Top all-time · #3915
Dampfkraft
Personal blog · dampfkraft.com · on HN as polm23programmingwritingculture
Dampfkraft is a personal blog at dampfkraft.com about programming, writing and culture. Since 2016, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “A Spectre is Haunting Unicode”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dampfkraft for deep dives into Unicode's "ghost characters", erroneous Japanese kanji that entered the Unicode spec, and for parsing the Japanese postal CSV data. Those posts are cited often in threads on Unicode and Japanese text.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Dampfkraft is a collection of beautiful chaos.
Most-linked posts?
- A Spectre is Haunting Unicode10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-07-29
- Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-11-08
- A Spectre is Haunting Unicode (2018)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-03
- Japanese Play-by-Postcard RPGs: Net Games (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-08-01
- Gamer Janken, or How to Pick a First Player2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-21
What Hacker News says?
This article reminds me of the Unicode Japanese "Ghost" characters: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html Long story short: Someone entered some characters erroneously in the Unicode spec and now those characters are there FOREVER.
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland”Submitted A Spectre is Haunting Unicode as a story · 353 points
HN discussionGood opportunity to repost this gem: "Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV" https://www.dampfkraft.com/posuto.html HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023673
Comment linking /posuto.html
on “Japan Post launches 'digital address' system”Submitted A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode as a story · 323 points
HN discussionThere's a career path to get there. It involves becoming someone who cares deeply about the ways and means of digitizing data stored in analog media. Drill down deep enough, and you'll find yourself in a fascinating world of coding an error. There are things like the "ghost characters," which are codepoints in Japanese that map to characters that were basically transcription errors when the team was putting together…
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated”Submitted A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode (2018) as a story · 268 points
HN discussionFreePascal/Delphi and VB6 are entirely different beasts. For one, FreePascal and Delphi are still under development. Delphi had the following language features added since 1998 (this is just a small selection): Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (remov…
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “Is XYplorer really written in VB6?”Submitted How I got my Japanese permanent residency as a story · 198 points
HN discussionSome of the ghost characters do appear to originate from place names, though that doesn't really have anything to do with the addressing system or any postal authority. Of the ones I checked more closely, like 膤, they tend to refer to things that wouldn't necessarily show in an address, like a hill or something. https://www.wdic.org/w/CUL/%E8%86%A4 https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV”Submitted Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV as a story · 168 points
HN discussionPyPI will not host large models, those have to be hosted externally. I had to deal with that before and wrote about that here. https://www.dampfkraft.com/code/distributing-large-files-wit... As another reply mentioned, the main things PyPI hosts are compiled extension libs. Sometimes these result in giant 300MB binary files, but more often what happens is you have many versions of a ~20MB file due to the combination…
Comment linking /code/distributing-large-files-with-pypi.html
on “What to do about GPU packages on PyPI?”Submitted Japanese Play-by-Postcard RPGs: Net Games (2017) as a story · 98 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Tokyo | Remote Need help with an NLP project? I've implemented several systems from scratch, working with Japanese and English over the years, and can help you set something up or improve your data pipeline. My one-line open source resume: I added most of the Japanese support in spaCy and have done some other work on it for the maintainers. I also have commits in Gensim, NPM, and visidata. Outside ope…
Comment linking /resume.html
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (November 2019)”Submitted Kanji Club: Search Kanji by Parts with Instant Feedback as a story · 97 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Tokyo | Remote Need help with an NLP project? I've implemented several systems from scratch, working with Japanese and English over the years, and can help you set something up or improve your data pipeline. My one-line open source resume: I added most of the Japanese support in spaCy and also have commits in Gensim, NPM, and visidata. On HN you may have seen my article about Ghost Characters in Unico…
Comment linking /resume.html
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (August 2019)”Submitted A Field Guide to Japanese Mojibake as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThere was also a nice discussion about Ghost Kanji a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637375 A spectre is haunting unicode: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “‘Ghost kanji’ lurk in the Japanese lexicon”Submitted How to Make a User with a Numeric Username in Linux (2014) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionHowdy folks, author here - sorry for not making it clearer, but if you tweet at @dupdupdraw it'll interpret your tweet as a program and reply with a picture. Words not in the vocabulary are interpreted as random numbers, so worst case you get a flat color. For a more detailed guide, check github or some examples: https://github.com/polm/dupdupdraw http://www.dampfkraft.com/by-id/efa8fe5c-34b0-47fc-99dd-9992... If yo…
Comment linking /by-id/efa8fe5c-34b0-47fc-99dd-999235eb0ea4.html
on “Show HN: Dupdupdraw, a Forth-inspired drawing bot”Submitted What Color Is Khaki, Anyway? as a story · 63 points
HN discussionArchillect is a popular Twitter bot that posts a certain kind of image. The code isn't open source, but the developer has described in general terms how it works sometimes. https://twitter.com/archillect The basic idea is it starts with a list of tags, and then uses Twitter responses (likes/RTs) and source metadata to decide what to post next. Not a complex idea, but I haven't seen anyone else do it. ShowMeMore star…
Comment linking /by-id/2931e31b.html
on “Show HN: ShowMeMore, an Archillect-alike taste bot”Submitted A Short History of Romaji as a story · 59 points
HN discussionReminds me of the ghost Unicode character saga: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
Comment linking /ghost-characters.html
on “The longest word you can type on the first row of a QWERTY keyboard”Submitted How to tokenize Japanese in Python as a story · 59 points
HN discussionSubmitted Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV as a story · 55 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Is Money in Asia Circles? as a story · 50 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cutlet: A Japanese to Romaji Converter in Python as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tokyo’s Lion Cafe in Audio Magazine as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gamer Janken, or How to Pick a First Player as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a Multilingual Book in Markdown as a story · 33 points
HN discussion
