Hacker News: jsdwarf

Smellcheck – detect AI smells in texts

jsdwarf — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:34:19 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/fbuchinger/smellcheck

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369492

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jsdwarf in "Coursera to combine with Udemy"

jsdwarf — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 16:52:57 +0000

I wouldn't be so tough on the online certificates. The key value I get out of Coursera is an unbeatable "time to knowledge" and some proof it was me who attended the course through the id verification. Compare that to traditional in-person education, where you are bound to fixed course dates, long approval timelines etc. Until you get feedback from HR that you are eligible for a course/training, i've probably already completed it via my Coursera complete subscription.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Show HN: Runprompt – run .prompt files from the command line"

jsdwarf — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:53:59 +0000

Claude.md is an input to claude code which requires a monthly plan subscription north of 15€ / month. Same applies to Gemini.md, unless you are ok that they use your prompts for training Gemini. The python script works with a pay per use api key.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)"

jsdwarf — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 02:10:04 +0000

pptx-tools, a collection of cli tools for interacting with Powerpoint presentations. Covers use cases that PowerPoint doesn't support. Currently in the making:

* pptx-grep - find text across multiple powerpoints, yield file/slide no and text excerpt of match

* pptx-dump - dumps extended info about a powerpoint, such as number of slides, applied master slides, used fonts etc.

* pptx-lint - allows to define validation rules for pptx based on content and/or formatting. E.g. presentation must not contain word "TBD", all text must be formatted in Arial etc.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Why can't HTML alone do includes?"

jsdwarf — Sat, 03 May 2025 19:27:31 +0000

I'd say in 80% of the cases a pure, static html include is not enough. In a menu include, you want to disable the link to the currently shown page or show a page specific breadcrumb. In a footer include, you may want a dynamic "last updated" timestamp or the current year in the copyright notice. As all these use cases required a server-side scripting language anyway, there was no push behind an html include.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Basic Income Pilot Project: Study results"

jsdwarf — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:24:57 +0000

Many alleged benefits of basic income can be explained by flaws in the study design. No I will not quit my 40h if the 1200€ are paid out for three years only.

But i will use the money to hire cleaning ladies or baby sitters -> more spare time than control group.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Basic Income Pilot Project: Study results"

jsdwarf — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:12:56 +0000

You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards

New comment by jsdwarf in "Barcelona buys apartment building at center of eviction protests"

jsdwarf — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 13:02:46 +0000

IMHO the crisis is fueled by the fact that more people want to enjoy the beauty of barcelona short-term (tourists) AND long term (digital nomads moving and working from there). Short term stayers "pay" with increasing hotel&airbnb prices, long-term stayers with low salaries. According to Glassdoor, a software engineer in Barcelona has a 30-40% lower salary than the same position in e.g. Vienna or Berlin. And believe me, hiring in Barcelona is easy.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)"

jsdwarf — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 21:51:42 +0000

I can offer another "why?" How many animals attack a wasp's nest? Almost zero, except other wasps in a territory war? How many animals attack a beehive? Humans, bears, apes,.. pretty any big enough mammal that can climb. So bees not only suffer from much more predators due to their precious honey, in my view they also need to differentiate between "honey maker" and warrior (sting) functions as their poison could contaminate the honey. Why do the males have to die? Because almost none of their enemies can extract a bee sting from their skin. Once stung, the poison glands and some muscles remain with the sting, acting as a "poison pump". This could deter the attacker longer from a second attack. Which makes sense, as the beehive cannot run away from the attacker.

New comment by jsdwarf in "The Tsunami of Burnout Few See"

jsdwarf — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 19:07:46 +0000

One big trigger for burnout is if you cannot answer the question "why do I work?" any more. One of the big whys was that working hard allows you to buy a house/appartment which allows you to maintain your standard of living in retirement. But this isn't true any more due to the declining purchasing power of salaries. Why should I be stressed out in my job if this only allows me to rent an apartment that i have to give up as soon as I stop working?

