Hacker News: matvore

New comment by matvore in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

matvore — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:15:02 +0000

I learned about 沌 quite a while ago when I studied the first few chapters of Genesis in Japanese (混沌 was used to describe the earth in Gen 1:2) and something jogged my memory when I was looking for examples.

The dictionary link I posted had あつまる、水があつまる in the first definition. I don't know if that's a reliable dictionary. Maybe you think it's not?

> - This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it > cannot have informed the construction of the character.

I don't know anything about which meanings were used first and which were added later, but what you say sounds believable.

> - There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.)

Let me clarify. Even without the first sense for 沌 in the above dictionary (あつまる、水があつまる) some of the other definitions for 沌 had "gather" included in it conceptually, namely clog and joined together without distinction.

This phenomenon we are talking about is called 会意兼形声文字 and this site seems to have a lot of accurate examples: https://okjiten.jp/20-kaiikenkeiseimoji.html#google_vignette

I confirmed a few, and they seem correct. I thought 界 was the most easily understood example. 介 means being between two things and contributes the pronunciation. 界 means region, span, separate, division.

New comment by matvore in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

matvore — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:46:01 +0000

According to https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%B2%8C-2789579#goog_rewarded 沌 has a meaning "gather, water gathers"

There are other meanings to it.

I admit I had a hard time finding an example.

New comment by matvore in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

matvore — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:28:49 +0000

A component can contribute meaning as well as pronunciation. 沌 is pronounced like 屯 and they both have a kind of "gather" "clog" meaning

New comment by matvore in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

matvore — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:52:17 +0000

  > Obviously the proper solution is to adjust your system thermal management / power targets,

My point is that I understand the users' complaint and request for a revert, not that I can't address this for my own machines. The proper solution for non-technical people is to ask the expert to fix it, which may include undoing the change if they were never interested in the process finishing faster anyway.

I did solve this problem once upon a time by running the process in a cgroup with limited CPU, though I later rewrote my dwm config and lost the command, without caring enough to maintain the fix.

New comment by matvore in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

matvore — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 02:24:14 +0000

If the fan was turning on where it wasn't before, it seems like cooling was once happening through natural dissipation, but after your fix it needed fans to cool faster. So the fix saved time but burnt extra electricity (and the peacefulness of a quiet room.)

This is pretty easy to understand IMO. About 70% of the time I hear machine's fans speed up I silently wish the processing would have just been slower. This is especially true for very short bursts of activity.

New comment by matvore in "Don't guess my language"

matvore — Wed, 21 May 2025 01:27:10 +0000

  > all of the languages mentioned so far appear before the "Latin alphabet" 
  > style languages, but 閩南語 and 閩東語 appear after them.

Could it have something to do with Minnan and Mindong Chinese articles being written in a Latin script, (despite the language name showing in both Chinese characters and Latin letters) ?

New comment by matvore in "Don't guess my language"

matvore — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:16:46 +0000

The Wikipedia sort for the languages is as I stated above, with Literary Chinese and Japanese between Wu Chinese and Yue Chinese. I explained why it was sorted that way, because radical is considered first. You could not explain why Japanese appeared between Wu and Yue because you insisted and continue to insist that radicals are not used.

I didn't say sorting is never done by stroke count alone. But I have seen radical+residual stroke count much more often than stroke count alone. Probably a result of the content I'm accessing. It's mostly Japanese and not intended for children.

The dictionary and non-dictionary sorting distinction that you make doesn't sound like a real thing. The audience, the country, and the number of items sorted are bigger factors. But you're not wrong in that stroke count is sometimes used alone.

New comment by matvore in "Don't guess my language"

matvore — Mon, 19 May 2025 16:43:54 +0000

It is sorted FIRST by radical and SECOND by stroke order. This is roughly equivalent to the Unicode codepoint sort if you stay in the basic multilingual plane. The order also puts literary chinese afer wu Chinese, which breaks with a pure stroke-count sort:

中文 - 中 = 丨 + 3 strokes

吴语 - 吴 = 口 + 4 strokes

文言 - 文 = 文 + 0 strokes

日本語 - 日 = 日 + 0 strokes

粵語 - 粵 = 米 + 7 strokes

New comment by matvore in "macOS Packaging for Ungoogled-Chromium"

matvore — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 18:46:05 +0000

Note I work for Google and I've contributed to Chromium, though I'm not necessarily an expert on Chromium forks.

1. Google Chrome

This is offical Chrome you download from google.com and also comes on ChromeOS devices.

2. Chromium

This is what you get when someone builds Chromium from the official repo without access to confidential source.

Source is confidential for various reasons, and some code that seems should be confidential actually isn't, like Android-for-ChromeOS integration, some of which is here: https://crsrc.org/c/chrome/browser/ash/arc/

3. Ungoogled Chrome?

This seems a contradiction of terms. Only Google can build Chrome, so they are not likely to e.g. set Bing as default or remove Google password manager support.

