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

61–70 of 167 posts

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#61

Post by akazantsev »

shortformblog wrote: post #42

LanguageTool (a Grammarly competitor) is also open source and can be managed locally: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine: https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its existence. It's nice to have options, though. It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one of the…

There are two versions of the LanguageTool: open source and cloud-based. Open source checks the individual words in the dictionary just like the system's spell checker. Maybe there is something more to it, but in my tests, it did not fix even obvious errors. It's not an alternative to Grammarly or this tool.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#62

Post by akazantsev »

m00dy wrote: post #56
lurk2 wrote: post #55

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

People who haven't heard of LLMs

LLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type.

Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#63

Post by mannycalavera42 »

raincole wrote: post #19
pram wrote: post #10

IMO not using LLMs is a big plus in my book. Grammarly has been going downhill since they've been larding it with "AI features," it has become remarkably inconsistent. It will tell me to remove a comma one hour, and then tell me to add it back the next.

So is there a similar tool but based on an LLM? Not that I think LLM is always better, but it would be interesting to compare these two approaches.

Grammarly is (was) written in Common LISP https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

Given LISP was supposed to build "The AI" ... pretty sad than a dumb LLM is taking its place now

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#66

Post by victorbjorklund »

lurk2 wrote: post #55

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

I think it is anyone who wanna make sure they write correctly. I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#67

Post by Destiner »

healsdata wrote: post #30
icapybara wrote: post #24

Why wouldn't you want an LLM for a language learning tool? Language is one of things I would trust an LLM completely on. Have you ever seen ChatGPT make an English mistake?

Grammarly is all in on AI and recently started recommended splitting "wasn't" and added the contraction to the word it modified. Example: "truly wasn't" becomes "was trulyn't" https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA

I don't think an LLM would recommend an edit like that.

Has to be a bug in their rule-based system?

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#68

Post by victorbjorklund »

dartharva wrote: post #47

I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through it once yourself? Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?

I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#69

Post by InsideOutSanta »

pram wrote: post #10

IMO not using LLMs is a big plus in my book. Grammarly has been going downhill since they've been larding it with "AI features," it has become remarkably inconsistent. It will tell me to remove a comma one hour, and then tell me to add it back the next.

Grammarly sometimes gets stuck in a loop, where it suggests changing from A to B. It then immediately suggests changing from B to A again, continuing to suggest the opposite change every time I accept the suggestion.

It's not a problem; I make the determination which option I like better, but it is funny.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#70

Post by phoe-krk »

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.

Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.
Post reply on HN