Hacker News: CJefferson

New comment by CJefferson in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

CJefferson — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:28:45 +0000

That's genuinely good to know.

The thing that often hits me nowadays is using pandoc (or pandoc via quarto) to go markdown -> latex -> pdf, which tends to bury these issues (and in markdown it's more tempting to just write emojis / unicode maths symbols.

Why use markdown, because I want good HTML output (which I realise is getting better in latex, but still not as good as markdown -> HTML.

New comment by CJefferson in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

CJefferson — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:57:52 +0000

I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.

New comment by CJefferson in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

CJefferson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:20:13 +0000

I tool which pulls all details from my Garmin and keeps a '5 day rolling average' series of stats -- my lifestyle means I can't keep up 'X steps a day', but I feel I can keep up 'average X steps a day for the last 5 days'. What's perfect is I can tweak it, I even added a special 'the weather is truely awful today, you can dip under average but you need to make it up later' option by getting it to automatically pull the weather forecast, or 'The weather is perfect today, really push'.

New comment by CJefferson in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

CJefferson — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:07:23 +0000

My advice -- give it a try. Chuck $5 into deepseek.com , and use this config (put it in a shell script, run ' . ./deepseek-claude.sh ', then just run claude as normal.

    export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic
    export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN= *** PUT YOUR DEEPSEEK KEY HERE ***
    export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=deepseek-v4-pro
    export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL=deepseek-v4-pro
    export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL=deepseek-v4-pro
    export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL=deepseek-v4-flash
    export CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL=deepseek-v4-flash
    export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=max

I started by using it for some bigger reading jobs, particularly when I was near limit. Honestly, it's not quite as good, but it's much cheaper, and means I can carry on working. I also find sometimes it's good to ask claude and deepseek to consider code, how to polish, it see what they both say.

New comment by CJefferson in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

CJefferson — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:06:00 +0000

No, I think we do need legal protection. We have so many high quality protections when it comes to real-world items -- they could be better, but if companies are going to move everything on line, and put tech in everything, they can goddamn give us the same level of protections.

New comment by CJefferson in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

CJefferson — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:04:46 +0000

Should a government control the porn a child can walk into a shop and buy? The alcohol and drugs they can work into a shop and buy?

Are you suggesting we remove current laws making it illegal for children to purchase these things?

New comment by CJefferson in "Colorado Amended SB051 (Age Verification Bill) to Exclude Open Source Projects"

CJefferson — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:13:02 +0000

Seriously?

They didn't survive, they died:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041714/united-kingdom-a...

New comment by CJefferson in "Colorado Amended SB051 (Age Verification Bill) to Exclude Open Source Projects"

CJefferson — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:08:57 +0000

There are so many things where we don’t do that. There are laws against giving children so many dangerous things, because you can’t watch them constantly outside the house, and honest I think unrestricted internet is worse for a child than alcohol. I’m not saying this is the right answer, but pretending it’s just a parental problem seems oversimplifying.

New comment by CJefferson in "WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward"

CJefferson — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:51:46 +0000

I don’t believe it’s Limiting factor in UI frameworks. I’ve profiled a lot of c++ and a lot of UI code. UI problems tend to come from too much churn and object creation, or doing too much work in the UI thread so it gets laggy, not just doing some reference counting.

New comment by CJefferson in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

CJefferson — Thu, 14 May 2026 05:31:33 +0000

No, they want to train the next generation of leaders and elites, and those elites and leader's parents pay a huge amount of money to get them there.

They know not to bite the hand that feeds them.

New comment by CJefferson in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

CJefferson — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:47:27 +0000

I'm not saying beating children is good but.. if you think the 'state of the world' is bad, well, most countries have massively reduced how much beating children get over the last 40 years or so.

New comment by CJefferson in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

CJefferson — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:45:11 +0000

Where the proof that caning people for mistakes creates in the the desire for vengeance where they will hit their children.

Naughty children won't work, or do vocational training. Have you worked with children?

New comment by CJefferson in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

CJefferson — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:28:49 +0000

I think what we really need is better sandboxes languages. I’d be much happier if my compression algorithm only had an input stream and an output stream. Maybe my gui library shouldn’t have network access or filesystem access. It just draws what I give it, gives me back what users press. You could still make evil software in this world of course.

New comment by CJefferson in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

CJefferson — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:36:55 +0000

Not a latex post with someone talking about typst. Come back when the html output works. Not having good accessible output was more acceptable back when Tex was invented, it definitely isn’t now, and they made a new system and somehow got this worse then modern latex.

New comment by CJefferson in "Grok 4.3"

CJefferson — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:35:28 +0000

Deepseek is fairly uncensored. I tried pushing it and reached my limits before it did.

New comment by CJefferson in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:12:00 +0000

The HTML generated by LaTeX is currently very good (you can read basically every paper on arXiV in HTML). The html generated by Typst just.. doesn't really work currently. I checked a few weeks ago, tables didn't output sensibly. Looking at the docs their plan doesn't seem to be to aim for total coverage in general.

New comment by CJefferson in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:53:09 +0000

Just a quick follow up, if my reply seemed very harsh, view that as a sign of how enthusiastic I was to see the website at first. I understand wanting to make money, but I'd seriously consider giving a lot more away (maybe even the basic report stuff) away for free, I'd love to explore my local area, my parent's, be nosey what life is like in Oxford (a place I previously lived), but even if I was willing to pay (I'm not), having to stop, get PDF, download, really breaks the flow.

New comment by CJefferson in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:43:05 +0000

So, this sounds exciting to me, but the postcode checker really feels like a spam as a user. All it tells me is 'Mixed results'. I could make a website that prints 'mixed results', I bet most results are 'mixed'!

I understand wanting to get money, but honestly, there is no way I would give money to this website in it's current state, you are giving me far too little info before asking me to hand over a credit card.

Then, if someone gives you £19, a crazy amount of money honestly, the last page of the report is an advert to give them 4 times more!

New comment by CJefferson in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:42:40 +0000

They made a new format with basically no accessibility. We finally got latex usable by blind people with acceptable html output, I’m not moving to something worse.

New comment by CJefferson in "Mahjong: A Visual Guide"

CJefferson — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:56:57 +0000

This is a really nice website!

In China it turns out there are lots of rule sets. The city I'm currently living in (Changsha) has it's own ruleset for example, with less tiles than these examples.