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Tools & Productivity

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

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6399

Five whys

At 3:30 in the morning of January 10th, 2008, a shrill chirping woke up our system administrator, Michael Gorsuch, asleep at home in Brooklyn. It was a text message from Nagios, our network monitor…

6401

How To: Getting Started with EC2 (for beginners)

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon's web services arsenal. You've probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the "elastic compute cloud." In layman's terms, it's a server. In slightly less layman's terms, EC2 lets you e

6402

From TextMate to Vim

TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an…

6407

Python Library for Google Translate

I have extended my xgoogle library with a Python module for Google Translate. The new module is called "xgoogle.translate" and it implements two classes - "Translator" and "LanguageDetector". The "Translator" class can be used to translate text. It provides a function called "translate" that takes three arguments -...

6415

Pimping out git log

I got playing with git log and ended up creating this alias: [alias] lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative Which adds a git lg command that is a prettier version of git log --oneline.

6418

How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet

Yesterday Mark Reid posted on Twitter a challenge : create a self-referential tweet (one that links to itself). He later clarified that the tweet should contain in its text its own identifier (the number after " /status/" bit should be its own URL). I decided to take up the challenge ("in order to learn a bit about…