Live data from Hacker News

A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

wired.com

21–30 of 77 posts

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#21
> Because the code took only the first letter, rather than the complete sound of the character, most regional speech variations did not matter.

This bit is really interesting. This is one of the motivations for an open source Chinese IME framework called RIME: https://rime.im There are configurations available for a number of dialects like Suzhou or Shanghai dialects so that users who prefer those languages don’t have to use Mandarin/putonghua pinyin.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#22
post #15
post #7

This wasn't just some random prisoner. This was a highly educated pioneer who studied in the West and was recruited in the West but chose to go help his country and was initially rewarded with a very prestigious and secure job and also deserved --to then get caught up in the hong weibing purges. This is the lesson of ideology -it goes astray fast. Lukily for him, he didn't end up beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi a…

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All that does is replace an interesting, specific, fresh topic with a shallow, predictable and boring one. I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous l…

Agree with other dissenters here that this was not a "generic ideological tangent", it was specific and relevant to the OP. And i found it interesting.

I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent", from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid the messes.

But this was not a generic tangent.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#23

It seems like the Hangul[0]/Korean writing system was retrofitted into Chinese with the challenge being to make the imprecise precise. Hangul was designed with the purpose of solving illiteracy and so the character forms were built simply from sound components. Doing it in reverse with a larger unstructured set of symbols is quite the feat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Korean is not a tonal language. But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All that does is replace an interesting, specific, fresh topic with a shallow, predictable and boring one. I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous l…

Agree with other dissenters here that this was not a "generic ideological tangent", it was specific and relevant to the OP. And i found it interesting. I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent", from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid the messes. But this was not a generic tangent.

Ok, you guys, I'll take the point and back off on this one. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#26
post #19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All that does is replace an interesting, specific, fresh topic with a shallow, predictable and boring one. I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi anonymous l…

I understand, but I will respectfully disagree. These events occurred during the Cultural Revolution and the article prefaces it with such. It's inextricable. It is true he was an innovator, no doubt, but for the politics at the time, many other minds would have been able to contribute to the progress of the country but were not "as lucky".

Ok, I can see the argument that I read it too generically and am happy to retreat this time. Thanks for the kind reply!

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#27
post #4

He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi. Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-l…

Contact list has become the standard - You've probably not even noticed it, but Android's "Gboard" has contacts permissions, and will use your contact's names and nicknames as well as e-mail addresses as suggestions.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#28
post #4

He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi. Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-l…

I don't think reading your contact list is that weird. iOS autocorrect in English clearly does it.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#29

It seems like the Hangul[0]/Korean writing system was retrofitted into Chinese with the challenge being to make the imprecise precise. Hangul was designed with the purpose of solving illiteracy and so the character forms were built simply from sound components. Doing it in reverse with a larger unstructured set of symbols is quite the feat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Korean is not a tonal language. But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it.

The same idea works tonemes distinguished by common graphical features as well.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#30
post #4

He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi. Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-l…

The problem with pinyin is that it's phonetic based and it's based on Mandarin. For large sub-populations of Chinese speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as intuitive -- although this is changing overtime as Mandarin becomes more dominant across China. A stroke/character based system preserves a key characteristic of Chinese, which is that speakers of different Chinese dialects can all use the same writing system. However, I think Pinyin is easier for Mandarin speakers (in PRC at least) and also non-native Chinese speakers who likely come from a phonetic based writing system and have learned Mandarin using Pinyin.
Post reply on HN