

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/
No relation to the sports channel.
This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/
Fascists lie.
As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.
Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.
First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.
Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”
By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.
Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.
Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.
I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.
If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.
If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.
“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”
Good catch! Typo. Fixed.
Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh
logging into each server and running grep
over the log files, to look for that weird error.
These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq
and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.
But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.
(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)
Whatever you do, don’t get in a time machine back to 1998 and become a Unix sysadmin.
(Though we didn’t have CL-PPCRE then. It’s really the best thing that ever happened to regex.)
The answer given in the spoiler tag is not quite correct!
According to the spoiler, this shouldn’t match “abab”, but it does.
This will match what the spoiler says: ^.?$|^((.)\2+?)\1+$
Any Perl-compatible regex can be parsed into a syntax tree using the Common Lisp package CL-PPCRE. So if you already know Common Lisp, you don’t need to learn regex syntax too!
So let’s put the original regex into CL-PPCRE’s parser. (Note, we have to add a backslash to escape the backslash in the string.) The parser will turn the regex notation into a nice pretty S-expression.
> (cl-ppcre:parse-string "^.?$|^(..+?)\\1+$")
(:ALTERNATION
(:SEQUENCE :START-ANCHOR (:GREEDY-REPETITION 0 1 :EVERYTHING) :END-ANCHOR)
(:SEQUENCE :START-ANCHOR
(:REGISTER
(:SEQUENCE :EVERYTHING (:NON-GREEDY-REPETITION 1 NIL :EVERYTHING)))
(:GREEDY-REPETITION 1 NIL (:BACK-REFERENCE 1)) :END-ANCHOR))
At which point we can tell it’s tricky because there’s a capturing register using a non-greedy repetition. (That’s the \1
and the +?
in the original.)
The top level is an alternation (the |
in the original) and the first branch is pretty simple: it’s just zero or one of any character.
The second branch is the fun one. It’s looking for two or more repetitions of the captured group, which is itself two or more characters. So, for instance, “aaaa”, or “abcabc”, or “abbaabba”, but not “aaaaa” or “abba”.
So strings that this matches will be of non-prime length: zero, one, or a multiple of two numbers 2 or greater.
But it is not true that it matches only “any character repeated a non-prime number of times” because it also matches composite-length sequences formed by repeating a string of different characters, like “abcabc”.
If we actually want what the spoiler says — only non-prime repetitions of a single character — then we need to use a second capturing register inside the first. This gives us:
^.?$|^((.)\2+?)\1+$
.
Specifically, this replaces (..+?)
with ((.)\2+?)
. The \2
matches the character captured by (.)
, so the whole regex now needs to see the same character throughout.
Try text.
Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.
(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)
In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.
Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that’s not how most traders behave, and it’s not how most traders’ payoffs work.
As the article mentions, Red Hat is IBM.
For what it’s worth, getting in the habit of making excuses for one’s use is part of alcoholism.
To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.