Topics /

Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 589 posts.

2023
272

Scripting with Elixir

I was a Python developer for some time and one great joy of Python is that you have an expressive language that you can use for your serious apps as well as for your hacky little one-off script or bespoke pieces of automation. By expressive I mean that typing very little can give you a lot of progress towards your…

273

Let's write a treesitter major mode for Emacs

Creating a standard programming major mode presents significant challenges, with the intricate tasks of establishing proper indentation and font highlighting being among the two hardest things to get right. It's painstaking work, and it'll quickly descend into a brawl between the font lock engine and your desire for…

275

An Alerting Vista of macOS Sonoma

There’s a new “feature” in Sonoma, and no one besides Apple is quite sure what it is. Alerts for deprecated APIs are now appearing frequently. Sometimes when you launch an app, and sometimes at random. Here are three I got the other day after waking a MacBook from sleep: From a UI point-of-view, these alerts […]

277

Bing Image Creator

Last month we introduced the new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge, your copilot for the web – delivering better search, complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to create content. Already, we have seen that chat is reinventing how people search with more than 100 million chats to date. We’ve seen…

286

The Curse of Docker

I'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write something quick and oddly professional: I'm going to complain about Docker.

297

Fun with DNS TXT Records

TXT Record Specification Primer # Reading through the RFC Using the Domain Name System To Store Arbitrary String Attributes to summarise the relevant part: Any printable ASCII character is permitted for the attribute name. More importantly, on the restrictions section Some DNS server implementations place limits on…

299

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

Productivity is one of my pet topics, because it's always dogged me a bit, especially early in my career. I'd pull long days and nights and then realize I only actually worked (as in, typing in code, debugging stuff, and thinking about problems and their solutions) maybe 20% of the time. Upon talking to coworkers…