Topics /
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 371 posts.
Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year.
Five git log commands that diagnose a new codebase before you open a single file: code churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns.
Over the past decade, I've worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe:
Local agentic coding has gotten great over the past few months
I file the sharp corners off my MacBooks. People like to freak out about this, so I wanted to post it here to make sure that everyone who wants to freak out about it gets the opportunity to do so.
Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.
TLDR: Despite claiming to backup all your data, Backblaze quietly stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders - along with potentially many other things.
I'm about as pro-AI as you can be, but this is becoming a pet peeve of mine (and I'm not alone). That's why I love the AI;DR acronym as my new solution for ignoring the walls of slop.
GUI applications should be fully driven by the keyboard using shortcuts
According to Wikipedia , it’s an adage that goes back to 1512 in Germany. People have known for hundreds of years that you should be careful not to throw out a good and vital thing in your zeal to get rid of a minor annoyance.
The research-plan-implement workflow I use to build software with Claude Code, and why I never let it write code until I've approved a written plan.
A flickering fireplace, a softly lit garden, and a smart home the whole family finally enjoys.
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns
The meme will no longer be a dream.
CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting dramatically easier and actually fun. This is the first time I would recommend it to normal software-literate people.
A place to play around with technology and make it easy and fun
Might seem simple on the face of it, but unfortunately it's pain all the way down.
How to delete all merged git branches locally with a single command. This one-liner has been in my zshrc since 2017 — I found it buried in the CIA's Vault7 l...
Oh, you use Firefox? Name every extension.
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For several years I ran MythTV , then XBMC (later known as Kodi).
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control
Hand drawn data visualizations by artist Doug MacDowell.
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
