Hacker News: jeffnash

New comment by jeffnash in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

jeffnash — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:50:04 +0000

have you tried 5.2? I agree that 5.1 and prior were below Kimi, Mimo, Qwen, Minimax, and probably Deepseek (depending on task), but 5.2 (especially unquantized) feels like something else.

Now I feel like that I'm covered by GLM 5.2 and Minimax M3 (when I need vision or a second pass on something).

New comment by jeffnash in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

jeffnash — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:53:07 +0000

Highly agree with much of the article. IMO, this is why many engineers who learned to code in the post-2010 'new hot framework every week' era but before LLM coding took hold are able to get much better results from AI assisted coding than those on either end of that sweet spot. The domain expertise in this case is constantly having to adapt to learning the latest flavor of the week DB or JS framework and adapt existing patterns and paradigms to new ones. Agentic coding itself is, in this case, one of those new paradigms.

Knowing the caveats and pitfalls of this through years of (often-painful) experience is what, at least for me, allows me to preempt a lot of the sloppy assumptions or omissions that even the frontier models make when working on systems at scale. This means I can leverage my domain expertise on these high-level areas while delegating the grunt work that is harder to screw up to the agents. I find this enables me to work faster while avoiding the slop making its way into critical engineering decisions.

New comment by jeffnash in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

jeffnash — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:13:33 +0000

100%. I think I hadn't fully internalized the open source vs trademark ethe (TIL that's the disputed plural of ethos) in my head. I had two nightmare scenarios: the first was where people would say "you copied Notepad++ and didn't give enough attribution, you're a thief!" and the other where...what happened here happened.

I think this was just about as close as I could get to asking Don Ho directly how he would prefer a port to be handled without actually doing so. I plan on publishing it shortly after cleaning up some God objects :)

New comment by jeffnash in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

jeffnash — Tue, 05 May 2026 02:29:58 +0000

The timing of this is very funny for me, personally. After the Claude Code Rust re-implementation, I wanted to see how far I could push 'spec-driven development' by re-implementing Notepad++ for Linux. I used four agentic loops to draft detailed from the source, implement the code, write tests to fix regressions, and compare the result with the original source. I then re-themed it and actually came out pretty well.

I initially worried that a brand new name (I went with nootpad) might misleadingly suggest the project was built from scratch rather than being a semi-clean-room re-implementation. Then, I saw that NPP was trademarked and my worries flipped the other direction; the reason I haven't yet published it was because I'm still removing all the NPP references from the source + comments in an abundance of caution, leaving a huge disclaimer/attribution in the README. I know that OSS is an opinionated place and didn't want to step on any toes.

I must say, having all of that anxiety and seeing this guy literally put Don Ho's picture on the website and say that it was being re-named "in collaboration with" Don Ho (i.e. not in response to a legal threat) made me laugh out loud.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:08:25 +0000

Now that's a throwback and is definitely my goto on macOS. I remember I did a bunch of chores in order to buy a Visa gift card just to purchase it. Was much easier than explaining to my parents what SFTP was and why I needed to borrow their credit card. I just googled it and it's good to see they're still around.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but I feel like 2006-12 (before the Mac App Store took off) was the golden age of Mac software. There were those ~$100 'app packs' that bundled a bunch of different software together. You'd buy it for 2 or 3 of them and end up discovering some cool new software in the process.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:24:20 +0000

Love me some WinSCP too.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:59:10 +0000

After seeing how quickly those hooligans re-wrote Claude Code in Rust from the leaked sourcemap, I actually made a spec-driven Linux port using Claude Code, Kimi, and Codex just to see if it was possible.

Frankly, I thought I was the only human being on earth who used Arch but missed the comforting embrace of Notepad++, so I'm happy to share the fruits of my ~$200 worth of tokens if there's interest!