Gloomberb
gloom.sh
gloom.sh
Related: please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages! Don't make the runtime your user's problem.
Anyway, most of what I write is designed to be installed in a virtualenv, which restricts the blast radius to one specific application.
> please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages!
Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
This is how I found out it's a javascript project and didn't install it. I only even bothered to do that because I actually wanted to try it. I'm just saying it would be awesome to have that right there next to the curl command.
> Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
And I prefer not to use those. Everything I said for Javascript holds for Python, Perl, Ruby... as well.
I don't know where that came from but it should definitely disappear.
At least the developer includes the binaries for all platforms in the GitHub release page.
Download it, put it wherever you like (probably `~/.local/bin/`) and you're good to use it.
Sometimes I truly wonder...
On the other hand, just because I run `brew install someapp`, it somehow feels safer, but why? That app could be doing anything too.
1. If the connection dies mid transfer, bash will still execute it.
So `rm -rf ~/.local/bin/whatever` can become `rm -rf ~`
The author can avoid this by wrapping everything in a function. But you wouldn’t know if they did so if you aren’t outputting it to a file first.
2. Say the link points to an S3 bucket and it gets compromised, there’s no record of the payload to analyze.
I’m sure there’s a plethora of other subtleties, but I’ve always had the same question as you and thought I’d share.
Is it? I see some kinda subscription, so there's gotta be some non MIT portion of it
An open source interface to a proprietary backend isn't really fully auditable.
My point about interpreted languages stands though. These bundled javascript runtime "apps" eat at least 500M of RAM on boot. That's totally not needed for a CLI tool. If it's not bundled, then it's even worse as you hit the supply chain and tooling interference problems (and you still use the same RAM). There are a lot of good, modern, compiled languages. CLI builders should pick up those stacks imho.
Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.
If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.
This kind of hug boxing might have been fine five years ago during the ZIRP era, but in an age where two sticks of RAM is becoming $800 (and data centers are causing dirty sin power that can wear down electronics), I think the developers have a duty to be efficient with their programs and to do what is necessary to not ship a 500 MB ram sink with every single app.
It is frankly unforgivable and it’s a drain on the skill of the industry to just say “yeah no man it’s OK. It’s OK don’t worry don’t worry about your app being completely inefficient and a drain on your users resources. Don’t worry about it. Your app is so good that nobody will ever be using any other application on their PC“
Is this developer paying for my RAM? I run local models on consumer hardware. I can’t afford a 500mb of RAM for a CLI app. Thank you for that. Thank you for writing your CLI software in a way that I have to close it in order to use other parts of my computer.
Not to mention interpreted languages are slower than compiled languages, and we are talking about a financial terminal. Talk about not even understanding the functional requirements of the thing you are building. I might go get Bloomberg terminal instead of this just because I know it’s gonna actually be faster and make me money. This might actually lose me money.
Just because they built an application that “competes” with a closed source tool does not mean that their open source tool is good or worth adopting.
I mean, have some respect for and actual thought about who your end user is.
Imagine in the 80s or 90s telling a software developer not worry about porting their Amiga fintech application to another architecture like sparc. Imagine telling a developer in the 90s and 00s not to worry about browser compatibility and thanking them for making it only for IE to protect their fragile ego.
Imagine telling the creators of UNIX “yeah, no PDP 11 is good. You could stop there anyone who wants to run it on a different architecture is just an ingrate who doesn’t respect the effort you put in.” Because they already did so much work.
This is a farce. GP had a valid constructive criticism and a valid input worth considering when you take into account the functional requirements of a financial terminal.
Just because you are willing to cut corners on things that you don’t release does not mean that it is OK to release a piece of software with cut corners. But you know that, or you would release your software. I’m certainly projecting because I know that that’s why I write tools for myself that I don’t publish, but even then I use compiled languages and go out of my way to avoid JavaScript type script, python, and all of that.
But if this project were to ever take off and they were to monetize or start charging enterprise licenses the very first thing I would ask for is the compiled version that doesn’t rely on interpreted languages or a 500 MB node folder.
...you don't actually work in this industry, do you?
someone made something and gave it away for free. anyone who complains should either fork it or shut the fuck up
I mean, not everyone who's sensitive, but certainly anyone who can't stand another engineer pointing out poor technology decisions. If they're going to be ego babies about it instead of taking the feedback humbly and making their product better, then yeah maybe they should leave the industry.
I've worked with people like this before and they don't belong in the industry.
Idiots that don't even take the time (and perhaps aren't capable of the empathy required) to consider the end users and are personally attacked when confronted with the end users' needs.
