Hacker News: mbork_pl

New comment by mbork_pl in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

mbork_pl — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:43:07 +0000

Are you Saruman by any chance?

New comment by mbork_pl in "Git-Link, an Emacs package to create links to Git objects"

mbork_pl — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:06:55 +0000

This is a really cool Emacs package (not mine) I found recently. Its purpose is to create links to objects (files and commits) on sites like GitLab, Savannah, Bitbucket, GitHub etc. (I wrote a blog post about it, too, with a little extension, though I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share it here so I won't.)

Git-Link, an Emacs package to create links to Git objects

mbork_pl — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:06:55 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/sshaw/git-link

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852949

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mbork_pl in "Draig, a Welsh Programming Language"

mbork_pl — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:23:38 +0000

I've been working with a codebase for a very specific domain where hardly anyone even knew the English terms for the domain-specific things (and some of them probably didn't even exist - highly localized customs etc.). No point in using English then.

New comment by mbork_pl in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

mbork_pl — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 07:50:19 +0000

Thanks, that looks very neat! I love apps like this, situated software created to scratch someone's itch.

New comment by mbork_pl in "Booting from a vinyl record (2020)"

mbork_pl — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 05:37:29 +0000

I'm not (yet) in my 50s (though close). I used to have a C64 back in the day. I wrote write a few things in its horrible BASIC dialect. Probably the most advanced was a database (not relational, just one table, but kept separately from the source, of course on an audio cassette).

That device had ridiculous capabilities. The sound chip was good enough people wrote a speech synthesis software. Later, people wrote a graphical OS, with e.g. a text editor being an equivalent of Windows Write from the 90s.

New comment by mbork_pl in "Booting from a vinyl record (2020)"

mbork_pl — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 05:24:36 +0000

My guess would be that the broadcaster had one geek who pushed for that. Fellow geeks had software over the radio, the broadcaster had an opinion of a modern one, keeping up with the newest tech. Win-win.

New comment by mbork_pl in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

mbork_pl — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:43:29 +0000

My wife is non-technical and doesn't know anything about bookkeeping. Every-ish day I ask her for receipts and enter them into our ledger-cli file. She mostly uses her debit card, so it's usually easy not to miss too much. (I use cash exclusively, so it's more of a conscious effort for me.) Every month I send her a monthly report via email.

New comment by mbork_pl in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

mbork_pl — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:40:23 +0000

Are you me, by any chance? I had been doing exactly this for years. Finally, my income rose enough that I stopped to care - I just pay from my current account and move on. But what astonishes me is that hardly anyone seems to do that, especially people earning less than the current me. It seems such an obvious idea!

I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...

New comment by mbork_pl in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

mbork_pl — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:56:31 +0000

I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any responsibility whatsoever.

New comment by mbork_pl in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

mbork_pl — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:29:52 +0000

Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier.

Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/

New comment by mbork_pl in "It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)"

mbork_pl — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:55:37 +0000

JarJarScript.

New comment by mbork_pl in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

mbork_pl — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 10:33:03 +0000

I did my share of coding on a Commodore 64 (have you seen that keyboard?) with a cassette tape as the only external storage, no debugger (just a very poor BASIC variant) and (of course) a mono CRT tv set as a monitor. No internet, of course, just a few books/magazines.

Kids these days... ;-)

New comment by mbork_pl in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

mbork_pl — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:54:07 +0000

Not to criticize you - I also use eglot and it's great - but let me mention that people have been doing pretty meaningful software development for several decades now, and LSPs are, I don't know, 5 years old?

There's a saying in my language, "the appetite grows while you eat"...

New comment by mbork_pl in "The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need"

mbork_pl — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:17:32 +0000

> Or, I could use some actually well designed software and save myself some printer ink :-)

Or, you could use some well-designed and self-documenting software. Too bad there's not much of that besides Emacs - on the other hand, Emacs and occasionally a browser cover most of my computering needs...

New comment by mbork_pl in "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is"

mbork_pl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:19:30 +0000

> How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?

Very rough estimation: $9000. I'm not sure how much my wife pays - this is paid by the employer and she usually doesn't bother to check. (This is mainly insurance, we seldom use public healthcare.)

New comment by mbork_pl in "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is"

mbork_pl — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 18:03:47 +0000

FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids). I think I could easily earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I live in central Europe.)

New comment by mbork_pl in "Free software scares normal people"

mbork_pl — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:17:51 +0000

How is that specific to FOSS?

New comment by mbork_pl in "You already have a Git server"

mbork_pl — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 14:25:19 +0000

Staging is immensely useful in more than one case.

Case one: WiP on a branch, code is pretty stable, but I want to do some experiments which will likely be deleted. I stage everything and then make (unstaged) changes which I can then undo with two keystrokes.

Case two: I'm reviewing a complex PR, so I first merge it with --no-commit, then unstage everything and then stage chunks (or even individual lines) I have already reviewed.

Case three: I was coding in the state of flow and now I have a lot of changes I want to commit, but I want to separate them into several atomic commits. I stage the first batch of changes, commit, then stage another, commit, etc.

There are probably more, but these three alone are worth having the staging area.

New comment by mbork_pl in "How has mathematics gotten so abstract?"

mbork_pl — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:18:34 +0000

The Fibonacci sequence might have been more appropriate.