Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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Boy, I wish someone had asked this before.

The best posts are ones that say something surprising (e.g. not just a reporter writing a routine story about a familiar topic), and say it in a convincing way, with depth of argument, and numbers, if applicable.

Posts about how to do things oneself, and how things work, tend to be particularly appreciated. This is an audience that likes to know the details.

Posts don't have to be about hacking, so long as they talk in detail about something novel or surprising. Though arguably anything that talks about the internal details of how something works is about hacking, in the broader sense.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414330

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098

Three of those links were a different color because they were not in my browser history. I immediately middle-clicked each of them.

Holy cow -- middle clicking opens in a new tab?! I love you.

My first thought on reading that was, "some people don't know that?!"

My immediate next thought was, "I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

Is there a wiki for this sort of thing? There needs to be one.

It's hard to look for things that solve problems you don't know you have.

Now there's an opportunity for a startup search engine.

apple-shift-t reopens closed tabs in firefox

Ctrl-Shift-T on Windows: works in Firefox, Opera and Chrome.

Also middle click closes tab.

It's the same for Linux, too.

You are my hero.

I presume that's built in? I've been using TMP to get the same functionality, but it uses F12 which gets swallowed by firebug if you have that enabled.

heh. Funny thing is that I post or tweet this about once a week. It's my pet project to tell more people about this.

Yeah I used to use F12 with Tab Mix Plus until it was swallowed by Firebug, and that's when I discovered Ctrl-Shift-T, which is arguably easier to hit than F12 as well.

how do you get firebug to work with F12 on Mac!?

The problem with an obvious things you don't know wiki is that everyone doesn't know something different that's obvious. Putting all those things in one easy to find place makes them hard to find. And if you didn't know what you were looking for in the first place...

A wiki with "middle click opens in new tabs" would be noise for me. Nice thought though.

"I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

I recently learned about open in OS X:

  $ open filename

This opens filename using whatever the default application is for the file's type.

Ctrl-CMD-D over any word in OS X gives you a definition. Keep holding Ctrl-CMD and move around...

CTRL-click does the same.

I think this is default behavior (thought I vaguely remember configuring it) -- on a computer without a mouse you can simultaneous left and right to open a new tab.

On Linux, left+right click emulate a middle click, at least if you only have two buttons.

This just saved me countless minutes. Great.

yea.. that just transformed my browsing ability, though probably not for the better :)

Thanks for the specific examples of threads you have liked. I find that I like to learn inductively. And you also described some characteristics of likeable posts, for those who like to learn deductively.

"President of Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented (volunteer), founding director and math coach for Edina Center for Academic Excellence (career), homeschooling father of four children." - extracted from the profile of tokenadult.

He is a grown up man with four children. Not longer a boy.

As a point of linguistic information: boy used as the poster did is an exclamation, pretty much equivalent to Wow.

Thanks for your advice. This shows that I did learned something from leaving comment.

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