Hacker News: z500

New comment by z500 in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

z500 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:53:00 +0000

Egyptian had it, and although it's Afroasiatic it's not Semitic, so it must have gone back further than that.

New comment by z500 in "Am I German or Autistic?"

z500 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:25:22 +0000

Doch.

New comment by z500 in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

z500 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:41:35 +0000

I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?

New comment by z500 in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

z500 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:54:13 +0000

It's like wiping your arse with silk.

New comment by z500 in "Should QA exist?"

z500 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:12:49 +0000

We don't have dedicated QA at my job, but personally I'm thrilled when a coworker finds a bug in my code. It's much more preferable to the customer finding it

New comment by z500 in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

z500 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:18:14 +0000

The only problem with that is the vast number of declensions. Sure they're not as wildly divergent as, say Latin or Ancient Greek, and there's no gender, but because of all the cases there's a lot of subtle variations to remember

New comment by z500 in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

z500 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:14:45 +0000

Like that scene in Hot Fuzz where they go out to talk to the farmer about cutting his neighbor's hedge, and they need a translator for the translator

New comment by z500 in "The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way to Keep Time"

z500 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:42:34 +0000

> A circadian clock must be self-sustained and internally driven, as the 20-hour cycle of the jellies’ spawning is. It must also be regulated by an environmental stimulus such as light; while the jellies’ spawning clock can run on a 20-hour cycle under persistent light in the lab, in nature it resets every day.

Sounds like that is what happens.

New comment by z500 in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

z500 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:35:47 +0000

It's not just media files. I'm forced to use Windows 11 on my work PC, and I had to disable the new shell extensions to make the file explorer usable again. It's noticeably faster without the new UI.

New comment by z500 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

z500 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:47:37 +0000

Any time I have to use the Internet without an ad blocker it's truly shocking how absolutely lousy everything is with ads

New comment by z500 in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

z500 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:50:29 +0000

Everyone uses grammar. What you're describing is elitism and elevating one particular dialect above all others.

New comment by z500 in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

z500 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:23:07 +0000

That's just centuries of change without updating spelling, a la Leicester or Worcester.

New comment by z500 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

z500 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:10:07 +0000

I've been taking a look at my sound change applier again. I've been trying to add syllable detection to it so that I can match directly on syllable boundaries instead of having to match on them explicitly in my sound change rules.

So I started by adding the ability to define syllable structure in the rules file, then I tried running the syllable rule through the same compiler I used for the regular sound change rules. It ended up being even slower than I was anticipating, so I decided to skip the NFA to DFA conversion step and wrote a backtracking NFA runner. This worked _okay_, but if the syllable rule isn't able to fully match a word it ends up backtracking forever, and I never managed to figure out how to fix that.

Last year I read a post about parser combinators and I decided to rewrite the syllable detector. I finished the rewrite and then ran into an error and gave up. This last weekend I revisited it and it turned out it was just user error again; my syllable definition rule had a mistake, but thankfully the error was a lot easier to fix with the new design. Now it emits a warning, and I'm rewriting my sample sound changes rules to use the new boundary markers and hammering out any issues, which are a lot less than I was afraid of.

I'm thinking about rewriting the sound change rule compiler to use the same combinators I did for the syllable rules, but it would be kind of a shame after all the work I put into the DFA compiler lol

https://github.com/marriola/Transmute

New comment by z500 in "We mourn our craft"

z500 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:00:08 +0000

You're right, this right here is the typical HN comment.

New comment by z500 in "Are we tired of social media? (2025)"

z500 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:26:21 +0000

> I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting.

Well, there was also narwhal bacon and Streetlamp Le Moose.

New comment by z500 in "GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene"

z500 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:30:16 +0000

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

New comment by z500 in "Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1"

z500 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:01:26 +0000

What terminology should we be using? Old Chinese reconstructions on Wiktionary always look so wildly divergent to me.

New comment by z500 in "Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years"

z500 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:32:44 +0000

I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う

New comment by z500 in "Rob Reiner has died"

z500 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:32:53 +0000

> Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source.

I don't read celebrity news, how should I know People's track record?

New comment by z500 in "Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science"

z500 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:09:24 +0000

It's a different kind of math from the continuous math they teach in school. Personally I found it a lot more intuitive. Like it wasn't the easiest thing ever, but I did better than I thought I would.