I run a small business (no employees) and GnuCash was ok. Then I got tired of battling it for years to do certain things.

Spent a few days human coding a command line income and expense tracker a little over a year ago at https://github.com/nickjj/plutus.

I do my estimated quarterly taxes with its assistance in literally 5 minutes. All I do is download the CSV files from my bank and run the reports I'm interested in seeing through it. At the end of the year I run through the full numbers and triple check things in about 10-15 minutes. These numbers give me complete confidence to file my taxes accurately from a business income / expense perspective.

Of course you can use the tool for personal income / expense tracking too. Personal vs business is an arbitrary category name.

I am running Arch Linux here. When I boot my machine into a full desktop environment it uses 1.1 GB of memory total, for everything.

If I open Firefox, it in itself uses about 1.3 GB to have Firefox open with just HackerNews in 1 tab. I have no extensions except uBlock Origin.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120938

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

No internet access doesn't save you.

With file system access it can delete a file.

Without sudo access it can silently add something to your user's crontab so a few days from now it runs a custom shell script that does anything with internet access. If you're not checking into this sort of thing regularly, you wouldn't know.

It can add something to your user's shell's rc so when you open a new terminal session, a bad side effect happens.

Malware scanning won't protect from these sort of things and every time a new version is available, it's another opportunity for something bad to happen.

To be fair this isn't a problem unique to Obsidian. Code editor plugins and most programming language package managers have the same problem.

It can get you up and running in a few minutes with an installer that can set up a new system or keep an existing system up to date. There's also a command line version that works on Arch and Debian based distros (including WSL 2) and macOS. I use it on my personal devices and a company issued MBP.

I'm not going to lie, I've been using computers for 25 years and this is the happiest I've ever been with using 1 machine for everything (software development, media creation, gaming, etc.).

Using a managed database solves this problem, so there's that an option.

If you self host your DB, if the data is on block storage you can at least spin up a new instance and connect that storage device onto the new instance with a short period of downtime. This is usually a satisfactory level of downtime for an event that doesn't happen too frequently.

What I like about the above is it'll work with any database and avoids needing to even think about performing real-time or near real-time replication with multiple writers.

There's also the scary truth that there's a ton of stuff out there where compliance requirements aren't enforced. I'm not saying it's a good idea but you can choose not to upgrade too. This is a risk assessment you'd need to do. At the very least if you go down this route, please make sure your server doesn't even have a public IP address. If it's super locked down, that doesn't mean it's safe but you'll want to limit the number of attack vectors as much as you can.

Yes and this also applies to other things like videos.

I'd be curious what others think about this:

If you see a video on YouTube and choose to click it, you as the viewer already know the title of the video and have seen the thumbnail. Those things together gave you enough detail to be interested.

The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

But on the other hand, outlining what you're about to see in the video doesn't seem like a bad idea so folks know what they're getting into.

As someone who has made hundreds of videos and have seen thousands, whenever I hear someone explain what I already know I'm immediately put into a state of "cool story, give me the information I clicked to see".

Does anyone else feel the same?

Lots of data, caching, web apps, background workers and lots of various API integrations. No fancy React front-end, no fancy crazy system architectures. Just a typical LAMP stack but running in Docker Compose, cranking away serving value to customers with very good uptime and a very low cloud cost relative to revenue. With that said, a managed database was involved but all of the web traffic was served by apps running through Docker Compose with a simple git push model of deployment that handled thousands of deployments over the years without much fuss.

Zero downtime server upgrades are easy. You could make a new server, ensure it's working in private and then adjust DNS or your floating IP address to point to the new server when you're happy. I've done this pattern hundreds of times over the years for doing system upgrades without interruption and safely. The only requirement is your servers are stateless but that's a good pattern in general.

It's because I like keeping my servers stateless when possible. It makes it easier to upgrade them in a zero downtime way later.

If your web server has your DB too, then you can't do zero downtime system upgrades. For example I would never upgrade Debian 12 to 13 on a live server. Instead, I'd make a new server with 13, get it all ready to go and tested and then when I'm ready flip over DNS or a floating IP address to the new server. This pattern works because both the old and new server can be writing to a database on a different server.

With all that said, if you were ok with 1 server, then yeah I'd for sure run it in Docker Compose.

Some time ago I've written about my experiences using it in production https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/why-i-like-using-docker-compo.... Not just for my own projects but for $500 million dollar companies and more.

They're some of the most popular GTK apps available. They seems like a good example to me.

The themes I'm using are compatible with GTK4 apps too.

I use niri which suggests installing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome which comes with Nautilus which is a GTK4 app. It's perfectly themed just like the GTK3 apps.

It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo....

Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.

Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it.

It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.

My decade old tech blog with 500+ posts now gets 10x less traffic than it did a few years ago and I'm actually on the fence on pulling the plug on my 10 year old business because traffic is so low it now costs me more to host video courses that I sell than I make per month from them. In turn this comes with other implications, such as maybe stopping my YouTube channel and no longer contributing to open source because paying bills has priority over hobbies. I enjoy spending time on these things and morally was always ok with giving away almost everything I do and learned for free, but income requirements are very quick to slap you into reality.

niri's alt+tab also has a filter where if you hold alt and then press "w", it will only show you things on your active workspace. There's a little label that pops up showing this. You can also press "o" to filter it for only 1 monitor (output) too.

The above might help with those lapses.

In my case I haven't experienced this because I'm usually after the end game destination which is focusing the app so fuzzy finding it is the quickest path to that. If it's 8 windows to the right or 3 to the left is all the same to me.

With that said, I do sometimes have sessions where I have 3-4 things open side by side and I quickly cycle between them by going left and right. In those cases I don't have memory lapses because there's only a few windows open and I'm doing something specific. When this task is done I usually close those windows or no longer need to remember their relative position to windows in view.

I bet you could create a cool looking horizontal mini map to show a strip of things open on a workspace, this way you don't need to open up other things (overview, alt-tab, window finder, etc.) to see where things are.

I've seen some projects that use it and you open the PR page to be greeted by every PR having 3-20 comments but when you goto the actual PR, there's no one except the contributor with a bunch of Copilot feedback.

It gives a false message that the PR is resonating with folks and has real activity. I wonder if GitHub did this on purpose to make engagement seem higher than it really is.

Usage paying for AI is 1000x crazier because you're not even getting a guarantee in the thing you pay for in the end. You have to keep feeding it prompts and hope it gives you the solution you want. You may end up with no expected result yet you are paying for it. At least with texting, you got what you paid for.

I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.

Also, my dotfiles come with a custom Walker menu to find and search through niri key binds, selecting the key bind will run the action too.

With that said, if you're using my dotfiles and want to use this tool, it would be as simple as adding "nirimod-git" to the `PACKAGES_AUR_GUI_EXTRAS` variable in your config file.