Hacker News: ciscoriordan

Show HN: Kindling – reverse-engineered kindlegen, ~7,000x faster in Rust

ciscoriordan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:36:38 +0000

Amazon has been slowly killing kindlegen since 2020. First they dropped the Linux binary, then stopped distributing the standalone CLI entirely. The only copy left is hidden inside Kindle Previewer 3. Most people building Kindle dictionaries have been getting by with unsupported copies from older installations.

Amazon has moved a lot to EPUB. But sideloaded dictionaries still require MOBI. There's no alternative format for custom Kindle dictionaries.

The MOBI dictionary format is barely documented by Amazon, and the MobileRead wiki has partial community documentation, but a lot of the dictionary-specific format had to be reverse-engineered from kindlegen's output byte by byte.

I was building a Greek dictionary with 80K headwords and 452K inflected forms, and kindlegen couldn't handle it - 12+ hours on a Mac under Rosetta, frequently running out of memory and crashing before finishing. Kindling builds the same dictionary in 6 seconds.

Binaries for Mac, Linux, Windows: https://github.com/ciscoriordan/kindling

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676991

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Ask HN: What's the best charting library for customer-facing dashboards?"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 14:48:14 +0000

AG Charts is in a simple/powerful sweet spot.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly (2022) [pdf]"

ciscoriordan — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 18:00:01 +0000

Defense attorneys in a DUI case got their hands on the source code for the breathalyzer. It turned out to have terrible programming, e.g. calculating new averages by averaging a new value with the previous average. The case went all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which still found the device to be acceptable.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:33:34 +0000

A depression cuts both ways -- lower tax revenue, but lower labor costs too.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:29:09 +0000

An electrical issue could cause a gauge to misreport. E.g. vibrations cause a bad ground.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Off-duty pilot allegedly tried to shut off engines on Alaska Airlines flight"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:03:39 +0000

Cheap flights, expensive parking. Paine Field doesn’t have massive garages like SeaTac. I’ve taken the flight from the article and my airfare was lower than my parking costs for just a weekend trip.

Ubers are expensive but only ~20% more than SeaTac with a Cap Hill starting point.

All things considered, Paine Field is my first choice airport for the area.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 18:49:22 +0000

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russian-su-34-fullback...

“The statement went on to add that the crash was caused by an issue with one of the engines during takeoff, but the jet's two crewmembers are said to have ejected safely and survived. The extent of the injuries to the apartment building's tenants as well as civilians in the surrounding area is unknown at present.”

New comment by ciscoriordan in "I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 17:57:36 +0000

I had a parasitic drain on my Tacoma from my Automatic device (OBD-II reader / GPS tracker). I parked in a garage with no cell service and it drained the battery by constantly trying to connect. It was a non-issue when I commuted daily but started killing the battery when COVID happened and I switched to WFH.

Hard for mechanics to diagnose because they had no idea what that device was and also one of their first steps was to unplug it, put it in a cupholder, and plug their own OBD-II reader in.

Now the Tacoma is parked again most of the time because I got a Tesla and I'm noticing a voltage drop. I need to do more research, I don't know if this is normal for being parked or if there's a drain.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)"

ciscoriordan — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 18:01:53 +0000

Possibly including John von Neumann, one of the greatest polymaths ever. Everyday life now would be different if he had lived to a normal life expectancy instead of dying to aggressive cancer at 53.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 21:35:00 +0000

If you like this, I recommend "Big Dead Place" (https://www.amazon.com/Big-Dead-Place-Menacing-Antarctica/dp...) by Nicholas Johnson, a garbageman at McMurdo.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "“The books will stop working.”"

ciscoriordan — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 22:54:40 +0000

They moved due to overcrowding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library_of_Washington....

New comment by ciscoriordan in "SEC Charges Rothenberg Ventures in Fraudulent Scheme"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:11:04 +0000

Whistleblower here. It took 25 months from when I reported the fraud until the settlement.

SEC Charges Rothenberg Ventures in Fraudulent Scheme

ciscoriordan — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 21:36:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-160

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17804202

Points: 176

# Comments: 87

New comment by ciscoriordan in "How a Chinese businessman became the largest supplier of pyrotechnics in the US"

ciscoriordan — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 22:43:30 +0000

The first line of the article is: "Roughly 70 percent of all Chinese fireworks entering the United States come here under the control of a Chinese businessman who has used his influence to raise prices and block competitors, leaving many U.S. executives fearful of losing access to their most important Fourth of July inventories."

The word "monopoly" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. The article's claim is that Mr. Ding is anticompetitive, not that he operates a monopoly.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro"

ciscoriordan — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 22:56:59 +0000

I'm on the phone with Apple customer service right now. It looks like I'm going to get a refund for the $257 I paid to have my spacebar fixed in March. The rep on the line says I'm the first person she's talked to about this but she expects a lot more.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "The Death of a Once Great City"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 18:19:52 +0000

That's the line that made me give up on the article. The author twists the truth to fit his narrative.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud"

ciscoriordan — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 01:05:37 +0000

It shifted away from Silicon Valley investors as time went on.

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Theranos investors cannot pursue class action: U.S. judge"

ciscoriordan — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 18:30:06 +0000

https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/...

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence"

ciscoriordan — Thu, 10 May 2018 19:45:43 +0000

Math Foundations of Computer Science (15-151) covers proofs, combinatorics, etc.

https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/course-profiles/15-151-Mathematical-F...

New comment by ciscoriordan in "Ask HN: Side project you're working on?"

ciscoriordan — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 20:03:40 +0000

https://oneminutefax.com - Send free faxes online without having to create an account.