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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,503 posts.
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, when I finally…
Microsoft Excel the programming language is evolving. With the recent release of LAMBDA, users can now define new functions in the program’s formula language. Learn about the capability and its role in the transformation of spreadsheet formulas.
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
Did you know you can change Git attributes based on what folder you're in?
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
In this post I will talk about my favourite computer ergonomics hack, a DIY device I call "The Beeper".
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
The simple act of reserving a tiny part of your day. Perhaps just 30 minutes. Of pure, uninterrupted focus. On the idea you want to make become reality. Will ensure at least some extent of progress. I guarantee you.
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a terminal-based disk usage analyzer for Linux and other POSIX-y systems, (formerly) written in C and available in the package repositories of most distributions.
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
Lufthansa has not banned Apple AirTags and I think it is clear why: it is the sort of rule that would practicably be unenforceable.
What if I'm a left-handed person in the world of right-handed tools?
Does your package.json file have a large scripts section? If you have more than a handful of extremely simple npm scripts, try Makefiles.
It’s been almost a year that Keivan Beigi shut down the AppGet project in response to shenanigans by the Windows App Model team. Microsoft…
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put it charitably, idiot-
Compiler warnings are mostly good: they identify real problems, and when false positives do occur they are usually easy to work around. However, if they’re not fatal, they tend to be ignored and build up. (See bug 187528 for an idea!)
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and…
Repeatedly reaching for your mouse slows you down in the short term, and in the long term brings on health problems (RSI). To stay fast and healthy...
Today we released Whisk 2.0: a lightweight web page editor with a live preview that updates as you type. The name may be new, but the mac app’s origins are in shareware called HyperEdit that I started while in college over 16 years ago. It is hard to believe I’ve worked on an app old eno
I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.
I am now officially part of the "previous" generation of programmers. I know this because the new generation no longer has "vi vs. emacs" e...
Starting today, Claude Cowork and chat are one Claude, rolling out on Pro, Max, and Ultra plans. Hand over the task and Claude does the work. You keep the final say.