One guy I worked with implemented a parts picker as a Python CLI app (a ~1500-line-main if-then-else monstrosity with no back navigation, so closing it was the only way to go back) built and apparently only tested on a Windows 10 PC.
During the demo he mentioned that technicians could copy the part number for entry in another form by pressing Ctrl+C. I asked why he would choose to implement copy in a tech floor CLI app using ctrl+c when all the Technician's PCs were Windows 7 based and that would close the application. He handwaved it away. This was a guy who had been promoted from technician. He knew what the functional and technical requirements were.
Two weeks later, a more senior member of one of the tech teams was having full drive issues. I ran windirstat and found that the idiot's python app was storing 500MB of temp python runtime bullshit in the AppData folder in folders named as random hashes on every run, and they weren't deleting. This elder Gen X gentleman didn't understand why Ctrl+C as he was told to do was closing the app instead of copying text and kept relaunching it until it his drive was full. But the whole tech floor shared computers in shifts, meaning that IT was gonna have to come and reimage every machine every 90 days. I did the math.
I submitted this problem to him as a formal bug report with a proposed solution, and I was written up for personally attacking him.
He later went on to fuck up timestamps in a database so badly that there was no recovering it, he took no backups, and 4 technicians spent weeks of man hours manually re-recording the data in the database and he set the launch of a device recycling program that would have saved the company millions back for several months. It was supposed to launch in April. He nuked the database in March. When I left the company in August, that shit still hadn't launched. He affected the company's share price with his crybaby sensitive ego.
So yeah, I think if anyone is so sensitive that they can't take real technical feedback like "don't use wasteful runtimes for CLI applications" it's indicative of a real mindset problem that will infect all other aspects of their work and interactions with technology, and they should consider leaving the industry or humbling themselves and learning how to take feedback and build better.
It doesn't take a genius to realize this entire project was probably vibe coded. What does the script actually do? What assumptions does it make about the user's system? Has any human actually looked at it to figure that out?
bunx gloomberb... unless, of course, it's Perl. Right?
TS/JS is not the problem.
You can, and you should eject your dependencies and package them with your releases. And I don't understand why it's not a common practice.
You can even bundle your releases with a runtime, but that's not always the best solution. For something like this I'd actually prefer interpreted code I can inspect line by line rather than having a blob of unknown origin.
Everybody who's distracted by the name and can't get past it, there's a thread developing here somewhere, where they're comparing it to Bloomberg.
Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!
But then they'd need to select which news they'd be able to publish.
explain where you got the data from
else this will just be bit of Bloomberg meme
Horoscopes for young impressionable men, along with Bitcoin and all sorts of crap, was the most articulate way I've heard it.
As if technical analysis was worth more insight than pissing straight up looking for rain. Sure, it's wet.
> 2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.
Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.
(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)
An example that comes to mind is JSON5. People have a visceral reaction to the name, it sounds like it's trying to be HTML4.01 -> 5 but for JSON. In reality, it has its uses but doesn't supersede JSON whatsoever. The name itself has given it a bad rap though.
If you pick a name like "Gloomberb" the most obvious interpretation is that it's a Bloomberg alternative.
Financial information should be free for everyone.
There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
1) Bloomberg was lightyears ahead of anything else in the pre-internet days, so there's a lot of UI familiarity.
2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
3) Bloomberg is the biggest and best aggregator
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.
But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting.
Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.
Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.
> I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children
Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.
(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
That has changed in the last 20 years or so but only because those jobs have effectively gone away. They are the factory jobs of the finance world. They succumbed to the automation impulse that started in the 80s and reached its zenith in the early 2010s. Traders basically don't exist anymore, a computer can do the job much more effectively. So much so that I was shocked when I _encountered_ a real live trading desk as part of a recent job move.
Trading can bring down a bank (e.g.Barings) but is not a big systemic risk.
I am not making this up.
There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
Anyone else old enough to remember scripting a tradebot in Asheron's Call?
Used Trello a lot before it got sold to, and damaged by contact with, Atlassian. FogBugz looked cool…but I had to use an old version of Bugzilla.
I didn't know Glitch existed until this site had a notice that it Glitch would be shutting down. Surprised me FCS had anything to do with a game, and seems it wasn't a good fit. I like the style though, and downloaded some of the art and variations on the Groddle theme before it died.
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
What's the equivalent of hacker news for financial folk?
I have never used bloomberg but my understanding is it has history, network effects and great data.
