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

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

> 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.

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

Definitely a lost art.

It's not all about WinAPI, it's about the approach.

Today's approach is "let me use electron for GUI and python backend for my bitcoin monitoring app because it's convenient for me". This results in bundling 1 GB of code for a trivial project which is a pain to use.

And the "legacy" approach is "let me use masm32 and winapi because it will be enough".

Those aren't mutually exclusive

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

Old Chinese reconstructions drive me crazy, or the fact that some scholars insist these are 99% correct instead of 'best guesses'

They are pretty well founded. You can read old rhyme dictionaries and see how the words evolved eg when borrowed by Japan at one time and then when borrowed again a couple of hundred years later. We can’t ever know 100% but it’s not idle speculation either.

Rhyme dictionaries describe Middle Chinese, not Old Chinese. Old Chinese involves much more guesswork.

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

This might be true. I’ve never thought about it deeply enough!

> 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?

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.

It's half dead bacteria, it's not supposed to smell like a bed of roses.

My personal collection got so big I started forgetting what was in it lol. I had to write a program to catalog everything and present a directory tree of genre combinations with FUSE