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s/bash/zsh/g
There is simply no way you can do calculations with fractions in bash without relying on bc , dc , or some hacks. Compared to simply being able to use a + b it’s ugly, slow, and difficult.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 521 posts.
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Online text to diagram tools (2020)
List of text to diagram tools
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Typing Is Hard
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
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Change your MAC address with a shell script (2019)
Sometimes I'm at a coffee shop and get locked out of the wifi, after an hour or two has passed. Rather than spending 2 minutes/week entering terminal commands, I thought it made sense to spend a few hours figuring out how to make it take one minute a week, instead, via AUTOMATION
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How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy
How to use the python web scraping framework Scrapy to crawl indeed.com. Learn data engineering strategies for getting actionable insights from public information.
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IT Without Software
During August 2009, we went on a number of field trips to health centers in remote areas of Thailand and Cambodia. The idea was to conduct a...
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iDOS 2 will be gone soon
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
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Elementary OS 6.1
We come bearing gifts and Yule tidings!
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I returned my Remarkable2
The non-writing UX is bad enough to render product unusuable
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Tips on adding JSON output to your CLI app
Best practices when adding a JSON output option to your command-line application.
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How I spend less time on YouTube
Maybe I'm paranoid. But, I think there's a lot of smart people out there dedicating their life's work to make others keep watching videos. Since YouTube's incomprehensible decision to remove dislikes count it's become even easier to waste time on worthless content. In this blog post, I'll describe a simple trick that…
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Use the 'tail' command to monitor everything
This article is about how to use the 'tail' command. Here is an overview of how you can use the 'head' and 'tail' commands to output different parts of a file:
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Instant replay: Debugging C and C++ programs with rr
Learn how you can go back in time and replay what went wrong in a C/C++ program with rr (a GNU Debugger Linux enhancement) in this short demo.
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Incremental note-taking
I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our…
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The pitfalls of using SSH-agent, or how to use an agent safely
Unfortunately for you, we promised a follow up to talk about the security implications of using such an agent. So, here we are.
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On Comments in Code
I used to think that I didn’t need comments if I wrote self-documenting code. However, I have realized that I do write comments, and that I find them really useful. To see how many comments I…
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VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker
Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds. In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this…
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CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line (2020)
“Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were - and still are - valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today's systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see…
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Collection of Human Interface and Software Design Guides
I'm thinking about a few things.
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Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse
Since 2008, I've ripped every DVD and Blu-Ray I bought to my Mac, with a collection of SD and HD media totaling around 2 TB today. To make that library accessible, I've always used iTunes and the iTunes Shared Library functionality that—while it still exists today—seems to be on life support, in kind of a "we still…
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How I Write Code: Pen and Paper
How I Write Code: Pen & Paper - Noteflakes