<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: mcgrath_sh</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mcgrath_sh</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:56:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=mcgrath_sh" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I too store all my photos on Dropbox. I used Hazel on macOS to move them into YYYY/YYYY-MM folders. I now use a bash script to do similar. This organization system has been rock solid for me for over a decade. I honestly don't want more than that. I dislike the obfuscation so many photo storage solutions use. I want my files and my folders.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 21:19:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48286113</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48286113</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48286113</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Why the KeePass format should be based on SQLite"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My KeePass database is pretty stable at this point. I would say edits happen every few weeks, if that. My edit date is ~2 weeks ago, and it was because I was logging into an account I hadn't touched in a few years. Nothing really changes much in my personal database. I add stuff occasionally, but new accounts are few and far between, and so are password changes. I'm not sure what would be changed every few days for an individual.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:17:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154451</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154451</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154451</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Sizing chaos"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, not every shoe brand is equal, but if I know I'm a 9, I can <i>generally</i> start there and find a shoe plus/minus a half size. I have yet to go into a store and wind up in a shoe that is 3 sizes larger than what I thought my size was. Or 3 sizes smaller. Or a size 8 in one shoe from a brand and a 10 different shoe. I can order Nike/Jordan brand shoes without trying  them on and they fit. Have done it for years.<p>I went to re-buy the "same" jeans ~8 months after my initial purchase and the size I was wearing didn't fit in the new jeans. Tried another pair with a different wash and was back to the original size. I have tried on jeans from the same brand with similar cuts and came away two sizes apart. I can swing several sizes as a <i>starting</i> point between some stores. I get it, not every jean is going to be identical, but it isn't a ridiculous ask to be able to have a size I can start at and be within a size of what I need.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:47:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067495</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067495</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067495</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Your app subscription is now my weekend project"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user."<p>I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the <i>only</i> user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.<p>I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I <i>could</i> have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*<p>There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:18:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726826</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks! This gives me a base to start from.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:11:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493380</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493380</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493380</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How do you do this? I am just getting into hledger and am curious about tracking this kind of stuff to see how much we would really save with a different electric supplier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 04:21:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484872</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484872</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484872</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use my password manager for those. The only card I have in my Apple wallet is my grocery card. Otherwise, I go to my password manager and pull up the entry and the attached images. Some, I have just a barcode png. Others I have screenshots of the card from an app/website. This has been a really good balance for me.<p>As an aside, I tried to use base64 for the images so everything was in text, but decoding with a shortcut was annoying enough I went with the image attachment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:56:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347812</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347812</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347812</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Managing dotfiles with Make"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use a combination of stow and make to manage my dotfiles. I added a makefile well after using stow for a decade. The makefile is more for new system setup than day to day management. I might try out replacing stow with make based on this blog, more for fun than anything. I'm a bit reluctant to replace what has been working so well for a decade, but I'm very intrigued by this. Make has always interested me. It seems like it could be incredibly powerful in the right hands.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:31:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45420609</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45420609</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45420609</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm shocked it is most of your software. I think I have under a dozen AUR packages. It has been that way for about a decade. I added a couple for gaming recently (mostly because Lutris just crashes for me), but nearly all of my software comes from the official repos.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Sep 2025 12:27:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312763</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "The death of partying in the USA"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:36:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524103</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524103</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524103</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid brain rot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What door/window sensors did you use?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Jun 2025 22:58:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44350999</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44350999</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44350999</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wrote something similar in another comment. This is where I have seen curse words bite teams too. It is always the needless "joke" when debugging that surfaces. Just go boring. No one gets offended by "check 001."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:36:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289965</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can swear a lot while talking. I have never written a curse word in my code, especially professionally. Just seems odd and not useful? I wouldn't be offended if I came across one, but it seems weird to use in a professional setting? A lot of the times I have seen inappropriate words used were not in any context and were used as a "joke" when logging/debugging. So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."<p>The contextless swearing seems so unnecessary and adds nothing to the code, whereas a comment with a curse word in it reads way more human.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:30:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289900</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289900</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289900</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "How I set up new MacBooks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm trying nix instead of Homebrew on my mac. It worked great until I decided to give rust a shot. I think my solution is to just do rust development on my Arch machine and stick with nix. That said, if I run into additional issues, I will probably just go back to Homebrew.<p>Where were your pain points?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:25:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43796283</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43796283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43796283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "How I set up new MacBooks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Professionally? Sure. Personally, I don't want to learn and maintain ansible for something I do once every 5-7 years. I basically diffed the defaults and got the settings I need to change in my script. I then add or remove them as I tweak things (infrequently). The rest of my shell script is a Makefile I use cross platform for making directories and stow-ing dotfiles.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:21:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792818</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792818</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43792818</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:18:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784502</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784502</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784502</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:31:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782503</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782503</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782503</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "Ask HN: Should I learn COBOL at 14yo in 2025?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wouldn't bank on a job in COBOL. I took several COBOL courses at an IBM affiliated university and enjoyed the language. I wanted to work in COBOL. I sent out dozens of applications and heard nothing back. I'm not saying "don't learn COBOL." That said, COBOL isn't a particularly difficult language, but at your age, I'd learn something more modern, and if in 5-6 years you are still interested in COBOL, learn it then.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:29:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43433559</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43433559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43433559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "MacBook Air M4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I am spending $1700+ on a machine, it is going to be my primary machine. I know exactly what "the real life difference" is between 256 GB storage on my primary machine and 2TB storage on my primary machine. My personal Dropbox sits at 850 GB. It is simple math. It is egregious that going to 2TB storage costs $199 less than buying an entire second laptop. No thanks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:21:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43279385</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43279385</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43279385</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mcgrath_sh in "MacBook Air M4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I do use portable drives, Dropbox, and Amazon Glacier. I have four copies of my photos. They are, by leaps and bounds, my most irreplaceable data. I want every single one of them on my main machine, which makes automating backups to the external drives and Glacier infinitely easier. It is a dealbreaker for me, and I don't find $400 an acceptable price to pay to get past said dealbreaker. Well, realistically, $800, seeing as my personal Dropbox is at 850 GB, it would be silly of me to buy an un-upgradeable drive that would be teetering on storage space issues from the jump. Apple thinks it is <i>reasonable</i> to pay $199 less than it would cost for an entire second MacBook Air to upgrade drive space to 2TB.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:41:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274734</link><dc:creator>mcgrath_sh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274734</guid></item></channel></rss>