Hacker News: thornewolf

New comment by thornewolf in "A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025)"

thornewolf — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:56:41 +0000

The author explain this in more detail in the article; I also was initially confused. The key details come from their broken down pandoc command. Specifically, these two flags:

  --pdf-engine=typst
  -V template=article.typ

Despite the input content being a .md file, we see that the .md contents populate the .typ file. Pandoc then understands how to convert the populated .typ file into a .pdf. The author also notes in their hyperlinked .typ document where the body content is placed:

  // THIS IS THE ACTUAL BODY:

What is not clear to me is the actual mechanism that tells pandoc where to place the body contents in the template. I presume it's some "magic" from the pandoc docs. The pandoc templates documentation[1] does reveal to us that `-V` is setting a variable called `template`. I don't have pandoc locally, but from another post[2] from the same author and a chatgpt query, it seems that the `body` symbol in the template is the chosen substitution symbol.

[1]: https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/6-templates.html

[2]: https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2024/pandoc-typst-tutorial/

New comment by thornewolf in "Ask HN: Are Tech Meetups Dead?"

thornewolf — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:54:26 +0000

not dead, they are on "luma". quality is higher in some ways, lower in some ways when compared to "old school" meetups

New comment by thornewolf in "Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid"

thornewolf — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:16:32 +0000

I can't smell much at all. one time when i was 17 my friend told me i was kinda smelly (i had just exercised). I've been stressed about it since. the human brain can latch on to the oddest things

New comment by thornewolf in "Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app"

thornewolf — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:36:24 +0000

there is something "wrong" with the ux that is hard to pin down. these things generate even text summaries more rapidly than i can read them. i need a better method for dumping info into my brain + dynamic control (if necessary)

New comment by thornewolf in "Show HN: Adam – An embeddable cross-platform AI agent library"

thornewolf — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:48:40 +0000

They have named themselves sqliteai and are releasing a library called adam. this is just advanced seo. seems neat though

New comment by thornewolf in "Show HN: Prompt-to-Excalidraw demo with Gemma 4 E2B in the browser (3.1GB)"

thornewolf — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:26:46 +0000

it's a security feature. otherwise my malicious site could check for cdn.sensitivephotoswebsite.com and blackmail you if it was cached already

New comment by thornewolf in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

thornewolf — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:59:49 +0000

New comment by thornewolf in "The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI"

thornewolf — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:14:02 +0000

I noticed this article is written by AI. Have you considered adding a disclosure?

New comment by thornewolf in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

thornewolf — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:24:39 +0000

just disclose please. i churn on non-disclosed ai generated content as a matter of principle. i don't necessarily churn on other variants

New comment by thornewolf in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

thornewolf — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:11:56 +0000

this article comes back 100% ai (for the opening). i will not reveal the tell that made me churn

New comment by thornewolf in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

thornewolf — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:08:21 +0000

I have swapped to using gemini over chatgpt for casual conversation and question answering. there are some lacking features in the app but i get faster and more intelligent responses.

New comment by thornewolf in "The only moat left is money?"

thornewolf — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:40:18 +0000

For the comment from "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning", the article author editorializes

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge."

into

"One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff."

which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly.

____

I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms

New comment by thornewolf in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"

thornewolf — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:30:46 +0000

dispell the hate from your heart

The monorepo: my personal software infrastructure

thornewolf — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:54:25 +0000

Article URL: https://iafisher.com/blog/2026/01/monorepo-2026

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779349

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thornewolf in "eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update"

thornewolf — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:48:49 +0000

it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here.

and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would be absurd if it were - but instead its a real and difficult to construct value

New comment by thornewolf in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

thornewolf — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:52:53 +0000

as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet

New comment by thornewolf in "Our approach to advertising"

thornewolf — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:31:12 +0000

while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article

New comment by thornewolf in "Web development is fun again"

thornewolf — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:03:11 +0000

I estimated that i was 1.2x when we only had tab completion models. 1.5x would be too modest. I've done plenty of ~6-8 hour tasks in ~1-2 hours using llms.

New comment by thornewolf in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

thornewolf — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:01:14 +0000

some forms of meditation can be. it's a very general term

New comment by thornewolf in "I'm just having fun"

thornewolf — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 11:19:21 +0000

I started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.