Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

writewithharper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 167 posts

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#121

Post by eadmund »

triknomeister wrote: post #58
tolerance wrote: post #41

I would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules that are hard coded in an open source program—meaning that I can change them—than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training data that the LLM would draw from. The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim The whole thing seems cool…

You would lose out on evolution of language.

If a language changes, there are only three possible options: either it becomes more expressive; or it becomes less expressive; or it remains as expressive as before.

Certainly we would never want our language to be less expressive. There’s no point to that.

And what would be the point of changing for the sake of change? Sure, we blop use the word ‘blop’ instead of the word ‘could’ without losing or gaining anything, but we’d incur the cost of changing books and schooling for … no gain.

Ah, but it’d be great to increase expressiveness, right? The thing is, as far as I am aware all human languages are about equal in terms of expressiveness. Changes don’t really move the needle.

So, what would the point of evolution be? If technology impedes it … fine.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#122

Post by dragonwriter »

eadmund wrote: post #121
triknomeister wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would lose out on evolution of language.

If a language changes, there are only three possible options: either it becomes more expressive; or it becomes less expressive; or it remains as expressive as before. Certainly we would never want our language to be less expressive. There’s no point to that. And what would be the point of changing for the sake of change? Sure, we blop use the word ‘blop’ instead of the word ‘could’ without losing or gaining anything,…

> So, what would the point of evolution be?

Being equally as expressive overall but being more focussed where current needs are.

OTOH, I don't think anything is going to stop language from evolving in that way.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#126

Post by johnisgood »

Freak_NL wrote: post #107
acidburnNSA wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write em-dashes on my keyboard in one second using the compose key: right alt + ---

Same here — the compose key is so convenient you forget most people never heard of it. This em-dashes mean LLM output thing is getting annoying though.

> This em-dashes mean LLM output thing is getting annoying though.

Agreed. Same with those non-ASCII single and double quotes.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#127

Post by novoreorx »

Seeing Harper as an implementation of natural language's LSP brings me great joy, as it proves an idea I've had for a long time—natural language and programming languages are interconnected. Many concepts and techniques from programming languages can also be applied to natural language, making our lives more convenient. The development of LLMs and vibe coding has further blurred the boundary between natural language and programming languages, offering similar insights.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#128

Post by loughnane »

Surprised coming into this that I don't see anyone mentioning vale[0]. I've been using it for ~4 years now and love it.

I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea. Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for moving to Harper?

[0] https://vale.sh/

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#129

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

Harper is decent.

I've relied on Grammarly to spellcheck all my writing for a few years (dyslexia prevents me from seeing the errors even when reading it 10 times). However, I find its increasing focus on LLMs and its insistence on rewriting sentences in more verbose ways bothers me a lot. (It removes personality and makes human-written text read like AI text.)

So I've tried out alternatives, and Harper is the closest I've found at the moment... but i still feel like grammarly does a better job at the basic word suggestion.

Really, all I wish for is a spellcheck that can use the context of the sentence to suggest words. Most ordinary dictionary spellchecks can pick the wrong word because it's syntactically closer. They may replace "though" with "thought" because I wrote "thougt" when the sentence clearly indicates "though" is correct; and I see no difference visually between any of the three words.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#130

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

loughnane wrote: post #128

Surprised coming into this that I don't see anyone mentioning vale[0]. I've been using it for ~4 years now and love it. I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea. Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for moving to Harper? [0] https://vale.sh/

Looks interesting for linting and cleaning markdown documentation, but it doesn't seem like a very competent "spellcheck". I'll check it out... but it doesn't actually do the same thing as Grammarly or Harper.
Post reply on HN