Hacker News: ngriffiths

New comment by ngriffiths in "The Emacsification of Software"

ngriffiths — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:31:06 +0000

Wow, this really changes how I think about working with software and with LLMs. Sharing ideas and amateur remixing and setting up something weird for you and your friends is so much easier now. Things you had to have lots of time and expertise to do before are just widely accessible now.

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

ngriffiths — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:15:13 +0000

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once.

Posts/discussion I found interesting:

- http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald...

- https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381

In particular it's interesting how people seem to think TeX itself is actually quite nice to use but its popularity and LaTeX packages created a huge mess of a system.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to"

ngriffiths — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:00:45 +0000

Good point. You sort of have a purpose for opening it up, then you get distracted, or fired up or whatever, because the app just unloads tons of information at you.

I sort of claimed that everyone enjoys it when they use these apps, maybe it's better to say they are likely getting something out of it in that moment. This could be kind of a bad deal - people make bad deals, and repeat old ones all the time. Other times they delete the app once they realize it.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to"

ngriffiths — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:55:21 +0000

Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me.

I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

ngriffiths — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:18 +0000

Isn't the super dramatic shift in public opinion on this topic the exact thing that makes it such a good example? Isn't the point that anonymity is not considered a universal right yet it is obviously a good thing once considering this example and others? This is a super weird and wrong way to read it.

New comment by ngriffiths in "How can I keep from singing?"

ngriffiths — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:26:45 +0000

I guess it's too extreme to say there's no difference, I just don't love the explanation of there being some hard ceiling because it seems like the real process is incredibly uncertain and unpredictable. There's a million little skills you have to learn as a pianist and also many brief moments where you suddenly grow a lot because you finally grasped something important. In other words I feel like the "ceiling" gets broken every once and a while, and the thing that separates the great musicians is they get satisfaction doing it even during the extremely frustrating times where you're stuck at some ceiling. Which also helps them maintain hope and curiosity and see the next step forward when it does finally come. It feels like the ceiling is often a psychological one, not a natural one!

New comment by ngriffiths in "How can I keep from singing?"

ngriffiths — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:49:14 +0000

One of my high school piano friends went on to become a concert pianist. The difference between him and the rest of us was that music was everything for him - its what he did to relax, his social life, his hobby, his work, and his passion. There were, like, some months where music felt almost like that for me but for him it always did. I think there's no mysterious talent you have to have, just a psychological problem. if you get genuine fulfillment in all areas of life just by thinking about and doing music all the time, the ceiling is much higher.

New comment by ngriffiths in "How can I keep from singing?"

ngriffiths — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:33:13 +0000

It's also extremely nonlinear. I look back on my years of studying piano and the first 7 or so as a kid were basically screwing around compared to the next two, when there was this huge breakthrough. Then another couple years at that level until another huge breakthrough. It's funny, the first one was a breakthrough that came from a great teacher and was sort of a realization that music was way much more deep and interesting than I ever imagined. The second one was barely musical at all, it was just finding a super vibrant music community. If not for some random luck, mindshifts and social experiences like that, I would've quit a fraction of the way in.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D"

ngriffiths — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:57:24 +0000

I think you are a little over the 250kt speed limit under 10000

New comment by ngriffiths in "Combining spicy foods with mint boosts anti-inflammatory effects 100x or more"

ngriffiths — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:56:04 +0000

In mice, but not even real mice. That's a new one!

New comment by ngriffiths in "What does it mean to “write like you talk”?"

ngriffiths — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:14:31 +0000

It would be easy if all you had to do was make it simpler, but I don't think that's it. Good writers always sound like themselves, you're reading along and you feel like there's a whole person there saying something to you, it's really them and not anyone else. It's magic.

If the average person tries following this advice they'll probably end up with something simpler sounding, and still bad. Which I guess is better than overly complicated and bad? I don't know, doesn't matter, both are bad.

