Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 391 posts.

Tools & Productivity
63

How To Do Less

You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...

67

The Joy of Small Projects

When was the last time you completed a project? When was the last time you started a project? Have you every felt that you were trapped working on something that you don’t enjoy anymore? Size is something that I’m sure most developers with the drive to do side projects have felt. Recently I have been completing more…

69

Emacs 29 is nigh

Table of Contents Major features Eglot is now part of Emacs core Tree-Sitter is also part of Emacs core Install packages from source with package.el Org mode 9.6 use-package in Emacs core Pure GTK Emacs is here for Wayland! Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time Native access to SQLite databases HaikuOS support New…

71

Useless Use of "dd" (2015)

tl;dr: dd works for reading and writing disks, but it has no "low level I/O" capabilities that make it more suited for this than any other shell utility. Like cat you should use it where it makes sense, e.g. to take advantage of its wide array of options, rather than try to ensure that all disk related commands begin…

90

Learn TLA+

tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found it so useful I wrote a free online guide to help others learn it. Then I decided the guide wasn’t good enough and wrote Practical TLA+ in 2018. Then I decided the…