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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,505 posts.

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6184

Honest In-App Purchases

It is no secret that the vast majority of revenues being made today in the App Store are via consumable based “Free”-to-Play games. These have sat atop the Top Grossing charts for a long time now. Last month at WWDC Apple announced that it had paid out $5 billion in the last year to developers, with clearly much of…

6186

Mutt on Windows Without WSL

I have this weird hobby of trying to get good unix tools to run natively on Windows. I find this is the most efficient use of my laptop's resources, and therefore the nicest experience. WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2 . Getting unix tools to work correctly under MSYS2 is a…

6188

A Year Away from Mac OS

This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.

6189

Generating true random numbers from bananas

It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……

6198

One sentence per line, please

I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…

6201

An early look at VLC 4.0

Early review of VLC 4.0 Nightly build, focusing on the new and redesigned interface, including tons of problems like bad ergonomics, low font contrast, decreased workflow efficiency, reduced responsiveness, no quick access to local filesystems, video playback in a separate window, and more