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simonmic

319 karma · joined October 10, 2009

Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com>

https://joyful.com

https://hledger.org

https://plaintextaccounting.org

https://hub.darcs.net

submissionscomments
simonmic··on Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
https://joyful.com/jj#Do+I+have+to+let+jj+auto-track+files+i...
simonmic··on Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
You can turn off auto-tracking.
simonmic··on Haskell Foundation 2026 Update
I didn't understand what you meant by "haskell and lisp don't scale". Are you saying their library ecosystems are weak ?
simonmic··on jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
This is great, thanks.
simonmic··on jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
You can turn that off (I do). In your config file:

    [snapshot]
    auto-track = "none()"
Auto-tracking could be a great default in certain projects, and a terrible one in others. jj doesn't require it at all and is still awesome without it.

Bonus tips:

    # show help by default, as the subcommands do
    [ui]
    default-command = "-h"

    # more readable log (also affects jjui)
    [templates]
    log = 'builtin_log_oneline'
simonmic··on The future of version control
You can turn off the auto-tracking, and add your files manually.
simonmic··on Show HN: Ditch your budget app subscription. Surebeans is a modern YNAB4
And in case anyone else finds this thread: I tried the app, and it's great!
simonmic··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Mine do. The phone's lightning connector socket has become "flaky" (from age, or lint..), and at this point I must hold the phone in hand rather than in pocket while walking, for uninterrupted playback.
simonmic··on Show HN: Ditch your budget app subscription. Surebeans is a modern YNAB4
Ah, that makes sense.
simonmic··on Show HN: Ditch your budget app subscription. Surebeans is a modern YNAB4
It sounds cool, congrats!

If it's based on hledger, you'll need to license your source code under GPLv3, won't you ?

simonmic··on Zig Libc
The linked blog post about making this is an excellent read.
simonmic··on One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household
Think of it as an intuitive alternate notation. + means debit, - means credit.
simonmic··on Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
This seems good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoYKBXWJes
simonmic··on Btop: A better modern alternative of htop with a gamified interface
Some recent notes, somewhat mac-specific:

"I'm having trouble finding one true activity monitor on mac. I tried all of these on mac with certain criteria in mind (reliability, renicing, good UX):

- Activity Monitor: doesn't update charts when in background, doesn't show nice value, doesn't allow renice, doesn't hide idle processes

- Apple's top: non-standard, information overload, no nice/renice/idle/filter

- htop: doesn't show accurate process cpu usages (known bug awaiting release), no idle hiding. (Use latest release to avoid crashes.)

- btop: hangs (known bug awaiting release), no nice/renice/idle hiding

- bottom: basic

- gotop: I forget

- glances: pretty good, supports nice & renice. That or htop seem to be the only options for that. glances is CPU-heavy.

- zenith: also good, faster, and at least shows nice. (Crashes if you sort by it, known bug awaiting fix.)"

I went with zenith.

simonmic··on Zig and the design choices within
Lauding with faint blame ? :)
simonmic··on GHC now runs in the browser
You're speaking of "GHC haskell" there. Yes that is the main stream - and this will get solved there sooner or later - but you can also do a fair amount of Haskell without GHC. Eg MicroHs is getting increasingly capable and I believe is highly bootstrappable.
simonmic··on GHC now runs in the browser
I always liked https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books/haskell-tutori... . But there's a lot out there. Have a look at https://joyful.com/Haskell+map . Or: read code. Or, just build practical stuff and seek help in the chats/fora when you hit problems.
simonmic··on GHC now runs in the browser
Yes, it's still a thing.
simonmic··on GHC now runs in the browser
https://joyful.com/Haskell#What+are+some+Haskell+apps
simonmic··on Movycat – A terminal movie player written in Zig
I had the same question. The demo video does not look like half blocks. More details of the terminal, font, window config used would be illuminating.
simonmic··on The Mainframe Six (2022)
Not loading for the last two days, but also available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250717160838if_/https://www.ha...
simonmic··on Hledger 1.50
> When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell.

You express it exactly, I felt the same way with Gnucash, Quicken, and all the other non-plain-text accounting apps I tried. Finance was stressful enough without also worrying about messed-up data. That was perhaps the biggest motivation to switch to Ledger, when I found it.

Later, I often could not figure out how to make Ledger do something I knew it could do, and I often was surprised by a crash or wrong behaviour when it saw some new combination of features and data that hadn't been tested or implemented yet. This was a big motivation to write hledger.

simonmic··on Hledger 1.50
They are different - though often tried for the same kinds of use case. Here's https://hledger.org/hledger.html#secondary-dates (hledger's name for effective dates) vs https://hledger.org/hledger.html#posting-dates. (Both features come from Ledger.)
simonmic··on Hledger 1.50
https://plaintextaccounting.org/Investing-and-trading summarises the current options, and https://joyful.com/hledger+lot+tracking has design notes, some of them recent.
simonmic··on Hledger 1.50
You said book, but I wouldn't rule out the docs on hledger.org (and perhaps plaintextaccounting.org); of which https://hledger.org/hledger-by-example.html is book-ish, and https://hledger.org/accounting.html leads to some good general accounting resources.

Also, again not what you asked for exactly, but the hledger chat room can be a very useful extra resource, to keep things moving along.

And here's one I found useful, though with more of a business flavour: "Accounting Savvy for Business Owners: A Guide to the Bare Essentials" by Philip B. Goodman CPA.

simonmic··on Why not Matrix (2023)
Sounds frustrating. Report it for investigation, please.
simonmic··on Jujutsu for busy devs
jj's auto staging isn't always desirable. I feel jj docs and evangelists should make clearer that it's easy to turn off by default, by adding this to ~/.jjconfig:

    [snapshot]
    auto-track = "none()"
simonmic··on Jujutsu for busy devs
That's a very clear up-to-date intro, great work.
simonmic··on What 1k Contributors Taught Me About Open-Source
Super advice, essential reading for FOSS maintainers.
simonmic··on APL Interpreter – An implementation of APL, written in Haskell (2024)
stack does generally have better UX. cabal hasn't supplanted it (and won't). But each has their strengths, the right tool for the right job.
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