The difference is that despite the fact that I will never use this, I am nonetheless here to celebrate the effort. What difference does it make if someone runs a marathon or takes an uber given they may arrive at the same location?
> Your accent is Dutch, my friend. I identified your accent based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Want to sound like a native English speaker?
I'm British; from Yorkshire.
When letting it know how it got it wrong there's no option more specific than "English - United Kingdom". That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents across the UK.
I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language.
There's a bunch of open source work in the robot combat space, but it doesn't have to be used for robot combat specifically. The Malenki Nano is a great example: a tiny, open source receiver with three speed controllers on a single board. It has two PWM channels for servos too so you could do a ton of interesting projects with it.
Not directly relevant to the post, but seems like a good place to share.
My team and I once took on a very tricky automation project. At the time we had a complex software deployment done about once per month that involved a team of about a dozen people showing up at 4am to do it while traffic was low.
The deployment involved many manual steps and coordination of everybody involved. The person leading each deployment followed the documented list of steps and got each person to do their bit at the right time; people to run database migrations, people to install RPMs on particular servers, people to test and verify functionality. Mistakes and missed steps were not uncommon.
The very first thing we did was take the documentation and write a Jenkins job to post each step into a Slack channel specifically for coordinating the deployments. Someone clicked "go" and each step was posted as a message in that channel with a 'done' button to be clicked when that step was done. Clicking the button caused the next step to be posted.
The next release we did used that instead of one person reading the steps out of confluence. Everyone involved in the release could always see what step we were at, and when it was their turn to do their bit. This helped ensure no steps were ever missed too.
Over the following months we chipped away at that job a bit at a time. We'd pick a step in the process and automate just that step, starting with the low-hanging fruit first. The Slack message for that step went from "click to confirm you've done it" to "click to do it", with the result posted once it was done; followed by the next step to perform.
It was a long process, but it allowed the rest of the business (and us!) to gradually gain confidence in the automation, and lowered the risk of the project dramatically. Once several steps had been automated and battle-tested we removed the 'click to do' bits in between and the whole release became a couple of clicks followed by the odd bit of manual QA.
A ~20 minute video on a particular number cropping up all over the place and not one mention of the frequency illusion / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon feels at least a little bit disingenuous.
I don't doubt that it crops up a lot when people are asked for a random number between 1 and 100 (especially if, as per the video, you ignore 1, 2, 7, 42, 69, 73, and 77, and sometimes 99 and 100), but it's pretty disappointing for a big channel based around science like Veritasium to not even mention that if you became obsessed with and went hunting for special properties of a different number between 1 and 100 you'd almost certainly find them.
I've worked on similar problems recently so I'm well aware of how difficult this is. An example I've given people is in automatically detecting base64-encoded data. It seems easy at first, but any four, eight, or twelve (etc) letter word is technically valid base64, so you need to decide if and how those things should be excluded.
It provided the wrong file-types for some files, so I cannot rely on its output to be correct.
If you wanted to, for example, use this tool to route different files to different format-specific handlers it would sometimes send files to the wrong handlers.
Here's[0] a .tgz file with 3 files in it that are misidentified by magika but correctly identified by the `file` utility: asp.html, vba.html, unknown.woff
These are files that were in one of my crawl datasets.
This looks cool. I ran this on some web crawl data I have locally, so: all files you'd find on regular websites; HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts etc.
It identified some simple HTML files (html, head, title, body, p tags and not much else) as "MS Visual Basic source (VBA)", "ASP source (code)", and "Generic text document" where the `file` utility correctly identified all such examples as "HTML document text".
Some woff and woff2 files it identified as "TrueType Font Data", others are "Unknown binary data (unknown)" with low confidence guesses ranging from FLAC audio to ISO 9660. Again, the `file` utility correctly identifies these files as "Web Open Font Format".
I like the idea, but the current implementation can't be relied on IMO; especially not for automation.
A minor pet peeve also: it doesn't seem to detect when its output is a pipe and strip the shell colour escapes resulting in `^[[1;37` and `^[[0;39m` wrapping every line if you pipe the output into a vim buffer or similar.
Just a silly aside with regards to the regex to extract domains from URLs, my little tool called unfurl [0] exists to solve that exact sort of problem :)
I strongly disagree that nearly 20% of the median household income (£31,400 [0]) is reasonable for a family's annual energy bill. Median income for the poorest 20% is £14,600 - the chances they could afford £6k a year on energy are slim.
Are you really suggesting that housing costs should average around £1400 per year (about one tenth the average annual rent [1]), but energy costs more than 4 times that amount are reasonable?
In a "Business and Communication Systems" exam at school I got the question "Explain how email works". Being the nerdy teen I was, I wrote about SMTP, MX records and that sort of thing.
If you were a bug bounty hunter and wanted to sign up for as many platforms as possible to maximise your potential scope, this list would be really useful.
Seems to me like useful content for hackers, which is what I would expect to see on Hacker News.
1. There isn't really a name for it, but it's a subset of JavaScript and the grammar is available here specified in EBNF, with some railroad diagrams to aid understanding: https://tomnomnom.github.io/gron/
2. That's pretty much exactly why I wrote the tool :)