Hacker News: omnster

New comment by omnster in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

omnster — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:51:03 +0000

Regarding the `timer` script, it appears to block the shell. A way to avoid this would be to spawn a subshell for the sleep command like this: `( sleep "$1" && notify ... ) &`

New comment by omnster in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

omnster — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 21:39:51 +0000

You can perhaps use `strftime` instead of `trim(system('date ..))`:

   inoremap date =strftime("%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p")
   nnoremap date :put=strftime("%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p")

I am also not sure if an `` is really necessary at the end of your normal mode map.

New comment by omnster in "You can choose tools that make you happy"

omnster — Mon, 26 May 2025 08:35:28 +0000

In defence of emacs: if I were using emacs, I'd be doing that not because of Neal Stephenson's essay, but rather because of the long-established legacy of the development, and because of the community. I believe that the combination of these two factors is very likely protecting emacs from a sudden enshittification so typical for proprietary software. I'm in the vim church, but for exactly the same reasons.

New comment by omnster in "I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad"

omnster — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 07:50:14 +0000

Exactly. We can also win a tiny bit of the distance by assuming the Moon in the perigee, where the distance to the Moon is about 363000 km. I also assume that these distances are measured between the centers, so we can perhaps subtract twice the Earth radius (about 2*6400 km).

New comment by omnster in "Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines"

omnster — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:55:51 +0000

Looks neat! Is there a way to make it work with pandoc?

New comment by omnster in "Google Scholar PDF Reader"

omnster — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:31:33 +0000

Here's a guide I found useful to set up zotero storage. In brief, it relies on zotfile to flatten the storage (keep all pdfs in one directory) and better bibtex.

I realized that it helped me to get rid of exactly the pain with fresh installs that you mention. I realized that the two plugins give me most of the functionality that I want.

https://habr.com/ru/articles/443798/

New comment by omnster in "Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute"

omnster — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 07:01:20 +0000

Great work, helped me to calm down a bit!

There was a bit of jumpscare for me at the end though: when the circle jumps back to being a button again. May I suggest adding a slower deflation?

New comment by omnster in "How does Shazam work? (2022)"

omnster — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 08:32:04 +0000

I'd assume adding noise is done once per song and is thus a bit computationally cheaper than trying to denoise each input.

New comment by omnster in "GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt"

omnster — Sat, 13 May 2023 08:03:31 +0000

There is quite an excitement about how someone has hacked the language model to output what was supposed to be a non-public set of rules apparently. How do people know if this is indeed the secret set of rules, not the list that the model was scripted to return in response to a request (perhaps, a bit elaborate) for the list of rules?

New comment by omnster in "Solving the cube root of 19,683 mentally"

omnster — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 18:27:53 +0000

Reminded me of the story about Feynman being challenged by an abacist to compute cubic root

https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

New comment by omnster in "LaTeX Makes Me Angry"

omnster — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 21:15:43 +0000

Define your \newcommands in commands.tex and tell pandoc to add it to the header: `pandoc -H commands.tex ...` There can be multiple header files like this.

New comment by omnster in "LaTeX Makes Me Angry"

omnster — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 21:13:33 +0000

I'd guess you have to first convert markdown to tex with --natbib flag, then compile the tex (assuming the input is input.md and you want input.tex at the output)

`pandoc -f markdown -t latex -o input.tex --natbib input.md`

It is perhaps not unexpected that the capabilities of such a simple thing as markdown are not too overwhelming. Pandoc does not extend markdown as a markup language, it can only convert markdown to pretty much whatever you want. If you have rather precise requirements such as natbib for citations, it may be better to start with latex right away.

I usually use pandoc to produce simple short documents. Occasionally I use it to do the peer review for journals, when from a single markdown source, pandoc builds me a plain text file with latex commands substituted with unicode symbols, and also a pdf.

This all can be simplified with pandocomatic (a thing that automates calls to pandoc) and entr (a thing that invokes a command upon file update).

In the simplest form, `ls input.md | entr pandoc -o output.pdf input.md` will call pandoc each time the file input.md is updated.

New comment by omnster in "LaTeX Makes Me Angry"

omnster — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 09:32:02 +0000

Pandoc is a standalone application that converts between a huge variety of formats, including markdown to pdf, which means that you can write your plain text markdown in the editor of choice and then convert it to pdf using pandoc.

To use citations, the standard way is to use the `pandoc-citeproc` filter.

New comment by omnster in "Resumes and cover letters: An extension school resource (2021) [pdf]"

omnster — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:18:07 +0000

That's interesting, thanks. Out of curiosity, is there a guide to learn more about the German style?

New comment by omnster in "Chess.com vs. Lichess"

omnster — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 10:00:26 +0000

I think it deserves a separate mention: lichess has so much better clock UI. Their clock is big and very clearly visible both on desktop and mobile. It also goes red when you are low on time. Chess.com's clock is tiny and I saw some GM complaining on his stream about losing on time because he was unable to track his clock because of that.

New comment by omnster in "Muboard: Mathematics Chalkboard with LaTeX and Markdown Support"

omnster — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:31:36 +0000

I appreciate the unicode support.