Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 381 posts.

Tools & Productivity
212

How I spend less time on YouTube

Maybe I'm paranoid. But, I think there's a lot of smart people out there dedicating their life's work to make others keep watching videos. Since YouTube's incomprehensible decision to remove dislikes count it's become even easier to waste time on worthless content. In this blog post, I'll describe a simple trick that…

214

Incremental note-taking

I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our…

227

DIY Mail

I have another post about half-written that I will finish up and publish soon, but in the mean time I have been thinking today about something that perennially comes up in certain orange-tinted online communities: running your own mail server.

237

The Future Needs Files

For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.

238

Avy Can Do Anything

Update (2024-09-08): Read this article in Japanese at Qiita or at Emacs-JP. You’re using Avy wrong. Too harsh? Let me rephrase: you’re barely using Avy. Still too broad? Okay, the noninflammatory version: Avy, the Emacs package to jump around the screen, lends itself to efficient composable usage that’s obscured by…