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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,504 posts.
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Novellas with Groff
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.
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Protecting a Laptop from Simple and Sophisticated Attacks
How I secured a ThinkPad: a Windows honeypot with Prey for thieves, TRESOR against cold boot, a USB boot stick for evil maids, and a separate Firefox user.
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Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
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DigitalOcean Indicator
The other weekend I took some time to play around with the DigitalOcean API, and this is what resulted. The DigitalOcean indicator allows you to monitor and manage your droplets directly from your panel. You can: Quickly see which droplets are active. Reboot, power on, and/or power down you …
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Chromium Notes: Ninja, a new build system
When we first started porting Chrome away from just Windows, we intended to use Scons to build Chrome on all our platforms. But early on in development I discovered that Scons, despite its admirable goals of correctness and ease of use, was quite slow — it could take 40 seconds from starting Scons before it decided to…
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Bitbucket announces Connect platform
More than 3 million developers and 450,000 teams use Bitbucket to manage and collaborate on source code. But code collaboration is only a fraction of what software teams do on a daily basis to ship software. Nowadays, shipping great software involves constant context switching using tools that don’t integrate tightly…
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2011 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment
Update: A better approach is detailed in Laptop Setup for an Awesome...
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How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first
Hacker News displays comments in a tree. This can be frustrating if you want to keep track of a particular conversation, as you constantly have to seek through the tree to find the latest comment.
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How to print your Guild Wars 2 character
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
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Postgres locks explorer
All of the data in this page is derived from these tests , so is true by some definition of true. Notable is this test - given an arbitrary SQL statement, it determines via runtime inspection which locks are taken.
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Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019)
I’m an entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI developer tools and data systems. My principal role is Founder at Kenn Software . I am also a Principal Architect at Posit , where I contribute to Python and AI strategy. I was a founder of Voltron Data , Ursa Labs (with Posit ), and DataPad. I wrote Python for Data…
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Delete tests
We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from holistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movements, the developers I talk to seem to have developed a folk wisdom around tests. That consensus seems to boil down to…
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Tracking Costco gas prices
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.
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Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight
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…
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Improving first impressions on Signal
The phenomenon of unsolicited and unwanted messaging dates back to the earliest communication platforms: from prehistoric cave graffiti and postal chain letters to popup ads and robocalls. To prevent spam, most online services rely on large-scale inspection of plaintext conversation content or de...
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A dead man's switch for your computer?
In the last few weeks, a lot of details have been disclosed around Ross Ulbricht’s arrest. For those not familiar with the matter, Ulbricht was arrested at …
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Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk
A single-function JSON parser for the POSIX shell.
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Notes on Software Development Waste
Sedano et al (2017)[1] on "Software Development Waste" identified and describe that software projects manifest nine possible types of waste, in terms of loss of productivity and unnecessary friction.
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Use this kernel parameter in your kiosk
r/PBSOD is a fun subreddit all about posting pictures of broken kiosks and information/entertainment systems in public. It stands for Public Blue Screen of Death which is a Windowsism but Linux systems are posted there too. If you spend enough time scrolling, you might notice two things: There’s a scary number of…
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Supabase Clippy – ChatGPT for Supabase Docs
Creating a ChatGPT interface for the Supabase documentation.
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