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

▲TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)(atthis.link)

29 points by Tomte 2 hours ago | 6 comments

▲natbennett 59 minutes ago

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

▲cauch 1 hour ago

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, ...)

▲bobbiechen 1 hour ago

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....

▲pm215 58 minutes ago

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.

▲CommieBobDole 56 minutes ago

Paywall-free link:

https://archive.is/Ipm3J

▲karmakaze 44 minutes ago

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.

▲Haranrk 10 minutes ago

I think this is a great idea.

▲aleksiy123 55 minutes ago

GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

▲sublinear 51 minutes ago

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.

▲x______________ 1 hour ago

tl;dr

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

▲ultraboom 1 hour ago

I slice my latke with a pocketknife.

▲karmakaze 46 minutes ago

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.

▲wonger_ 19 minutes ago

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