Hacker News: decimalenough

New comment by decimalenough in "Pac-Man, but you're the ghost"

decimalenough — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:55:21 +0000

"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350

New comment by decimalenough in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

decimalenough — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:50:14 +0000

There is no one "Arabic". Yes, formal modern Arabic (fusha) is based on (but not identical to) the classical Arabic of the Quran, but nobody speaks this in real life. The actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages, many of which are effectively different languages at this point:

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

A rough equivalent in both time and space is how the Vatican continues to use Latin, but the rest of the Roman Empire has splintered into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc.

New comment by decimalenough in "All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)"

decimalenough — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:04:10 +0000

No, it's not. The successful private companies all serve suburban commuters. The long-distance network was almost entirely JNR.

As of 1996, JR group still controls over 20,000 km of Japan's 30,000 km of rail, and that's after privatizing and closing a large slab of it (mostly those duplicated by Shinkansen).

New comment by decimalenough in "All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)"

decimalenough — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:26:45 +0000

This take is hilariously misinformed. Japan's long-distance network was almost entirely public until JNR was privatized in 1987, and its successors the JRs continue to be for all intents and purposes controlled by the government.

Some not-very-light reading about the rise and fall of JNR:

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye...

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...

New comment by decimalenough in "All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)"

decimalenough — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:21:02 +0000

Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s.

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

New comment by decimalenough in "7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible"

decimalenough — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:05:00 +0000

It's a poor country with a lot of ramshackle housing and "informal settlements" (slums). Seismic codes exist, implementation and enforcement are an entirely different matter.

New comment by decimalenough in "Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026"

decimalenough — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:02:46 +0000

but but WordPress is written in PHP screeeee

decimalenough — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:00:31 +0000

I lived in Bangkok and saw 4 motorcycle accidents or their immediate aftermath. Even in perpetually jammed third world megacity traffic, the motorcyclist always loses to the other vehicle, in several of those cases almost certainly fatally.

New comment by decimalenough in "You Can Run"

decimalenough — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:15:35 +0000

No, it really was a golden age. Before the 747 kicked off the age of cheap air travel in the 1970s, it was impractical to hop around the world like the family here did. Even domestic travel in the US was slow, difficult and expensive until the train and automobiles came along.

And if you wind the clock even further back, you could hardly go further than a few villages away on foot or horseback before people would get very suspicious about an outsider venturing to their domain.

New comment by decimalenough in "India's surprise baby bust"

decimalenough — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:26:23 +0000

Gender does matter though. Men can sire offspring into their 60s, women have marked decline in fertility starting from 32 and hit an absolute wall (menopause) by their fifties.

New comment by decimalenough in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

decimalenough — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:18:17 +0000

Singapore has been described as a "managed democracy". There are genuinely free elections, and there's an actual opposition, but the government/ruling party (they're largely inseparable at this point) exerts a heavy hand to ensure they keep their supermajority.

One of the big questions of Singaporean politics is what would happen if there ever was a "freak result" (in LKY's words) and the opposition won a majority, since thanks to the first past the post voting system further exacerbated by mandatory "group representative constituencies" the winner always wins big and coalitions or minority governments are not an option.

New comment by decimalenough in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

decimalenough — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:14:53 +0000

Some 50,000 of OP's father's compatriots were killed by the Japanese, the survivors can call the invaders what they wish.

New comment by decimalenough in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

decimalenough — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:07:45 +0000

> And since Singaporeans reportedly have high life satisfaction

They do not; in fact, they're the least happy country in SE Asia.

https://www.hcamag.com/asia/specialisation/employee-engageme...

New comment by decimalenough in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

decimalenough — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:05:38 +0000

> The story of Singapore’s ascent from ‘Third World’ to ‘First’, following its forced separation from Malaysia in August 1965, happened under the watch of another visionary, Lee Kuan Yew.

Ah, yet another uncritical narration of the People Action Party's literal party line.

Singapore was the second richest city in Asia (behind Shanghai) before WW2. While the PAP obviously deserves credit for their economic management from the 1960s onward, their starting point was far from the opium-riddled fishing village backwater they like to paint it as.

New comment by decimalenough in "Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition"

decimalenough — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:31:25 +0000

That's a bit of an understatement. Essentially all residential scale solar panels and batteries are now built in China.

New comment by decimalenough in "Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition"

decimalenough — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:30:21 +0000

https://archive.is/nA1UT (includes complimentary subscription in botnet)

New comment by decimalenough in "Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition"

decimalenough — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:27:50 +0000

Oceania too: Australia installed 442 MW of residential solar and 2.5 GWh of residential batteries in the month of April alone. Both numbers are partly juiced by changes to a rebate program from May, but the overall trend remains explosive growth.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/households-still-going-big-on-so...

New comment by decimalenough in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

decimalenough — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:19:43 +0000

The BYD Shark 6 is already a hit, and the upcoming Shark 8 is aimed squarely at the ginormous US-style truck crowd.

https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6

https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/byd-shark-8-co...

New comment by decimalenough in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

decimalenough — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:18:16 +0000

BYD is not just zippy little city cars. The BYD Sealion 7 SUV (EV) and Shark full-size truck (PHEV) are incredibly popular in Australia, which is a very similar market to the US, and I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes if allowed into the US.

https://bydautomotive.com.au/sealion-7

https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6

New comment by decimalenough in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

decimalenough — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:28:26 +0000

Why would a Shariah index fund have to exclude SpaceX?