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Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 356 posts.
Building Lyft’s Marketing Automation Platform
Machine learning based marketing automation to improve cost and volume efficiency in an ever-changing marketplace.
What Is Idempotence?
Idempotence means duplicates don't matter. It means you can safely retry an operation with no issues. The classic example is the elevator button: you press it twice and it does not call two elevators. We explore why we would want that property in an email server.
Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google
Google has become synonymous with the internet, offering services from search engines to email, cloud storage, and more.
Blurring the Line Between User and Programmer
“The world’s been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken,” says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users…
Linux Terminal Goods
Some time ago I blogged about some cool terminal plugins I was using in my Linux notebook. Also some awesome retro- emulator terminals j...
Serving Vue.js Apps on GitHub Pages
I wanted to share a pretty simple setup on how to serve a Vue.js app using Github Pages. I’m writing this because I had to search around online for awhile...
Raspberry Pi Model Railway Automation
This note introduces my experiences of using the Raspberry Pi to automate a model railway.
End-User Programming
A vision for empowered computing that reaches back forty years. Our research lab examines why it has been so hard to achieve.
Highlights from “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande
1. In the 1970s, the philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay on the nature of human fallibility that I read during my surgical training and haven’t stopped...
Adding Glue to a Desktop Environment
In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly regarding wmctrl, wmutils, xev, xtruss, xwininfo, xprop, xdotools, xdo, sxhkd, xbindkeys, speckeysd, xchainkeys, alttab, triggerhappy, gTile, gidmgr, keynav, and more. If those don't make…
USB-C Easy Bake Oven (2017)
I modified an Easy Bake Oven to run off USB-C. The obvious question is "Why?", but I prefer to ask, "Why Not?". The USB-C spec allows for 100 Watts of power to be transferred through the connector, and that is the power rating for the oven, so it should work.
Building better software with better tools: sanitizers vs. Valgrind
We often have to write code using permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer "sanitizers". I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use…
Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update
Xubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” is just around the corner. It features numerous updates and an updated snapshot of Xfce 4.14 development.
Lefthook: Knock your team’s code back into shape
Meet Lefthook, the fastest polyglot Git hooks manager in our galaxy that requires zero setup from your contributors
99% code coverage (2017)
Do we have a good safety net to change this legacy code?
Amundsen – Lyft’s data discovery and metadata engine
In order to increase productivity of data scientists and research scientists at Lyft, we developed a data discovery application built on…
Keyringless GnuPG
My favorite music player is Audacious . It follows the Winamp Classic tradition of not trying to manage my music library. Instead it waits patiently for me to throw files and directories at it. These selections will be informally grouped into transient, disposable playlists of whatever I fancy that day.
Threading Macros Guide
Threading macros, also known as arrow macros, convert nested function calls into a linear flow of function calls, improving readability.
Producing an Ebook, Step by Step
A detailed step-by-step description of the complete process of producing an ebook for Standard Ebooks, start to finish.
Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad
For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters - Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF).
Clojure - Deps and CLI Guide
In all the above scenarios you might want to use other Clojure and Java libraries (dependencies or 'deps'). These may be libraries you are writing locally, projects in git (e.g. on GitHub) or, commonly, libraries available in the Maven ecosystem and hosted by central repositories like Maven Central or Clojars.