Hacker News: tomthe

New comment by tomthe in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

tomthe — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:05:08 +0000

Yes, the pageview statistics might be enough, but I started from the pagerank dataset https://github.com/athalhammer/danker

And because of bot traffic, the pageview statistics are sometimes suspicious and noisy.

New comment by tomthe in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

tomthe — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 09:56:18 +0000

If you open the menu, there are already some filters, but no filter to filter out Wikidata-only entries yet. Maybe I will add it.

New comment by tomthe in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

tomthe — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:10:21 +0000

Oh, yes. It also includes all Wikidata entries with geocoordinates, but they have the lowest "importance" and are only shown very small. You need to zoom out a bit to see places with articles.

New comment by tomthe in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

tomthe — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:51:16 +0000

Time to promote my project: https://tomthe.github.io/wiki-importance-map

It shows all Wikipedia articles on a zoomable map. The size of the labels depends on its pagerank score and the pageview statistics.

Wikipedia Importance Map

tomthe — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 07:31:04 +0000

Article URL: https://tomthe.github.io/wiki-importance-map/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128812

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Wikipedia Importance Map. Every article sized by its pagerank on a map

tomthe — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:40:31 +0000

I extracted all Wikidata items with geocoordinates, joined them with pageview statistics [1] and wikipedia pagerank scores [2] to define their label sizes. For some entities without coordinates, I used proxies: Birthplace for humans, port of registry for ships, city of the headquarters for companies.

I created a version a year ago without AI. It was already interesting, but lacked a lot of polish and functionality. Now it was fun to complete it with coding agents.

You can toggle the different categories on and off in the UI. People and places are off by default, because they overshadow everything else and humans overlap so much. But please turn it on if you want to see where "important" humans have been born.

And the search works with a completely static index and range requests.

[1]: https://github.com/athalhammer/danker [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49094842

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by tomthe in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

tomthe — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:02:50 +0000

I thought you were referring to this slightly humorous video about the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dO9Lm_CXz0

New comment by tomthe in "Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events"

tomthe — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:38:49 +0000

Cool! I made something similar with the same datasets a year ago, but with geocoordinates instead of timestamps: https://theilemail.de/wikipage/ It shows a zoomable map with the "most important" wikipedia entries at specific locations.

It was very hard to get the parameters right so that the text is always displayed in a good size, while showing not too few or too many entries. I never published it until now, I think.

New sign-ups for Copilot Pro and student plans are temporarily paused

tomthe — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:58:46 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/get-started/plans

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848152

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomthe in "I asked Opus 4.5 to make a Rust implementation of PyNNDescent"

tomthe — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:14:38 +0000

The creator of UMAP and PyNNDescent tried to let Opus 4.5 translate PyNNDescent from Python to Rust

I asked Opus 4.5 to make a Rust implementation of PyNNDescent

tomthe — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:14:38 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/leland_mcinnes/status/2009738982712627433

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598792

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Pripyat – An Abandoned Industrial City

tomthe — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:55:33 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510869

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomthe in "Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model"

tomthe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:18:41 +0000

No, it is not as good as Veo, but better than Grok, I would say. Definitely better than what was available 2 years ago. And it is only a 7B research model!

New comment by tomthe in "Worldwide power grid with glass insulated HVDC cables"

tomthe — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:29:29 +0000

Yes, of course I do ignore a lot in that calculation. I just wanted to calculate the biggest possible usefulness of this cable. Especially the resistance losses could be quite disastrous.

New comment by tomthe in "Worldwide power grid with glass insulated HVDC cables"

tomthe — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:23:34 +0000

To some degree, yes. I just looked it up and the EU produced ~2500GWh in 2023, which is around 280 GW on average.

New comment by tomthe in "Worldwide power grid with glass insulated HVDC cables"

tomthe — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:42:10 +0000

If I (and only I) owned such a cable from Europe to the US, how much money could I make by buying cheap solar energy from the bright side and selling it to the dark side of the Atlantic?

First thought: 10 GW * $0.03/kWh 4 hours/day = $1.2Mio per day [0]

I am not sure about my assumptions...

[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10+GW+*+%24+0.03%2FkWh+...

New comment by tomthe in "Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive?"

tomthe — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 07:14:48 +0000

I wonder if you could implement it with only static hosting?

We would need to split the index into a lot of smaller files that can be practically downloaded by browsers, maybe 20 MB each. The user types in a search query, the browser hashes the query and downloads the corresponding index file which contains only results for that hashed query. Then the browser sifts quickly through that file and gives you the result.

Hosting this would be cheap, but the main barriers remain..

New comment by tomthe in "Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]"

tomthe — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 07:43:11 +0000

Very cool open release. Impressive that a 27b model can be as good as the much bigger state of the art models (according to their table of Chatbot Arena, tied with O1-preview and above Sonnet 3.7).

But the example image shows that this model still makes dumb errors or has a poor common sense although it read every information correctly.

New comment by tomthe in "Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)"

tomthe — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 11:02:14 +0000

It is not sufficient to understand the content very well, you also have to understand the state of the mind of your pupils very well.

Rock 'n Poll – Polls explained with interactive graphics

tomthe — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 12:44:53 +0000

Article URL: https://rocknpoll.graphics/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42696534

Points: 1

# Comments: 0