thek3nger's comments

On: The Curse of Markdown

[thek3nger]

The fact that this website decided to "fade out" the paragraph at the scrolling level where I usually read is infuriating.

On: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

[thek3nger]

Any service without a free tier pays more than Spotify because only premium users contribute to the number of streaming that will be payed.

In some sense, premium Spotify users pay also for the free users and, therefore, the average is lower (yes, there is ads income but I bet is negligible).

On: ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023

[thek3nger]

Animal life is just a different permutation of electrons, carbon and “software”.

On: Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0

[thek3nger]

I update it with Brew on macOS and Scoop [1] on Windows (but I guess it is included in other package managers such as chocolatey).

Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.

[1]: https://scoop.sh/

[dopa42365 → thek3nger]

It's also on the official microsoft package manager (winget).

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

[crtasm → thek3nger]

It is: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=calibre

On: Just Build It...

[thek3nger]

I agree. For months, I wanted to ditch Bootstrap from my blog theme and implement all the CSS from scratch. But the idea of making a "perfect" theme was daunting. Then, at some point, I just decided to go for it and publish my very incomplete WIP theme anyway. Working on it "live" has been liberating and, honestly, more fun than expected.

On: Ask HN: What should be added to the syntax of Python and why?

[thek3nger]

None propagation. It such a pain to constantly check for None when accessing very deep nested structures (as I had to do often with JSON data).

There is a PEP for this[1] but it is currently deferred.

[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0505/

On: Ask HN: Easiest way to set up email form?

[thek3nger]

On my website, I set up a webhook to a Zapier “send email” zap: I have a basic contact form and a button that, in practice, does a POST to the Zapier webhook with the email content.

It is not perfect, but it works for my very little volume and hides my email to the outside (I rarely get spam on the email address linked to the contact form).

On: Japan will try to beam solar power from space by 2025

[thek3nger]

Here it is a nice video explaining pros and cons of orbital solar panels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZPrIE5ZMZA

On: The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich [pdf]

[thek3nger]

It makes sense until you cross the point of diminishing returns. And I think many countries crossed that point by at least 20 percentage points.

On: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

[thek3nger]

I am still very surprised that Apple allows this kind of CSS/plugin power. I wonder if the reason is that Obsidian is so popular among a lot of influential iOS users, that rejecting it would be a huge PR disaster. :D

Anyway, it is good to see Obsidian going strong. I am a happy user since the very beginning!

[ericax → thek3nger]

App Store allows external code if it strictly runs under WebKit and JavaScript Core. There's a few more general restrictions (like the additional functionality must be free or use IAP).