Hacker News: thadt

New comment by thadt in "Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why"

thadt — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:33:35 +0000

Zinda, his face black, his eyes red…

New comment by thadt in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

thadt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:06:28 +0000

It's hard to pick a favorite - everyone brings their own perspective to their time. One of my early favorites was 'A Jew Who Stood Guard for Hitler'[1], the account of a kid who joined the Nazis for a while - till they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out. Ah, the naivety of youth.

[1] https://www.messyhistory.net/a-jew-who-stood-guard-for-hitle...

New comment by thadt in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

thadt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:11:24 +0000

This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English.

The net result is that it's easier (for me) to understand a letter written by someone in a translated foreign language than one written by someone in English from the same period.

New comment by thadt in "Mistral OCR 4.1"

thadt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:05:04 +0000

Yeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.

New comment by thadt in "Web Security is Too Hard"

thadt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:39:36 +0000

The blog’s suggestions are fine. I’m pointing out that this issue is less about “security” and more a problem of “identity”.

And that such issues with identity are likely to increasingly be a problem.

New comment by thadt in "Web Security is Too Hard"

thadt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:53:52 +0000

In the movie Sneakers, a whole scene is taken up sending some guy on a date with Mary McDonnell so she could record clips of his voice. Today she'd just need a phone call or his Instagram. It's getting harder to keep up with who _people_ are online, much less organizations and domain names.

Identity is hard y'all.

New comment by thadt in "Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)"

thadt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:59:20 +0000

And likewise became EHLO which could also be used as a greeting over the phone if you were you were talking to an email server.

New comment by thadt in "Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified"

thadt — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:22:36 +0000

Given the (non-) responsiveness of the page, I’m going with they focused too much on “storage” and not enough on “network attached.”

New comment by thadt in "Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?"

thadt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:38:18 +0000

Childhood card-holding Texan here: can confirm the king's flavor is closer to that of country mesquite smoked BBQ than McDonald's.

I mean, it is comparing burgers and briskets, but if we're going for which translation is the most "faithful" ...

New comment by thadt in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

thadt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:58:38 +0000

Heh, this one brought a smile - well played.

New comment by thadt in "Mistral OCR 4"

thadt — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:30:33 +0000

Yes, we've been using Transkribus for this extensively. My wife is a historian who spends quite a bit of time sorting through old letters and diaries, and it has been a considerable quality of life improvement.

Even if you are able to read someone's scratches, having a model to do the bulk lifting saves your eyes a lot of squinting. One thing that makes Transkribus useful for research vs a chat interface is that it can line up its interpretation alongside the original image so you can examine its work directly.

New comment by thadt in "Data Compression Explained (2012)"

thadt — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:44:18 +0000

Whereas if we're talking about lossy compression (as is the person to whom you replied) we certainly can compress arbitrary data - almost as much as we want.

The hard question, then, is how much the decompressed output looks like the original.

New comment by thadt in "The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate"

thadt — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:05:41 +0000

> I do not want a "connection" with a business.

That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.

Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.

New comment by thadt in "Three of our worst VC stories"

thadt — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:11:04 +0000

Right - and if I ever go to raise VC then that's a guy I'll want to talk to. Even if they themselves don't invest, their recommendation would be valuable.

Life's too short to screw people over - reputation is one of the few things that last after we're gone.

New comment by thadt in "NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era"

thadt — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:59:56 +0000

Agreed. I scanned a short book with my phone, and a dedicated scanner would have been nice to have.

But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast.

[1] https://www.transkribus.org/scantent

New comment by thadt in "NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era"

thadt — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:10:54 +0000

Maybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.

New comment by thadt in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

thadt — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:09:43 +0000

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

New comment by thadt in "AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC"

thadt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:02:14 +0000

They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this. Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has accelerated their throughput significantly.

Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out at all. Even being able to run something as simple as frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive benefit.

At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is in one place and their transcription experts are spread out over the country.

New comment by thadt in "AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC"

thadt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:50:33 +0000

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines

thadt — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:31:20 +0000

Article URL: https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662234

Points: 551

# Comments: 248