Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 356 posts.

Tools & Productivity
6

Dotfile madness

My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn't belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can't place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear…

9

Why Bother with What Three Words?

I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface…

15

Reinventing Firefox for Android

With Firefox Preview, we’re combining the best of what our lightweight Focus application and our current mobile browsers have to offer to create a best in class mobile experience. The new application is powered by Firefox's own mobile browser engine -- GeckoView -- the same high-performance, feature enabling motor…