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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,503 posts.

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1742

The Xylophone Maze: Screen-free coding for children

My child is 3 years old. I was looking for a game that we could play together and would be her first programming-like activity. I wasn’t keen to teach her anything specifically but rather offer her the option to explore what coding or algorithmic thinking tasted like (similarly when you would give your child a sheet…

1744

Toward a better programming

When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…

1752

Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon

Update 29.01.2023: Adapted the code to work with Mastodon 4.0 and replaced linuxrocks.online by floss.social Update 15.03.2023: Thanks to @veronica@mastodon.online, this code now handles replies in a lot nicer way. You might want check out her solution too. Update 07.07.2023: Thanks to @cassidy@blaede.family, the…

1755

Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

Wiggling apps in Launchpad There's this thing called **Launchpad** on macOS which shows you all the apps on your Mac in an iOS like manner. You may already have it in the Dock, but you can also launch it as any other app. There's even a nifty trackpad gesture for it where you *pinch with thumb and three fingers*. ...

1759

Low-Cost VPS Testing

Last time around I was looking for a large dedicated VPS in the $100/month price range. Since then I have started deploying a lot more tiny cloud instances that cost less than $10/month to run just one or two apps. So this time around I am looking for the best bang for the buck for less $10 per month. Unmanaged, of…

1760

Stop measuring community engagement

👋 Hello everyone. I'm Michael Hall and I will be your guide in Rosieland today. I want to start you off with a story about good intentions with bad outcomes. Hopefully, everybody has seen the Disney Pixar movie Monster’s Inc. by now. In the movie, the monster society runs on energy produced by children’s screams. Even…

1762

How to take smart notes with Org mode

While writing the documentation for Org-roam, it occurred to me that I have things to say that do not belong in the documentation. I wrote Org-roam because Org-mode simply didn’t have the utilities to enable the kind of note-taking workflow I wanted. I don’t want to be prescriptive about how note-taking should be…