dictomaton

Finite state dictionaries in Java

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13Mentions

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133GitHub stars

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Finite state dictionaries in Java

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.

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HN mentions by year13 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-05-05 10:18:03 UTC to 2023-09-11 18:28:39 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2013	2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	4
2014	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	5
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

microtonal·Nov 19, 2013

Or store the lexicon in a determinisitic acyclic finite state automaton. E.g. (shameless plug): https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton Though, having implemented a language guesser myself, it's only an issue with very short texts (a few words). On longer texts models based on character n-grams achieve very high accuracies.

In Show HN: Language detection as a service

microtonal·Aug 13, 2013

And my implementation in Java :): https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton

In frak: Transform collections of strings into regular expressions

microtonal·Aug 13, 2013

Especially considering that there are incremental algorithms for constructing the minimized DFA. For instance, I use one such algorithm in my library that (among other things) uses a minimized DFA to store String sets in Java: https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton (It also supports perfect hashing automata and Levenshtein automata.)

In frak: Transform collections of strings into regular expressions

microtonal·May 5, 2013

Sure, in Java you don't have to deal with GADTs. But you do have to deal with the fact that people think functions are dark magic and expect you to extend an abstract class instead. The amount of type wizardry that Haskell permits is far larger than Java and C++ teaches us that in practice you have to expect all possible combinations language features that are allowed. A random Java library will have a far more understandable API than a random Haskell package, since there are not so many permutations of language features possible. If everybody stuck to just Haskell 98, things would be far simpler. Besides, have you ever tried to use the equivalent of Parsec or QuickCheck in Java? As a matter of fact, I just committed QuickCheck-like unit tests five minutes ago [1] :): https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton/commit/7aaa89aae68524... I write

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such tests in Java quite often. Of course, you don't have the nice combinators of QuickCheck :). I am not saying that Haskell isn't more powerful it is. But it comes at a cost: many packages come with an up-front learning cost, Haskell is hard to optimize compared to Java or C, etc. The Java APIs are predictable, run-time performance is predictable (in the sense that it easy to profile and optimize) and the ecosystem is boring and predictable. These are some of reasons that Java is popular (besides having a steward with deep pockets). ([1] Ps. yes, I know there is a very obvious optimization optimization possible that commit, it's a development branch.)

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