New comment by jsdwarf in "Curl-Impersonate"

jsdwarf — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 23:50:15 +0000

Disabling guest checkout would have been my weapon of choice or at least requiring the user to enter an email address to so that they are notified when the product becomes available.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Eventually consistent plain text accounting"

jsdwarf — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:46:47 +0000

Been there. hedger/ledger look tempting, but if you follow the approach of the OP, you need to build your own toolchain around it so that it recompiles your journals on each rule change.

I've found it easier to use a spreadsheet. Sheet 1 contains the csv export to which i constantly append, sheet 2 the hierarchical acoount structure: an account name like "expenses: groceries:walmart" is followed by a regex that matches the expense description on sheet 1 for that account (walmart). On sheet 1 I have an "detected Account" column, into which a formula outputs the detected account based in the regexes.

Sumif formulas sum up the totals per account. Since no compilation step is necessary, rule changes are picked up much faster

New comment by jsdwarf in "MtCellEdit – Lightweight Spreadsheet Program"

jsdwarf — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 13:46:15 +0000

What does MtCellEdit set apart from the standard spreadsheet program apart from its lightweightness? Any special features?

New comment by jsdwarf in "Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker"

jsdwarf — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:19:18 +0000

That's exactly my problem. Assigning the purchase of a new computer mouse to the "Expenses:ITEquipment" account? Easy if you purchased the mouse at your local computer store and used your debit card. Just define a text pattern to make any purchase from that store go to the ITEquipment account and run it against the csv from your checkings account.

Same purchase from amazon? Difficult, because you have two layers of indirection: checking account > credit card > amazon > it equipment.

Currently testing a new spreadsheet approach to deal with such scenarios, but not easy.

New comment by jsdwarf in "The semantic web is now widely adopted"

jsdwarf — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:53:48 +0000

Funny you bring up logistics and (data) ontologies. I'm a PM at a logistics software company and I'd say the lack of proper ontologies and standardized data exchange formats is the biggest effort driver for integrating 3rd party carrier/delivery services such as DHL, Fedex etc.

It starts with the lack of a common terminology. For tool A a "booking" might be a reservation e.g. of a dock at a warehouse. For tool B the same word means a movement of goods between two accounts.

In terms of data integration things have gotten A LOT worse since EDIFACT is de facto deprecated. Every carrier in the parcel business is cooking their own API, but with insufficient means. I've come across things like Polish endpoint names/error messages or country organisations of big Parcel couriers using different APIs.

IMHO the EU has to step in here because integration costs skyrocket. They forced cellphone manufacturers to use USB-Cs for charging, why can't they force carriers to use a common API?

New comment by jsdwarf in "How to avoid losing items? Holding pens"

jsdwarf — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:47:07 +0000

My trick is to make the objects "stand out". Black headphones, smartphones, keys etc are easily overlooked in work bag pockets or when placed on other dark surfaces.

I've greatly improved the "retrieval interval" of my phone since I've put it in a mint-green case instead of the standard black one. Same goes for my bluetooth headphone case, on which I applied reflective stickers.

Another trick is to group related objects. My office key card is in the cover of my work smart phone, so I have to look out for one item less each morning.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority"

jsdwarf — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 09:59:59 +0000

Excel is so ubiquitous because it is the only IDE/Programming Language/Database Environment business users can run in a restricted corporate IT environment.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Gabriel García Márquez: Sons publish novel that late author wanted destroyed"

jsdwarf — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 07:07:41 +0000

We probably wouldn't know anything about Kafka's Works if his agent Max Brod had adhered to Kafka's instructions to destroy all his notebooks and manuscripts upon death.

New comment by jsdwarf in "Is something bugging you?"

jsdwarf — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:13:18 +0000

> and found all of the bugs in the database

This is when I stopped reading

New comment by jsdwarf in "Thoughts on tech employment"

jsdwarf — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 19:54:07 +0000

You can steer attrition by so many parameters - compensation, (non) promotion, change in benefit plans.

And again, a "non-regrettable" termination can also apply when the employee quit.