One thing I know for sure though is writing like you talk is dressing down. Sometimes that's good, like when you want to be relatable and down to earth, or maybe you're saying you're a tech bro type, moving fast and no time for nonsense. Other times you should be more formal though.

Again, the great writers don't care, they just pick whatever level of formality makes sense and do their thing.

New comment by ngriffiths in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

ngriffiths — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:31:37 +0000

I think in an ideal world, programming languages[1] would allow you to express key behaviors, interfaces, states, etc very precisely and sharpen your own understanding while writing, but importantly, also leave unimportant behaviors, structures, etc unspecified, using reasonable defaults and similar stuff.

I sort of see the success of coding agents as not just a sign that people get tricked by slop, but mainly a sign that today's languages and frameworks just aren't that good. And now it's easier to say to the LLM, "I literally don't care how the UI is organized as long as everything is visible" than to try to express that in code.

[1]: I mean this in the vaguest sense, so including DSLs/frameworks/interfaces offered by libraries too

New comment by ngriffiths in "Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024"

ngriffiths — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:59:26 +0000

Raises a few questions:

1. Is there still value in a trusted source of high quality, relevant information existing in an easily accessible place? To me the answer is obviously yes, whether a human writes it or an agent, and also whether a human consumes it or an agent

2. If an agent visits a page, they shouldn't generate ad revenue (I guess they don't? is that true?). Should they just be able to copy the information for free? If the answer to 1. is yes, the answer here should probably be no.

3. Does this completely break the ad revenue model that powers like the whole internet?

4. Does this seriously threaten our ability to maintain a high quality, shared collection of knowledge? What can be done?

New comment by ngriffiths in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

ngriffiths — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 03:42:39 +0000

A lot of comments about how this is another case of useless bloat. I don't know, markdown is just incredibly useful and widespread and yet it is pretty annoying to find a good editor:

- There wasn't anything that comes with Windows that natively supports it (before now)

- All your favorite text editors don't support it natively, and plugins vary

- You can pay for a nice markdown editor but for some reason your more powerful usual text editor is still free?

- You can open VSCode, which is hilarious overkill if you just want to take some notes. Obsidian is excellent but same problem.

- Maybe something I'm missing?

Basically I think it is a great thing if I just get a lightweight markdown friendly editor built in, because I'll probably use it all the time.

...except if it immediately leads to a CVE, I guess.

New comment by ngriffiths in "What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI"

ngriffiths — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:55:23 +0000

> Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose.

I think this is a really important point and to add on, there is a lot of writing that is really good, but only in a way that a niche audience can appreciate. Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff targeted to a general audience, and it's still nowhere close to some more niche classics.

An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace. A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be creative," which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones are great, not just random subjective opinions.

I kind of think... there is still something fundamental that would get in the way, but that it is still totally achievable to overcome that some day? I don't think it's impossible for an AI to be creative in a humanlike way, they don't seem optimized for it because they are completely optimized for the sort of analytical mode of reading and writing, not the creative/immersive one.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models"

ngriffiths — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:01:24 +0000

I don't think the biology is there, let alone consensus on the major ethical questions involved

New comment by ngriffiths in "Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models"

ngriffiths — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:51:42 +0000

Because research on real humans and real diseases is exceptionally difficult. Clinical research is notoriously expensive, results are likely to differ from non-human (preclinical) models, and trials take forever to get started, gather enough data, and get a drug actually reviewed and approved. So even when everyone is excited by the preclinical data, there are so many barriers (both scientific and non-scientific) that getting to an approved drug is pretty unlikely.

New comment by ngriffiths in "Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models"

ngriffiths — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:33:46 +0000

IN MICE. (To be fair, also IN SOME OTHER BETTER MICE).

https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...

(mostly a joke, but I'd be in favor of adding context to the HN headline if possible)

Classical Chinese poetry: a guide for the curious (2023)

ngriffiths — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:57:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/classical-chinese-poetry-a-guide

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544953

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ngriffiths in "How to Attend Meetings"

ngriffiths — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:40:07 +0000

One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message.

Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.