Hacker News: ntnsndr

Why This Is Not a Newsletter

ntnsndr — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:58:51 +0000

Article URL: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/05/why-this-is-not-a-newsletter/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48115163

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ntnsndr in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

ntnsndr — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:55:47 +0000

It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other!

System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

ntnsndr — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:30:32 +0000

My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).

One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Vim-pencil: Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing"

ntnsndr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:33:46 +0000

I've been using Vim only about a year, and just finished drafting an academic-trade crossover book with extensive endnotes in it. I've tried Pencil and Goyo, but ended up finding that a pretty tiny vimrc file was all I needed. No plugins.

https://gitlab.com/ntnsndr/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.vimrc

I launch with `vim -O [2-3 working files]` and am good to go. Learning vim itself is hard enough, and rewarding enough, that plugins feel extreme, especially for prose writing.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Pandoc for the people: Convert documents without leaving the browser"

ntnsndr — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:13:18 +0000

For me, too late, because my workflow is already full of little pandoc scripts that do document conversion wherever I need it!

But I wonder if the killer app might be a browser plugin, not a website. Highlight text on any webpage, convert it to whatever. Saves the copy-paste, and hopefully stays on the local machine.

New comment by ntnsndr in "OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III"

ntnsndr — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:27:29 +0000

Except that 6 is far and away the best

New comment by ntnsndr in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

ntnsndr — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:04:54 +0000

For example, the Colorado Sun has labels on every story for the nature of reporting that went into it: https://coloradosun.com/

Some may find it surprising that this is left over from the Sun's early support from the crypto journalism project Civil.

Agentic Coding Mentor

ntnsndr — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:12:17 +0000

Article URL: https://git.medlab.host/ntnsndr/agentic-coding-mentor/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46914644

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ntnsndr in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

ntnsndr — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:53:13 +0000

That was my first thought too!

New comment by ntnsndr in "Xfce is great"

ntnsndr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:10:06 +0000

I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.

I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Xfce is great"

ntnsndr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:04:12 +0000

Remove all the xfce design elements you don't like. Ytou can even use a borderless theme, eg https://github.com/ushioichi/borderless-xfwm-theme

I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard.

XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.

New comment by ntnsndr in "How Markdown took over the world"

ntnsndr — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:25:36 +0000

Funny that he didn't use the .md extension. Maybe because he started doing it before he expected his markup would merit its own filetype?

Collective Governance for AI: Points of Intervention

ntnsndr — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:20:18 +0000

Article URL: https://metagov.org/cg-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214048

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ntnsndr in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

ntnsndr — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 01:14:52 +0000

Amen. Not only do they make hardware in the US (though not laptops yet), they contribute great Linux software.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Show HN: RowboatX – open-source Claude Code for everyday automations"

ntnsndr — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:39:45 +0000

I use CC regularly for editing large text files (especially turning interview transcripts into something readable) and have found it works much better than web chat interfaces because of filesystem access and ability to work with large files.

New comment by ntnsndr in "Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living"

ntnsndr — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 03:46:42 +0000

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.

The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.

The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies

ntnsndr — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 23:52:46 +0000

Article URL: https://osf.io/preprints/mediarxiv/cdrmp_v1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079060

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ntnsndr in "Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs"

ntnsndr — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:52:25 +0000

+1. I have tried a bunch of local models (albeit the smaller end, b/c hardware limits), and I can't get handwriting recognition yet. But online Gemini and Claude do great. Hoping the local models catch up soon, as this is a wonderful LLM use case.

UPDATE: I just tried this with the default model on handwriting, and IT WORKED. Took about 5-10 minutes on my laptop, but it worked. I am so thrilled not to have to send my personal jottings into the cloud!

New comment by ntnsndr in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

ntnsndr — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 19:50:52 +0000

Same experience, but ending up with .md, sync-ed on Nextcloud.

Robin Berjon: Web Standards

ntnsndr — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:08:13 +0000

Article URL: https://protocol.ecologies.info/interviews/berjon-web_standards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44788635

Points: 1

# Comments: 0