HN Explorer

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valleyer
Slightly off-topic:

1. When I loaded the page, it bombarded me with a banner asking me, "Interested in sports?" (Yes, I am, but I came here to read about English handwriting. Go away.)

2. At the end, it presented me with a "badge" for finishing a whole "book"! Yeah, maybe people's attention spans would be better if they weren't bombarded with little banners at the beginning.

coldpie
We really need to start considering these things in the same category as pop-up windows. Browsers need to start killing these things, just like they did pop-up windows in the 90s and early 2000s. Remember when pop-up blocking was a huge feature? Imagine if Firefox implemented that today to block all this crap.
teekert
For me it's in Dutch, it must detect my language and adapt (since HN block non-English content)?
zarq
There's a blue button at the bottom center to revert to the original language.
qingcharles
I always like throwing these old handwritten documents into LLMs to see how well they do. GPT5 did nicely on the quitclaim deed in Anglicana, which is very hard to read.
dr_dshiv
This is really beautiful content. I’m assuming it comes from the fact that there are Google teams tasked with digitizing old manuscripts?

I work with a library (Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica) in Amsterdam that has thousands of manuscripts from the renaissance to the early modern period… all very esoteric. We really want to get the renaissance into model training! Over 75% of books (1450-1700) are unscanned — and the manuscripts are in even worse shape.

Curious if anyone knows if there any new handwriting recognition benchmarks? I’ve noticed the main model providers have plateaued in the past year on their ability to read manuscripts / modern handwriting… I think the lack of well-designed competitive benchmarks is the issue…

I love positive examples of the intersection of AI and the humanities.

gx
It should've included another 100 years to catalogue and showcase the devolvement towards kindergarten handwriting.
chrismorgan
Seeing the mention of Round Hand reminded me of Gilbert & Sullivan’s description in H.M.S. Pinafore of the importance of handwriting if, like Sir Joseph Porter K.C.B., you want to rise to the top of the tree:

  As office boy I made such a mark
  That they gave me the post of a junior clerk.
  I served the writs with a smile so bland,
  And I copied all the letters in a big round hand—
      I copied all the letters in a hand so free,
      That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!
casey2
The satire here is clear, that naval skill isn't necessary to run the navy but rather skill in some trivial and unrelated clerical task (along with political connections)

The problem comes then when people see this, don't recognize it as corruption, and waste their time learning useless skills. In a large org productivity losses from this are non trivial.

fatihkocnet
Frist time seeing this website. Excellent!
einpoklum
> The handwriting in the early 1100s is known as Carolingian Miniscule. It was easy to write, very legible and ideal for writing Latin.

It was not very legible. Its legibility is weak due to aspects such as:

* Non decomposability into rectangles bounding letters

* Variation in letter forms depending on preceding and succeeding letters

* "extended serifs" or edges of letters which may vary at the author's pleasure.

* Some pen strokes being extremely thin to the point of near-invisibility (like the middle line of 'e' characters)

* non-uniform vertical height of letters (even ignoring ascenders)

* non-uniform horizontal baseline

navigate8310
What a horrible over engineered UI. Texts were illegible when behind a white background and constantly shifting image perspective. No proper way to zoom in on the image and anchoring everything on the scrollbar was the cherry on cake.
joshcsimmons
This is phenomenal. I’ve recently gotten into fountain pens and have been interested in learning some of these older styles.