now ask Google to remove your phone number, email or address from search
Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the age of 18 (or a…
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`COPY –chmod` reduced the size of my container image by 35%
Earlier this week, I was writing a Dockerfile to download and run a binary when I noticed the image size was way more than what I would expect. I’m using ubuntu:21.10 as the base image, which is about 70MB. The binary I’m running is about 80MB. Other packages I’m installing would add 10-ish MB. But the image size is…
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SSH tips and tricks
Since I joined Charm, I’ve been working and learning more about SSH, and I thought I would share a few quick tips and tricks with you.
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The Curse of NixOS
I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. On the other hand, it's…