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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 522 posts.
Before the AI era, I wrote pretty long commit descriptions (or commit bodies) for major changes. It took me about five to ten minutes to draft and reread them to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I did that for several reasons.
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
On how I progressively removed myself using Claude Code out of the development cycle - or did I?..
Natural language is a wonderful interface, but just because we suddenly can doesn't mean we always should.
I reverse-engineered Costco's gas price API and built a live tracker covering every US warehouse, right as a Strait of Hormuz scare sent fuel prices climbing.
Update, 29 April 2026 This post was picked up on Hacker News and crossed 100 comments. I love that this sparks emotions. As always, there is a fair mix of reactions, which is exactly what you would expect from HN. Scroll to the bottom for extra responses to some of the comments. … Cloud Next was intense. I wrote the…
My previous AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop is still up and running – it will now be my kids computer … so I needed a new one … but not a bigger one :) I spent way too much time finding…
This Spectrimage palette extractor started as a sidecar to image color analysis, but grew into its own feature.
If you do Linux systems programming, you will have likely pored over man pages, either on the command line or, my personal preference, using the excellent man7.org or linux.die.net. I’ve always seen …
Pensieve for developers: a local MCP server that gives Claude Code, Codex and Cursor your context. A thread for every piece of work. Free and open source, for Mac.
How Storyteller’s forced alignment algorithm works.
many traditional and modern card games. At only 120 cards, it supports a large number of existing game systems, such as: The Everdeck is a card game system that can be adapted to play many traditio…
sqlite-backed shell history
Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
I do all my work in the terminal, so it has to be quick. How my zsh starts in 30 milliseconds without a framework, and how to measure where your own shell spends its time.
After a long day of exhausting conversations about Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography, random jackasses trying to play gotcha with endpoint attacks against end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, and me…
What happens when you ask Claude Code to compose music? Five experiments later: original songs, music videos, and a full album, all built from scratch.
MIDI Guide, the open, "comprehensive" MIDI CC & NRPN dataset, has far outgrown its original purpose.
You might have heard recently that Safari Technology Preview 234 landed the final plan for supporting masonry-style layouts in CSS.
I found a one-line JavaScript bug in the 24 Hour Fitness unsubscribe page and built a working alternative. The official page has since been fixed.
A free browser game that teaches real Vim motions. The van is your cursor, the town is your text. Serve every customer under par.
I love taking notes, but one problem that I have is that that I start cherishing every notebook that I start. I can't seem to keep my notes messy. Eventually...
I never questioned why code should be highlighted until I tried to make my own theme.
I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. Linux never sticks with me.
A story about replacing a creative workflow and focusing on another.
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here .
a guide to interactive rebasing.
Everything that goes into making a digital font, from vector outlines to hinting.
