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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,503 posts.
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Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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Take the pain out of Git conflict resolution: use diff3 (2017)
Hating git conflicts? Use git's built-in diff3 option to make sense out of it all!
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Application-Level Logging Best Practices
Logs from the application level are the only way your application talks back to you. Having proper logs with commendable search capabilities is like having a torch in a dark room.
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Semantic Zoom
Making a gestural, itemized environment more fluid
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Emacs Bedrock 2.0
Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without…
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A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
The terminal is the result of its history, from the telegram to our terminal emulators. What is the difference with a console? The shell?
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Online text to diagram tools (2020)
List of text to diagram tools
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Developing inside a virtual machine
Keeping my laptop clean by developing in a virtual machine
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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
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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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The Finder’s GUI tax can be very expensive
Once a month, I download roughly 25 gzipped (.gz) files from Apple—these are our Mac App Store sales reports, with one file for each App Store region. I could have Safari expand these files (via the "Open 'safe' files after downloading' item in its preferences), but I prefer to leave that option unchecked. (Why? I…
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Git commands you probably do not need
Ah, git ! Love it, hate it. Few things are as central to the modern software development workflow as source-control management (SCM) tools. Although there have been and still are plenty of alternatives to git in the world of SCMs, none other seem quite as prevalent both in open-source and the enterprise.
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Org-mode 9.4 is out. Can you help?
This page does not exist (anymore). Back to home
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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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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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The new Cloud9 development environment
AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.
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Introducing Closure Tools
Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail , Google Docs , and Google Maps . Like developers eve...
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Bitbucket Pipelines Beta: continuous delivery inside Bitbucket
Bitbucket Cloud is introducing Pipelines to let your team build, test, and deploy from Bitbucket. It is built right within Bitbucket, giving you end-to-end visibility from coding to deployment. With Bitbucket Pipelines there's no CI server to setup, user management to configure, or repositories to synchronize. Just…
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Making a rickroll laser: A parametric speaker
Most speakers emit sound in all directions because they are relatively small compared to the wavelength. Audible sounds have wavelengths of up to several meters, so an acoustically "large" speaker might not even fit in your house.
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P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com, and is now free
P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com — and now it’s free for everyone. As more collaboration is happening remotely and online — work yes, but increasingly also school and persona…
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An unexpected benefit of unit tests
While I won’t go so far as to diagnose myself with ADD without consulting a doctor, those who know me know I can be distracted quite easily. So recently, I decided to do something a little different with a personal project I started a few weeks ago (link to come). I wrote unit tests. That may seem rather uninspired…
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