Hacker News Reader

Comment by itsmemattchung | Hacker News Reader

2 minutes in, Paul types out [xfs] and then later [xtc] — what do you think these symbols are for?

My best guess from watching the video is that they are temporary place holders, breadcrumbs he leaves himself to return to, allowing him not to break his flow/train of thought. If that's the case, then the technique reminds me of Neil Strauss's "Power of the TK":

When you get suck on a word, or cant’ think of the right fact, what shouldn’t you do?

Don’t stop. Just type, TK.

View on HN

IIRC they were random letters that do not occur naturally in English words, in order to serve as easily searchable annotation/footnote identifiers. He somewhat already knew they were extra details that would not make it to the main body. Later these get changed [1], [2], etc but you don't want to use these at the outset due to possible reordering/deleting.

Source: I was one of the founders of Stypi and we asked him when porting the data from Etherpad to Stypi.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpa...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495397

Have been using TK for about four decades of writing, not sure where I picked it up from. An editor who was working with me in my teens I think. More so recently (the past 20+ years) [todo] and [info] and [note] when I have a tangential thought that I need to return to. Interestingly, during an interview with some of the writer's of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or perhaps even Levar Burton, they mentioned that many of the scripts would simply have "TECH" in them for inserting random, technically plausible sounding gibberish that didn't advance the story but could be set aside as a decision point whilst working on the script.

Sometimes FORTH shines here. Space is the delimiter. and consequently you can mumble the name on the keyboard without stopping at the moment. you have mix of all digits alphabet and symbols into one token. |alpha| x^y ~x #items [a-b] however YMMV

I find the UL is actually better for this use case

Finding `tk` is much easier than `ul`, since the latter is very often part of words, whereas the former very rarely is.

whoosh

Rootkit would like to have a word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com