Textbook HN hint: (Here's how I) don't do X in a traditional manner, but use Y, an obscure, undocumented, poorly supported and inferior alternative because f- you and your standards, that's why.
This is a textbook example of using creativity and a free toolset to solve a very common problem. As a member of this community, I love stuff like this. I might never do it myself but I learned some new VIM commands that could totally come in handy.
If this kind of post is annoying to you, you aren't going to enjoy this place.
but (s)he's been a member for more than 2 years and has a very high karma for the time. So I'm going to take this observation on HN's tendencies seriously. Why should observations on the HN community's biases inevitably solicit downvotes or finger wagging?
I personally love Vim and like to use it far outside its scope, but I recognise that there is a case to be made for many posts on HN being a little "originality for originality's sake".
Because meta is murder[1]. Nobody comes to read HN about the finer points of posting on HN, they come to read the interesting stuff on the front page (and IMO, someone hacking vim to do invoices is interesting) and the further interestingness in the comments.
This entire comment chain is both not interesting and not contributing anything to anyone. It's a complaint. It's a long form "I didn't like this" that could have been avoided by not clicking on the link. Okay, they didn't like it. So?
And on top of that, it comes across as a rather dickish snipe at the community.
Yet meta is necessary, no? That's how the community improves in a feedback loop to increase its value? StackOverflow even created an entire Meta site for that reason, though they wisely segregated it from the main location. Such a thing does not exist for HN so I guess the meta pollutes the main threads. Anyway, I'll stop polluting now.
Because it's a fundamentally wrong way to do business accounting. It's more difficult to check, more difficult to look for year/year patterns, more difficult to integrate into other tools, etc. A pile of invoices created by vim are a lot more difficult for your accountant to enter in to their systems for year-end taxes than a more common format, like a spreadsheet or a database.
Maybe he does what I do: gives his accountant a categorized list of income & expenses rather than the raw data. My accountant cares that I did $xxxxx in total sales, not that I sold $aa to AA Inc and $bbb to BB Co., etc.
