Navigation difficulties in the vicinity of Albuquerque, NM

They run ads. They actually have pretty reasonable ads policies, too.

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that was a PG-rated version of an old slogan: MAKE OUT, NOT WAR

How the hell do you wreck lentil soup that bad? Heck, there are lots of different cultures around the world that make tasty lentil soup. There’s German lentil soup with potato, carrot, and ham; there’s Indian dal in a range of flavors and colors; there’s Turkish Ezogelin soup with bulgur and paprika …

Mare-Ih-Joe-Wah-Nah

Necromancers imply the existence of necplatonics.

Baltimore is south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mason and Dixon surveyed the border between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

In the mid-19th century, Maryland was a slave state but did not secede and join the Confederacy. Enslaved Marylanders were, thus, not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, since that only targeted seceding states under Union Army occupation. Slavery in Maryland ended in 1864 with the adoption of a new state constitution.

Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

(Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)

The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).

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!

> (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))

If DNS is transiently down, the most common mail domains are still in local resolver cache. And if you’re parsing live user requests, that means the IP network itself is not in transient failure at the moment. So it takes a pretty narrow kind of failure to trigger a problem… And the outcome is the app tells the user to recheck their email address, they do, and they retry and it works.

If DNS is having a worse problem, it’s probably down for your mail server too, which means an email would at least sit in the outbound mail spool for a bit until DNS comes back. Meanwhile the user is wondering where their confirmation email is, because people expect email delivery in seconds these days.

So yeah … yay, tradeoffs!

(Confirmation emails are still important for closed-loop opt-in, to make sure the user isn’t signing someone else up for your marketing department’s spam, though.)

The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.

If you’re accepting email addresses as user input (e.g. from a web form), it might be nice to check that what’s to the right of the rightmost @ sign is a domain name with an MX or A record. That way, if a user enters a typo’d address, you have some chance of telling them that instead of handing an email to user#example.net or user@gmailc.om to your MTA.

But the validity of the local-part (left of the rightmost @) is up to the receiving server.

If someone sells something to you and then takes it back later, that is theft.

Any time you’re turning a string of input into something else, what you are doing is parsing.

Even if the word “parser” never appears in your code, the act of interpreting a string as structured data is parsing, and the code that does parsing is a parser.

Programmers write parsers quite a lot, and many of the parsers they write are ad-hoc, ill-specified, bug-ridden, and can’t tell you why your input didn’t parse right.

Writing a parser without realizing you’re writing a parser, usually leads to writing a bad parser. Bad parsers do things like accepting malformed input that causes security holes. When bad parsers do reject malformed input, they rarely emit useful error messages about why it’s malformed. Bad parsers are often written using regex and duct tape.

Try not to write bad parsers. If you need to parse something, consider writing a grammar and using a parser library. (If you’re very ambitious, try a parser combinator library.) But at least try to recall something about parsers you learned once way back in a CS class, before throwing regex at the problem and calling it a day.

(And now the word “parser” no longer makes sense, because of semantic satiation.)

By the way, please don’t write regex to try to validate email addresses. Seriously. There are libraries for that; some of them are even good. When people write their own regex to match email addresses, they do things like forget that the hyphen is a valid character in domain names.

“Hot Pockets are the American empanada.”
— Wendy Watson

Yay!

Removed by mod

It’s safe to look things up!

Looking up the name of a crime does not mean that you’re doing that crime.

If you look up “bank robbery” that doesn’t make you guilty of bank robbery. It doesn’t even mean you’re trying to rob a bank, or even want to rob a bank. You could want to know how bank robbers work. You could be interested in being a bank guard or security engineer. You could be thinking of writing a heist story. You could want to know how safe your money is in a bank: do they get robbed all the time, or not?

Please, folks, don’t be afraid to look up words. That’s how you learn stuff.

Fascists crash economies. Despite what the Marxists will tell you, fascism is terrible for capitalism. The only way fascists are ever able to show a profit is by stealing the gold out of people’s teeth.