Hacker News Reader

Sembianceon Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

Neat. FYI your “home” links are broke. And here are 150,000 more unique RAR files if you need to test if your compressor produces the same byte-for-byte output if you unrar and then re-rar these: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=rar&dedup=ded...

Sembianceon OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API

Just tried with DeepSeek V4 Pro with OpenCode. It didn't do great. First attempt produced somewhat correct drawings for some of the original samples, but most were just a spaghetti messs of lines. Some prodding got it to do a little better, but still not right. A third prod and it went down a wild rabbit hole and was much worse. I gave up.

I also tried GLM 5.1, it's first attempt was such a disaster I didn't bother working with it any further. It also took by far the longest and wasted a bunch of time/tokens trying to find other converters online (and failing) instead of just reverse engineering the format from the sample files given.

Sembianceon OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API

I gave 4.6, 4.7 and GPT 5.5 the same prompt and task to reverse engineer a collection of sample vector files from an obscure Amiga CAD program and create a detailed txt specification and a python converter that converts to SVG and produce a report so I can visually verify.

4.6 did very well. 90% perfect on first try, got to 100% with just a few followups. 4.7 failed horribly. First produced garbage output and claimed it was done, admitted it did that when called out, proceeded to work at it a lot longer and then IT GAVE UP. GPT 5.5 codex was shockingly good. Achieved 90% perfect on first try in about a fourth of the time. Got to 100% faster and with fewer follow-ups.

I’m impressed.

Sembianceon FILE_ID.DIZ Description (1994)

Here is a collection of 1.1 MILLION FILE_ID.DIZ files from back in the day: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=FILE_ID.DIZ&qfield...

Sembianceon Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?

This does an “okay” job at converting the document: https://archive.org/details/KeyViewPro

Here is the converted PDF: https://smallpdf.com/result#r=091f20f23de353fac21376a3a49a60...

Sembianceon Why 56k is the fastest dial up modem speed

The article mentioned using an 8bit ADC. Could a 16bit ADC be used on BOTH sides and achieve 112kbps?

Sembianceon I like gentoo's package deprecation process

If you go to an earlier commit here, you can find earlier versions: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo

Sembianceon I like gentoo's package deprecation process

I’ve made many a trip to the git repo to dig up older versions and copy down the old version ebuilds into my own overlay: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo

Sembianceon Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium

Sodium and kitchen salt are not the same thing. https://youtu.be/CArZeDTwVh4?si=tdVHOPO-8QZhxrkS

Sembianceon The 88x31 GIF Collection

If you extend the range by 1px to be 87x30 to 88x32 you double the amount of results and get those images that are off by 1px: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?family=image&widthMin...

Sembianceon MilkyTracker

Here is the Call of Ktulu S3M: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/7499/arcadebbs.zip/arca...

Another 58,644 MOD/S3M/XM files show up in DiscMaster: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?family=music&formatid...

Sembianceon Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

HTTP is decentralized. That’s actually worked out really well I think, no sarcasm intended.

Sembianceon Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2

Midjourney is open to everyone now, no waiting, and is easily the 2nd best tool for this stuff

Sembianceon Gopher: Underground Technology (2004)

I made solitaire for gopher: https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...

Why? Dunno. It was a fun weekend project.

Sembianceon Surfing the Gopherspace

You can even play solitaire on gopher: gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/

Blog post about it: https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...

Sembianceon The Button Cheat Sheet

I’m making a website right now that only uses HTML, no CSS/styles and no JavaScript and it is a breath of fresh air :)

Sembianceon Mojeek: Independent search engine with its own spider

I applaud an independent, new spider and search engine.

Sadly, the name is pretty horrible.

If you have to spell a domain out letter by letter when telling people in person, it’s not a good name. You also don’t appear to own common misspellings, like mogeek.com or moejeek.com or mojeak.com or at least they don’t redirect to the main website.

Still, I hope it gains market share and usage and I hope in a few years you may have the funding necessary to rebrand it into a more user friendly name.

Sembianceon Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

Ahh, stack overflow. Hugely popular thread with a lot of engagement? Lets lock it. Wouldn’t want to encourage behavior that doesn’t match our narrow minded “vision” for the site. Still though, an improvement over the early years where they just outright deleted countless pages with countless contributions. In the end it’s their site and they can run it however they want, but it’s sad to see such massive potential squandered through a policy promoting deletionism. Hindsight is 20/20 though and it’s not like I’ve gone and coded a better one, so I should probably just delete this comment and move on.

Sembianceon Asciimatics – create full-screen text UIs on any platform

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com

Sembianceon SimRefinery Recovered

You should rip the CDs and upload em to archive. It’s possible that there is unique content on them that doesn’t exist anywhere else :)

Sembianceon Show HN: Grid.js – Advanced table library that works everywhere

I thought this was about CSS Grid, but nope, nothing at all to do with that.

Sembianceon Best React animation library

Greensock is by far the best JavaScript animation library I’ve used in the past 12+ years, and I’ve used a lot. It’s not react specific, but that shouldn’t really matter.

Sembianceon Solitaire over Gopher

60 different solitaire games, 5 different ASCII background patterns. Keeps track of score and moves. Full rules.

Best gopher client to use: lynx Other verified gopher clients: cgo, VF-1, gophwr

Doesn't work with web based gopher proxies (it relies on extended ASCII charset and 70 character width lines)

Sembianceon Ask HN: What software products do you find expensive?

Amazon Web Services and other cloud vendors. The amount of traffic and processing power a single dedicated server can provide is astonishingly cheaper than the cloud.

I understand that the cloud provides additional software products, services and flexibility to scale quick, but you pay for it.

Sembianceon How a domain registrar can kill your business

Can I ask why you chose to leave namecheap for Google?

Sembianceon Post-Mortem and Security Advisory: Data Exposure After travis-ci.com Outage

Aren’t these the folks that spammed every github repo with a spam pull request to integrate their system into your code? I kinda lost all respect for this project and their developers after that incident.

Sembianceon Porting 4.5K lines of C to Go

Today I learned that Go does not support the ternary operator. that's sad :(

Sembianceon Show HN: Vexlio – Create precise, beautiful diagrams

Ditto. Would buy for my Gentoo system!

Sembianceon PlatformIO, open source ecosystem for IoT

I love and use PlatformIO, but I've dumped their library system because often the libraries in the pio db are a version or two behind what I can get from github.