Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 227 posts.

Tools & Productivity
73

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…

78

Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps . (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact…

83

Vim tricks

I’ve been using Vim for eight years and am still discovering new things. This is usually seen as a Good Thing About Vim. In my head, though, it’s a failing of discoverability: I keep discovering new things because Vim makes it so hard to know what’s available. While people often talk about the beauty of modal editing…

84

Better Bash History (2012)

By default, the Bash shell keeps the history of your most recent session in the .bash_history file, and the commands you’ve issued in your current session are also available with a history call. These defaults are useful for keeping track of what you’ve been up to in the shell on any given machine, but with disks much…

89

Programming the Z3 SMT solver

Abstract. This tutorial provides a programmer ' s introduction to the Satisfiability Modulo Theories Solver Z3. It describes how to use Z3 through scripts, provided in the Python scripting language, and it describes several of the algorithms underlying the decision procedures within Z3. It aims to broadly cover almost…