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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 356 posts.
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The hard part in becoming a command line wizard
I've long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they're both. Below I'll give a famous real example. Then…
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Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
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I lost my data trying to back it up
This is a story about how I lost my data when trying to prevent it by backing it up.
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Rsync, GUIs, power, control, design, and decisions
I spent last weekend making a GUI for rsync (and this past week tidying it up a bit) and I learned a lot about rsync, GUIs, design, power, control, and decisions around verbosity and freedom of choice versus simplicity and guidance/support, packaging, maintenance and support.
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Tract: A Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects
Hello! I wanted to tell you all about an open source project I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Tract and it’s a Hugo theme for large documentation projects. I aim to release version 0.1.0 by the end of 2019. In the meantime, check out the current home page or a sample docs page .
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Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer
Python application distribution is generally considered an unsolved problem. At their PyCon 2019 keynote talk, Russel Keith-Magee identified code distribution as a potential black swan - an existential threat for longevity - for Python. In their words, Python hasn't ever had a consistent story for how I give my code…
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How Google Pagespeed works
How Google PageSpeed Insights works: where its field data comes from, how Lighthouse calculates the Performance score, and how to improve your page speed.
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A Quick and Easy Guide to Tmux (2015)
Become a master of tmux in a few minutes
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Grafana v6.2
Improve operational efficiency, monitor your infrastructure, and analyze metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana, the leading open source tool for dashboards and visualizations.
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My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
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From Google Analytics to Fathom
tl;dr: I'm now using Fathom for my personal website analytics, and it's easy to self-host and maintain, better for privacy, and can lead to better site performance. Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone…
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The IA Client – The Swiss Army Knife of Internet Archive
As someone who's uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to the Internet Archive's stacks and who has probably done a few million transactions with the materials over the years, I just "know" about the Internet Archive python client, and if you're someone who wants to interact with the site as a power user (or were
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Tracking Blood Sugar
Fasting glucose and A1C tests done over the past few years show me at low risk for diabetes. But these tests don’t necessarily capture how much blood sugar “spikes” after meals–something that may be a better predictor of disease risk . Such blood sugar spikes can be minimized with a suitable diet, but what that diet…
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Using Web Technologies to Print a Book
From Markdown to PDF via HTML and CSS.
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Personal Kanban 101
Despite our best intentions, life has a way of becoming complicated. People, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and even recreation all compete for our attention. The human brain however, simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities. That’s where Personal Kanban can help.
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Metasploit 5.0 Released
We are happy to announce the release of Metasploit 5.0, the culmination of work by the Metasploit team over the past year. Learn more.
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Slack will never replace email
Hello Mr Butterfield,
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GitHub Package Registry Will Support Swift Packages
Today we’re excited to announce that we’ll be adding support for Swift packages to GitHub Package Registry. Swift packages make it easy to share your libraries and source code across your projects and with the Swift community.
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My OpenStreetMap Workflow: Mapping the Village of Marmari, Evia
A general OpenStreetMap editing workflow, with the example of Mapping the village of Marmari, Evia in Greece (Μαρμάρι, Εύβοια).
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Making Git and Jupyter Notebooks play nice
Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes , or see my example setup below.
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Highlights from Git 2.23
Take a look at some of the new features in the latest Git release.