What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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“secret” and “secrete”are both derived from a word meaning “to separate, set apart.” (edit to be very clear: I mean "secrete" as in "ooze"!, not merely as a verb form of "secret")

A common Mandarin word for “secret” is 密 mì, and there is also a word for “secrete” 泌 mì (note the shared 必 phonetic component in the characters, indicating they were also pronounced very similarly thousands of years ago; the dots on the left side of 泌 mean water whereas in 密, the phonetic component is enclosed between a roof and a mountain).

I find it fascinating when completely unrelated languages converge on the same subtly interwoven concepts.

also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.

Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:

- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"

- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)

- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.

- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.

So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)

But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.

Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.

... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!

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インド人のAI slopによってインターネットが台無しになっているみたいな言説が今あきらかにあって、でもそれはたぶん3個ぐらいの意味で問題のある話であって、まず単純にヘイトであること、AI slopでインターネットを台無しにしているのはインド人に限られないこと、そして最後にAIがないころからインターネットは彼等によって台無しにされていただろう、ということ

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2025年12月20日(土)
貸切列車 "Moonlight Symphony VI"
なんとご縁がありまして乗車させていただきました。

参加者の皆様、企画や運行に携わった皆様、
素敵な夜行をありがとうございました。

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저는
아예 개연성을 포기하고 "우리 맘대로 할 거임. 대신 개쩌는 이야기를 들려줄게" 라고 하거나 (ex. 워해머 40k)
반대로 개연성을 끝까지 잡아서 '진짜 있을 법한 일'을 만들거나 (ex. 톨킨)
하는 편을 좋아하고

이 둘 사이에 애매한 것들을 다 싫어하는 편... "우리 사실적임" 이라고 어필하면서 사실 사실적이지 않은 것들을 개극혐하는 편... 예를들면 아바타....

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【BUILT-IN PRO 電器專門店特約】英國一隻名為Flossie的家貓,於12月29日踏入30歲,繼續保持健在貓隻中最長壽紀錄。根據《Guinness World Records》資料,她早在2022年已憑26歲316日成為「在世最長壽貓隻」,相當於人類約120歲,如今紀錄再被延長。

Flossie於1995年出生,是一隻英國家短毛玳瑁貓,幼時曾生活於英格蘭Merseyside一個野生貓群之中,後被醫院職員救起收養。近年因原主人先後離世,她被轉介至慈善機構Cats Protection,最終由現任主人Vicki Green收養,並在倫敦近郊Orpington展開「晚年新生活」。
#全球最年長在世貓貓

May be an image of magazine, newspaper and text that says '全球最年長在世貓貓 KN 慶祝30歲生日 主人: 從沒想過 與世界冠軍同居 CLan ಯೇರೇిೇ ま.. 있습는 ms =0 Lsi hristm Sal BUILT-IN PRO SIEMENS F BOSCH LG Whirlpool SAMSUNG 大折日 12月17日-12431日 12円17日 129313 低至1折理 低至 低至1折 全場過千件產品'
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잠깐...오늘 12월 31일이라고?.....안돼... 달기로 했던 후기 리뷰 커미션 붐업올 내년으로 미룰순없어 안돼...안돼 그만처미뤄야해 내년까지 미룬사람이된다고

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저는
아예 개연성을 포기하고 "우리 맘대로 할 거임. 대신 개쩌는 이야기를 들려줄게" 라고 하거나 (ex. 워해머 40k)
반대로 개연성을 끝까지 잡아서 '진짜 있을 법한 일'을 만들거나 (ex. 톨킨)
하는 편을 좋아하고

이 둘 사이에 애매한 것들을 다 싫어하는 편... "우리 사실적임" 이라고 어필하면서 사실 사실적이지 않은 것들을 개극혐하는 편... 예를들면 아바타....

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┏━━┓┏━━┓┏━━┓┏┓┏┓┏━━┓┃┗━┓
┗━┓┃┃┏┓┃┗━┓┃┃┃┃┃┃┏━┛┃┏┓┃
┏━┛┃┃┃┃┃┏━┛┃┃┗┛┃┃┗━┓┃┗┛┃
┃┏━┛┃┃┃┃┃┏━┛┗━┓┃┗━┓┃┗━━┛
┃┗━┓┃┗┛┃┃┗━┓  ┃┃┏━┛┃
┗━━┛┗━━┛┗━━┛  ┗┛┗━━┛
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TIL that when a class attribute is annotated as `typing.Final`, `mypy` will treat it as an error if an instance attribute of the same name is assigned at some point:

«There can be at most one final declaration per module or class for a given attribute. There can’t be separate class-level and instance-level constants with the same name.»

mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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판타지의 마법이라는 것이 관측가능성과 재현성을 가진다면 과학적 방법론을 도입할 수 있어요

다시 말해 온갖 실험과 가설과 추론이 난립하는 자연과학의 영역으로 끌어내릴 수 있다는 것이지요
정말로 두근거리지 않나요?

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판타지의 마법이라는 것이 관측가능성과 재현성을 가진다면 과학적 방법론을 도입할 수 있어요

다시 말해 온갖 실험과 가설과 추론이 난립하는 자연과학의 영역으로 끌어내릴 수 있다는 것이지요
정말로 두근거리지 않나요?

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