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15 days agoGood catch! Typo. Fixed.
No relation to the sports channel.
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023
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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
sshlogging into each server and runninggrepover 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
jqand 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!
Test case
According to the spoiler, this shouldn’t match “abab”, but it does.
Corrected regex
This will match what the spoiler says:
^.?$|^((.)\2+?)\1+$Full workup
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
\1and 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\2matches the character captured by(.), so the whole regex now needs to see the same character throughout.
314·18 days agoTry 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.
So you’re into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?
I dunno man, that’s still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won’t try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.
I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?
We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.
I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.
I’m just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.
(Also, I think you’ll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone’s reading matter.)
Just to be clear, are you saying that people should be investigated by the police for fictional stories that they read?
Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.
Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.
If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)
If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.
Once you learn about parser combinators, all other parsing looks pretty dopey.
In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.
Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.
“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”