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The Digital Orientalist
Personal blog · digitalorientalist.comdataprogramming
The Digital Orientalist is a personal blog at digitalorientalist.com about data and programming. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The Digital Orientalist for posts on how writing systems fare in computing, such as a cursive Japanese handwriting recognition post. Comments cite it as support for points about training data.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Practical examples and theoretical reflections on the do's and don'ts of using digital tools for your study and research in African and Asian Studies.
What Hacker News says?
As always, this depends on the amount of training data available. Japanese is another success story: https://digitalorientalist.com/2020/02/18/cursive-japanese-a...
Comment linking /2020/02/18/cursive-japanese-and-ocr-using-kuronet/
on “The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition”Submitted Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPossibly. Telephone (电话) is electricity/electronic (电) + talking/speech (话). In Japanese there's the Japanese possessive ('no') which can also be a modifier/qualifier in text like 男の子 (boy, literally "man of child") and 女の子 (girl, literally "woman of child"), so there are sequences of Chinese characters (possibly in combination with Japanese) that could be a single token like character sequences in the Latin script.…
Comment linking /2025/02/04/to-merge-or-not-to-merge-the-pitfalls-of-chinese-tokenization-in-general-purpose-llms/
on “Kimi K3 is now live”