Hacker News

TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)

20 points by Tomte 2 hours ago | 11 comments

karmakaze 6 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.

cauch 29 minutes 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 24 minutes 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 19 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 18 minutes ago

Paywall-free link:

https://archive.is/Ipm3J

natbennett 21 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)

aleksiy123 16 minutes ago

GCP employees heart rate spiking at the title.

sublinear 13 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______________ 38 minutes 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 23 minutes ago

I slice my latke with a pocketknife.

karmakaze 7 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.