Hacker News: Sembiance

New comment by Sembiance in "TinySol, a tiny solitaire game for DOS"

Sembiance — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:16:23 +0000

Related, play Solitaire over gopher https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...

New comment by Sembiance in "Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs"

Sembiance — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:05:57 +0000

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...

New comment by Sembiance in "OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API"

Sembiance — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:27:36 +0000

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.

New comment by Sembiance in "OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API"

Sembiance — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:58:05 +0000

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.

New comment by Sembiance in "FILE_ID.DIZ Description (1994)"

Sembiance — Mon, 27 May 2024 14:35:28 +0000

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...

New comment by Sembiance in "Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?"

Sembiance — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:57:26 +0000

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...

New comment by Sembiance in "Why 56k is the fastest dial up modem speed"

Sembiance — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 18:34:05 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "I like gentoo's package deprecation process"

Sembiance — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 19:56:31 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "I like gentoo's package deprecation process"

Sembiance — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 19:55:22 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium"

Sembiance — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 17:46:03 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "The 88x31 GIF Collection"

Sembiance — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 21:21:54 +0000

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...

New comment by Sembiance in "MilkyTracker"

Sembiance — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 21:15:16 +0000

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...

New comment by Sembiance in "Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022"

Sembiance — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 12:05:50 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2"

Sembiance — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 11:52:31 +0000

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

New comment by Sembiance in "Gopher: Underground Technology (2004)"

Sembiance — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 21:17:38 +0000

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

Why? Dunno. It was a fun weekend project.

New comment by Sembiance in "Surfing the Gopherspace"

Sembiance — Tue, 17 May 2022 11:05:13 +0000

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

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

New comment by Sembiance in "The Button Cheat Sheet"

Sembiance — Tue, 25 May 2021 16:30:16 +0000

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 :)

New comment by Sembiance in "Mojeek: Independent search engine with its own spider"

Sembiance — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 11:56:23 +0000

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.

You Can Be a Woman Engineer

Sembiance — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:08:13 +0000

Article URL: https://archive.org/details/you-can-be-a-woman-engineer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24850456

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Sembiance in "Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code"

Sembiance — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 11:17:21 +0000

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.