4. Ungoogled Chromium?

A particular project run by a particular team which forks Chromium and removes pro-Google behavior and settings.

5. Googled Chromium?

I don't know the original context of the use of this term, but possibly this just refers to official Chrome.

New comment by matvore in "macOS Packaging for Ungoogled-Chromium"

matvore — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:22:16 +0000

Chromium is merely Chrome with only the open source parts. Chromium components are still implemented in a Google-controlled repo. So it has Google-oriented features and defaults.

New comment by matvore in "Show HN: Original 8x16 ASCII Fixed Width Font: Classic Console Neue"

matvore — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:58:28 +0000

This is the default font of my browser-based terminal emulator, http://github.com/google/werm, along with a handful of other retro fonts (uses the int10h.org ttf's--converted to bitmaps--which I suspect has all the same characters as Neue)

New comment by matvore in "Show HN: Original 8x16 ASCII Fixed Width Font: Classic Console Neue"

matvore — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:30:00 +0000

IMO it still looks rather nostalgic. I do remember using cmd.exe or command.exe in Windows 95 and later and this being the default (but it would different if you had a different legacy code page set, IIRC). Of course cmd.exe just rendered the pixels as-is, no emulation or retro effects.

New comment by matvore in "How terminal works. Part 1: Xterm, user input (2021)"

matvore — Tue, 21 May 2024 06:16:11 +0000

Yes, let's take dozens of terminal emulator projects out of maintenance mode so app devs can individually and capriciously overload my shift and escape keys, because modern.

New comment by matvore in "Bitcoin Block 840000"

matvore — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 15:48:26 +0000

  > Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves.

Miners don't decide the consensus rules. The nodes validate blocks, and the miners generate them.

The halvening timing was coded a long time ago, and in order to change it, the nodes would need to adopt the new code by installing updated clients, and at that point, you have a hard fork, because there will be nodes on the old rules, either accidentally through not updating or intentionally through using a modified core distro, and you have the new rules' valid blocks is a disjoint set from the old rules'.

The new rules' block set being a subset of the old rules' is a strictening of the consensus rules. A strictening consensus scheme is a soft fork and can keep the network in one piece.

So, there is no real way for the miners to avoid the halvening without a hardfork and a great risk to the network.

New comment by matvore in "Show HN: Hancho – A simple and pleasant build system in ~500 lines of Python"

matvore — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 20:51:21 +0000

Some say hunky dory comes from "honcho doori" or 本町通り (personally I don't see how ki can come from cho)

New comment by matvore in "Useful Uses of cat"

matvore — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 22:52:33 +0000

I wish I knew awk as well as I know perl, since then I wouldn't need to hear recommendations for CPAN modules and spurious style prescriptions.

New comment by matvore in "Useful Uses of cat"

matvore — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:17:16 +0000

Perl has the advantage of only having one implementation, unlike sed and grep (e.g. BSD or GNU) and /bin/sh (can be one of many POSIX shells), so upgrading this pipeline to 100% perl is safer in some respects. The example in the article is light on details so it's hard to comment very deeply.

I have heard snarky Perl putdowns ad nauseam at work and on HN and may have regretted using it a handful of times but I can say worse or similar for other popular tools, languages...

New comment by matvore in "Useful Uses of cat"

matvore — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:03:15 +0000

If we're going to talk about unnecessary extra processes like useless cat, we should merge the head and grep commands into a sed, and possibly just merge everything into perl:


If perl is processing the file line-by-line then filtering lines by regex and stopping at line X is trivial, and you don't even need sed.



New comment by matvore in "Wasm3 entering a minimal maintenance phase"
matvore — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:15:58 +0000

  > To prove a point, I spent an hour reading his opensource project
  > and found several resource leaks

This is asking a lot, but if you enjoy that, I would be thrilled if you could do the same for some of my C projects - nusort and werm under github.com/matvore.



New comment by matvore in "Wasm3 entering a minimal maintenance phase"
matvore — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:12:06 +0000

  > To prove a point, I spent an hour reading his opensource project
  > and found several resource leaks

Sounds like some interesting case studies. Could you share some?
  > > if I find [… typo words(?) omitted … ] a leak in the code I
  > > usually refactor to make the correctness more obvious.

I should rewrite this as - if I find a leak that I accidentally introduced, I will refactor in the process of correcting it, to make the mistake harder to repeat and the correctness easier to confirm.There are non-language mechanisms that help code run safely, like Wasm, which is a sandbox. Also msan and asan should be used more.
Thinking that changing the language is the right way to fix all the problems you mentioned still seems like a premature assumption. The fact that 100% perfection is worth pursuing at all costs is theoretical and you could be losing things more valuable in the process - e.g. FFI bindings suck, and the added fragmentation in having so many languages in the craft is a pernicious cost with a multitude of aspects to it.