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I designed a cube that balances itself on a corner
This cube manages to balance itself on a corner, and can simultaneously rotate around its axis in a controlled manner. It does so using clever controls and a set of three reaction wheels.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 448 posts.
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Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
Signal’s mission and sole focus is private communication. For years, Signal has kept your messages private, your profile information (like your name and profile photo) private, your contacts private, and your groups private – among much else. Now we’re taking that one step further, by making your...
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An NFC movie library for my kids
When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangibl...
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Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
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Is something bugging you?
At first glance, Antithesis couldn’t be more different from FoundationDB (our last company), but it’s a continuation of that story in a funny sort of way.
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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.
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Did you lose your AirPods?
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
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Use a work journal
You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task...
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No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains
Bad service in the subway? Transit's offline motion detection shows where you are between stations, and reminds you when your stop’s up next
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Fixing Macs door to door
Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.
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Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT
Introducing canvas
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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites
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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
We are delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle ), a programming language for producing configuration.
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Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Like Heroku, but you own it.
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
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Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
A smart and user-friendly command line shell
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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
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Kino: Pro Video Camera
Today we're excited to launch Kino, a powerful filmmaking app for beginners and experts alike. As say they say in screenwriting, "Show, Don't tell," so let's walk through a few of the tent-pole features in our huge 1.0 release.
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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.
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Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely
This is another post in our Code Health series. A version of this post originally appeared in Google bathrooms worldwide as a Google Tes...
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9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
Thoughts on building Paper as an indie maker.
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My favourite Git commit (2019)
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
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Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
We’re gonna need a bigger printer.
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Building a fully local LLM voice assistant to control my smart home
I’ve had my days with Siri and Google Assistant. While they have the ability to control your devices, they cannot be customized and inherently rely on cloud services. In hopes of learning something new and having something cool I could use in my life, I decided I want better. The premises are simple: I want my new…
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I automated my job application process
A developer automated job applications, sending 250 in 20 minutes using Python scripts and GPT
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Puppeteer Support for Firefox
Puppeteer 23 now supports Firefox, simplifying browser automation and testing across both Chrome and Firefox.
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Uv: Python packaging in Rust
uv is an extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, designed as a drop-in alternative to pip and pip-tools.
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OpenAI compatibility
Ollama now has initial compatibility with the OpenAI Chat Completions API, making it possible to use existing tooling built for OpenAI with local models via Ollama.
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Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses
By WitherOrNot