TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024) | Hacker News Reader

TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)

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51 pointsTomte24 comments

I just used to use: ????

It server the same purpose, placeholder for a word I couldn't think of, and wouldn't naturely appear in the text. Plus for me I could hammer out the four characters in frustration too, for not being able to think of the word/term I wanted.

Indeed a great trick. I often double it to TKTK just to make it stand out even more.

Fun fact: the Ghost.org editor looks for TK

https://ghost.org/changelog/tk-reminders/

I've a very dim memory of having heard about it years ago (more than a decades), from an article of Cory Doctorow, and in my mind, he was the one who came up with the idea (and chose the letters TK).

But I can be wrong (maybe it's not from Doctorow, maybe the article did not even claim the paternity of coming up with TK but it was me badly understanding it, ...)

TK is a very standard term, see William Safire's usage in this 1996 NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/06/magazine/of-hacks-and-tk....

Mmm. This Q&A -- https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/M... -- suggests it's been kicking around as printing and journalism jargon since at least the 1980s, and I would expect probably earlier.

Paywall-free link:

https://archive.is/Ipm3J

I do this a lot but I use “TK:” with the colon to make it unambiguously grep-able (stands out better visually too)

Could you instead use any two numerical digits? Then you've got a tagging system with up to 100 tags.

This assumes you're writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers. i.e. 58 is always intentionally "fifty-eight", so "58" must be your own meta text.

I think you can use whatever you want. The point is just to drop a quick marker that you can find later, and not interrupt your flow.

Ah, never mind. A slight refinement needed here.

AP style only spells out one through nine. 10 and above are written as numerals. So, you'd get 10 tags, not 100.

I think the regex would be: /(?<!\d)\d{1}(?!\d)/

> writing according to guidelines that insist you spell out all numbers

What? There exists such a guideline, which is not limited to very small numbers that can be written in at most two words?

That would have you writing things like one million, four hundred fifty-three thousand, one hundred fifty-eight instead of 1,453,158.

"TK: for the thousand one hundred and eleventh time, ditch this idiotic editing job"

No. I was thinking of AP style [1], but I was mistaken. Anyway, it's not like these guidelines are at the level of consistency you're probably expecting. I will merely take inspiration and strictly spell single-digit numbers "zero" through "nine" and otherwise apply leading zeroes to miscellaneous annoyances (dates, time, etc.). The "real" style guidelines have absurd exceptions that are completely irrelevant to me.

My parent comment wasn't an entirely unreasonable idea though [2]. There's generally a less than one percent chance of a high value two-digit number occurring. Three digits and above are even less likely.

[1]: https://apstylebook.com/ask_the_editors/style_guidance

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization...

> The obvious question that comes from this is why not just type TODO, add a few question marks, or highlight the text that needs to be looked at?

Because we know from the software engineering discipline that TODOs never get done, so the safe thing is to avoid that with TK.

If you use Brashtag notation you could insert #tk{} bag.

https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

LLMs should use "TK" or stable diffusion (and the like) so as not to get hung up on sequential words/thoughts and fill them in later instead of hallucinating filler.

I think this is a great idea.

Tk without Tcl?

Shout out to Title TK by the Breeders.

GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

tl;dr

add tk when you hit a wall (abbreviated from 'to come', yet spelled with k as tc appears in many words)

I slice my latke with a pocketknife.

I found the low frequency surprising as it's so easy to pronounce--I suppose tc is used in most cases. Here's what I found for bigram freqs near TK:

Ratios (count / total) and percentages:

    PG: 0.00047%
    TK: 0.00046%
    KK: 0.00045%
    HQ: 0.00042%
    FN: 0.00042%

Every other one here I'd expect to see: Postgres, kk/okay (and my initials), headquarters, function. Of course there's Tcl/Tk but not used nearly as much as it could.

True, but have you ever sliced your LATKE with a POCKETKNIFE?

...I did, a few years ago, when I went camping with some friends.

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