The data is ultimately the problem with any project like this. Data is not cheap for personal use. For redistribution in a commercial product, it is really a huge bottleneck to get anything off the ground.
This just looks like the standard , useless, retail trading software IMO.
A few examples:
1. As a researcher, you can develop indexes and portfolios, then make those available to customers via bbg
2. Goldman has a service that let's you buy equities via SWAPs, if a fund can't hold said equities for regulatory or operational reasons. The whole service is a series of menus within the terminal.
3. Many brokers offer automatic trading services like "sell this notional but do it very slowly" etc etc... they do that via bbg
Yup.
If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.
If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.
People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.
Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".
Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.
The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
That freedom is actually why it's hard to create a Bloomberg competitor - in order to provide their data stream, Bloomberg has to have partnerships with hundreds of companies worldwide who run exchanges for stocks, bonds and other instruments. If exchanges were government-controlled rather than free-market, there would be more centralization and getting the data together would be easier.
Not really true. I can't just start a stock exchange. I need to comply with a bazillion regulations. Then I need a license, which I won't get.
As much as the crypto space is disliked, it also showed what happens when regulation isn't stopping you. Exchanges would pop up and anyone could create one. You didn't have to be already wealthy, a spin off from a hedge fund, a connected family, a connected person. You could just do it, and if it was good enough, people would trade on your venue.
Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone. The little person can't do that any longer, it is now reserved for the elites again.
There is a lot of regulatory capture in the financia sector, but that does not in imply that no regulation is necessary at all
The one thing I can't figure out is how to set a pane to change its ticker symbol based on the selected one in another pane. The default research panes do this, but I can't figure out how to set a new one to do it.
Not particularly. I don’t think Bloomberg has any super-proprietary data. It’s more like Excel. There is a command or two that is so weirdly niche specific that some user somewhere really needs. And it has a social network.
Bloomberg, as it is, will probably work as long as humans are in the loop in trading financial assets.
You pretty much need $30/m subscriptions for historical data. Not that it couldn't be worked into this.
From it: "Bonds and Fixed Income: It provides the best data for interest rates and debt markets. Global Economics: It easily connects data from different countries, such as currency rates and government debt. The Chat Room: The messaging system is the industry standard. If you want to talk to the biggest players in the market, you often need to be on Bloomberg."
My dismissal is their problem to solve.
- if i wanted to build an aggregator say 500k tickers real time , ohlc from every exchange on the planet and every known asset to mankind...
- where would i start?
How? It's not like it accidentally installs itself onto your machine and runs itself, or injects itself into your projects without you knowing.
Hopefully it's not intentional
Your website is literally down.
https://i.postimg.cc/YCdkwZZq/image.png
And I don't think their website is that bad.
The download button doesn't even work properly.
Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg
Docs give me a 404, blog is empty
I mean, it works for me?
The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
It is just a work in progress.
I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.
Doesn't invalidate my experience.
> and maybe they didn't expect people to find it
What do you mean? It's linked on the Github repo.
> but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
I think a site that doesn't work properly is a bad one. That's just my opinion.
I mean isn't this the point of open source?
You can fork the repo and fix the problem instead of complaining?
>I mean isn't this the point of open source?
Only if you just found what open source is.
In actuality, successful open source projects recruit developers by providing value to them. If there's a failure before you even install the product, there's 0 reason for someone to start contributing right away, why not start their own project at that point? Contributing 1 to something that has 0 value is a donation in exchange for nothing, not how Open Source usually works.
Yes.
You know the project is OSS, you found the problem, you can fix it or open and issue instead of complaining to me about it.
Problem solved.
That benefits everyone rather than forking a project and starting all over again and wasting effort.
I cannot reproduce the problem, so I can't fix it.
But since you're complaining about it and you have the right skills, you can!
You can fix it though or open an issue.
If you fail at a webpage in 2026, you have no chance at doing anything complex or innovative.
Because I'm starting to see the word 'slop' as a synonym for:
"This person may or may not have used AI to build software and I don't like it"
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#:~:text=%E2%80...
> Slop is slop when the author could not have done it without the AI.
For Vim (1.) and Linux's AI adoption policies, there are some contributors who couldn't have made a PR / patch without AI. Are Vim and Linux now considered slop because they allow AI contributions?
(1.) https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#using...
Sounds like you consider Vim and Linux to be slop by your definition. As an example:
https://github.com/vim/vim/commits/master/?since=2026-08-02&...
Claude's contributions are littered around the vim's C codebase, so surely Vim is now a 100% slop TUI?
So my question still remains, what tool do you think isn't a 100% slop TUI?