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smichaelon Go’s Version Control History

These two are quite interesting:

- https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

- https://pijul.org

smichaelon Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

Try other browsers; grid view still works in some of them (Chrome IIRC).

smichaelon Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files

https://hledger.org/mobile-apps.html gives some ideas.

smichaelon Pijul 1.0 Beta

Off topic: why does this happen ? I thought the point of Cloudflare is to prevent it.

smichaelon Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win

You can do it with Canonical's multipass, for one.

smichaelon Why Co–Star Uses Haskell

I moved from Python to Haskell, when I had had enough of debugging runtime failures. Excellent choice, go for it.

smichaelon Show HN: QuickServ – User-friendly web server

Thanks for explaining. My thinking was: by (optionally?) allowing the usual extra characters (#!python3 -> #!/usr/bin/env python3) it remains standard, avoiding an unnecessary roadblock for existing scripts and programmer workflows.

PS: I also like your shorter syntax and would be happy if it became a cross platform standard - Shebang 2.0..

smichaelon Show HN: QuickServ – User-friendly web server

I like it, thanks for sharing.

Why not a standard unix shebang line at top of index.py ?

smichaelon A Tour of the Oil Language

The linked Tour is part of the documentation, which at a glance looks extremely extensive. You mention some issues; are you saying these docs are too hard to discover and lacking a good-enough TOC or index ?

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/1684

smichaelon Ask HN: Is it possible to automate accounting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420797 can be useful.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Thanks for these comments, good to know!

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

By all means - see you in one of the chats! https://plaintextaccounting.org/#mail-listsirc

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

> I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency -

All the major PTA tools support this - perhaps the chat could help ?

> my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses.

The first two are easy, the third is more complicated but also possible - unrealized gains at least, I forget how easy realized gains are in the various tools, it might not be fully automatic.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Another advantage over spreadsheets I forgot: more guide rails and more common ground (shared practices, howtos, support) with other users. Spreadsheets are a tabular report construction kit, PTA is an accounting system construction kit.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

https://hledger.org/mobile-apps.html

PS a little daily-ish data-entry-and-reconciling ritual, with a pleasant tool setup, can be quite satisfying! I actually look forward to it. (That right there is part of my PTA success story. I used to suffer a lot of stress around all things finance.)

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

True! I will look into it, thanks for the report.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

ledger-mode in Emacs has some excellent account and description auto-completion (warning, may require a bit of configuration to suit your taste).

hledger add, hledger-iadd and hledger-web are some of the data entry uis with auto completion.

Alternatives: other ways of generating entries means less manual data entry, such as copy/paste in your editor, predefined templates (org-capture, yasnippet or equivalents), or conversion from bank csv data.

[PS I realize now you were asking for more than account name auto-completion, ie: filling in defaults for all postings (legs) when you reuse a transaction description. I don't know of many PTA tools doing this yet; hledger add is one.]

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Do you mean, in the sense of https://hledger.org/investments.html#a-more-correct-entry ?

balancednoautoconversion validation may be relevant, if so (https://hledger.org/hledger.html#strict-checks)

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

It is a good question to ask. You say the FAQ has addressed it... I guess it was not convincing ? (If you remember where, please point me to it..)

PTA tools, some of them at least, can scale well from beginner-level single entry accounting, or even zero entry "accounting" (just a list of dated event descriptions), to fully general double entry accounting that can model any financial event. I always encourage people to start out simple. What usually happens is they learn and become more interested and more sophisticated as time goes on.

So I would say one group of people this appeals to is people who want to get their hands dirty with Double Entry Bookkeeping, with the support of a lively and enthusiastic community, in order to understand it better.

Another is people who are expert with text editors, scripting and programming and want an accounting system where they can bring these skills and insights to bear.

Another is people who want total control and privacy of their financial records.

Another is people who want their financial data to be accessible and usable for a very long time (even without software, if it came to that).

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Some possibilities:

* Use a version control system - keep journal files in eg a github repo; control access, manage pull requests, audit changes in the usual way.

* Use multiple files - the journal can be composed from multiple files, each with different filesystem permissions/accessibility.

* Maintain files on a server, and run a web UI like hledger-web or fava, perhaps behind a login form, to give read-only or add-only access to remote users.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

I have not used the SQL output, but I hope it's like all other hledger output: the number formatting is configurable (following your data format by default, but overrideable).

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends

Currently yes. hledger has rudimentary SQL export (https://hledger.org/hledger.html#output-format).

smichaelon Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

My favourite of all the posts here. I would love to read a how-to for ignorant techies, describing all the details and how it takes hardly any time.

smichaelon Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC network

You'd be a bit late..

smichaelon Show HN: Live Feed of the HN Top 30 as an IRC Channel

/join #freenode_##hntop:matrix.org

Or Explore, Freenode, hntop.

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting

You can use command-line hledger to produce the appropriate balance report data as CSV, suitable for gnuplot (or drag into a spreadsheet and use the charting tools there).

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting

Remove the `=` and you don't have to choose!

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting

I had the same wish, you might be interested in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/bin/hled...

However, reporting average expenses is easy, and sometimes enough..

smichaelon Plain Text Accounting

It would be good to measure that for the various tools. Things like balance assertions, balance assignments, valuation, may complicate the picture. hledger and beancount users, at least, do often split files by year to keep things in the "pleasantly fast" range.