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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 247 posts.
More than a year ago, Ryan Kirkman and Thomas Davis approached us about a project they were working on. Dubbed CDNJS, the project had a noble goal: make the world's Javascript resources load as fast as possible.
A while back I wrote an analysis of fake microSD cards. As a result of the post, I’ve received this question regularly via email:
There has been a lot of noise in the tech community earlier this year about how RSS is supposedly having one foot in the grave. If that would be even remotely true, I hope it dies with its boots on. The herald would be browsers and social networking sites killing or hiding support for RSS. While that may be true…
I'm a big fan of my Fitbit pedometer because it does most of its work without any interaction. I clip it onto my pocket and it counts my steps and flights of stairs as I walk throughout the day, then automatically, wirelessly uploads the data to Fitbit's website whenever I'm within range of its USB dongle plugged into…
I've finally implemented the command I keep typing all day: gti. It's a program that displays a badly made ASCII-art animation to punish you for your typing error - and after that magically launches the command you meant to launch. The code is available under an MIT-like license on github - though of course anybody…
Do Use SSH Keys When ever you can use a key for SSH. Once you create it, you can distribute the public side widely to enable access where ever you need it. Generating one is easy: ssh-keygen -t dsa Don't Use a Blank Passphrase on Your Key This key is now your identity. Protect it.
I’m not leery of Google shuttering its Gmail service, but I can imagine a scenario where they cut off my access to Gmail and I have no way to plead my case to the search behemoth. So I went looking …
I’ve had the idea of embedding a computer DSLR camera for a couple of years now, but for whatever reason I never got around to implementing it, mostly due to the cost of small single board computers. Until now, that is. With the release of the Raspberry Pi, embedded computing has all of a sudden become much more…
Over the last 20 years, my primary computing environment has gone from Windows 3.1, to Mac OS 6/7/8/9, to Windows for about a decade, and then back to a Mac a couple of years ago. Recently, I switched to using a Linux desktop as my primary computer. I can’t say that there’s a dramatic r…
This post was republished on Lifehacker. I just started my junior year at Penn. Aside from a newly developed disdain for the freshmen I see bumbling their
We do this software development thing. I don’t have to tell you at times, it’s a very trying process. You shouldn’t have to deal with tools that get in your way or make your experience any less pleasurable. Okay. So you got the fancy chair. How about
SSH keys are useful to login over ssh (secure shell) without typing a password. They are also used by Github and other version control systems for passwordless authentication. Here is some basic information from the software developer point of view how to use SSH keys for maximum comfort and security. These…
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…
