Hacker News: techtalsky

New comment by techtalsky in "Mago: A fast PHP toolchain written in Rust"

techtalsky — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 16:50:06 +0000

It's more like `ruff` for PHP.

New comment by techtalsky in "Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system"

techtalsky — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 15:59:44 +0000

I was really excited when I read your post. I've long looked for a good MarkDown -> PDF or RTF workflow, so I gave KeenWrite a quick try. At first glance I really thought I'd be exactly the user for this tool, but quickly realized that the discoverability of KeenWrite isn't nearly good enough.

Upon launch, I'm presented with three panes. I've got a MarkDown authoring interface and an output preview. Great. I drop in some markdown and it renders.

Then I have a "variables.yaml" pane open with three little controls, "Create", "Rename", and "Delete". Ok... I'm editing a YAML file. But it's a clunky nested node editor. People can edit a MarkDown file but you don't think it's faster to simply let people edit YAML in text?

So, I get it, I'm editing a YAML file that stores metadata about... SOMETHING about my document output. Except I don't have a single example of a variable. Not a single one. I have no idea what variables are available and exploring every single menu option tells me nothing. Help only provides a small about page with no link to the documentation.

So, I go to keenwrite.com and click documentation. It takes me to a single GitLab readme that talks about different command line launch options, and then finally how to begin to use metadata, but the options all revolve around creating an .Rmd file and using R or creating a "definitions.yaml" instead of a "variables.yaml" in a seperate editor.

This is the moment I realize there's no chance this tool is going to be useful for me.

New comment by techtalsky in "A password generator inspired by the Xkcd password spec"

techtalsky — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:40:26 +0000

A note that if you have "uv" installed you can execute arbitrary python packages with the "uvx" command without needing to clone a repo:

    uvx --from git+https://github.com/beala/xkcd-password xkpa -h

New comment by techtalsky in "Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify"

techtalsky — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:40:51 +0000

There's proof!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vskQsSJ_IJg&ab_channel=hirud...

Watching a playthrough I was surprised to see I'd never seen anyone get past level two.

New comment by techtalsky in "The Atlantic Did Me Dirty"

techtalsky — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:36:03 +0000

The author clearly needed to write the article they pitched, even if that wasn't supported by this source.

New comment by techtalsky in "Amazon Pharmacy"

techtalsky — Thu, 23 May 2024 15:42:26 +0000

Probably not. PillPack is MDP: multi-dose packaging, which is little packets containing multiple medications. All they're advertising here is regular bottled medications, which is a much easier-to-solve mail-order prescription problem.

New comment by techtalsky in "You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)"

techtalsky — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 21:11:08 +0000

At the same time, Reddit exists, and this is a community of people created by a VC company explicitly to have wonky tech discussions with other professionals called "Hacker News". It's fine every once in a while but I don't want this to be filled with generic human interest stories.

Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

techtalsky — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 16:17:25 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/beancount/beancount

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138434

Points: 229

# Comments: 123

New comment by techtalsky in "Interesting Programming Languages"

techtalsky — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 01:17:14 +0000

Good call on Inform. It's certainly both novel and useful.

New comment by techtalsky in "Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s"

techtalsky — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:33:30 +0000

Your anecdotal experience isn't an effective counterpoint though. Here's a citation in the neighborhood: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/americans-see-diff...

New comment by techtalsky in "Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s"

techtalsky — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:27:38 +0000

It's actually really common for women who have experienced sexual assault to take steps (gaining weight, wearing loose baggy clothing) to avoid the male gaze.

New comment by techtalsky in "Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended"

techtalsky — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 20:04:59 +0000

Technically, yes, as I understand the legislation.

New comment by techtalsky in "TextQL: Execute SQL Against CSV or TSV"

techtalsky — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 18:15:55 +0000

However this is something you can put in /use/local/bin and use alongside other command line tools with pipes

New comment by techtalsky in "Front-End Checklist"

techtalsky — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:15:59 +0000

OWASP guidelines are a good start.

New comment by techtalsky in "Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time"

techtalsky — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 06:24:24 +0000

Muliline style /

New comment by techtalsky in "Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation"

techtalsky — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 21:53:03 +0000

Even though the second Keen trilogy had richer graphics, I really loved the first Keen trilogy for the gameplay. The jumps and movement felt so much more physical. Keen would make this tiny pause as if winding up for a jump each time he jumped. The later Keen just did big floaty isometric jumps that didn't have the same snap. That said, I loved and played every single one of those games.

New comment by techtalsky in "Ask HN: How Is Developing on a Linux VM in Windows?"

techtalsky — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 15:35:09 +0000

+1 for using Vagrant. This lets you bring instances up and down much more easily. Also, for most things you need (like say a Rails/nginx stack, or a LAMP stack) there's a prebuilt Vagrant box you can start from.
Also, some modern IDE's have Vagrant support natively, which allow you to work transparently in whatever Windows IDE you like, and operate your VM from there.

New comment by techtalsky in "The story behind NetHack's first update since 2003"

techtalsky — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 04:56:20 +0000

Yeah, some aspect of Spelunky's spirit are obviously pulled from NetHack (Derek Yu, the creator, explains so specifically in the book about Spelunky).

New comment by techtalsky in "Amazon Snowball"

techtalsky — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 20:11:11 +0000

I'm sure they don't cost Amazon $200 to produce, and assumably they can just bill corporate customers for them if they're not returned. Some amount of loss is probably included in the cost to consumers.

New comment by techtalsky in "OnHub"

techtalsky — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 17:41:05 +0000

Looks like the advantages as listed are: - Very simple visual configuration software - Ability to view a graphical representation of device usage and prioritize a device - Ability to update the device without interrupting the connection - Sends setup information to Android devices via an audio tone