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3

Mokubai

Awww

But I wanna!

Hi, how do I parse HTML with reg-- GAH why are you throwing tables at me?! Stop! STOP!!!! gets knocked unconscious

7

Mokubai

@allquixotic You just made my day ^_^

@allquixotic Best answer on SO, yes <3

8:27 PM

We need such an answer on SU.

/me goes and look at all the weirdo questions out there...

@TomWijsman Next shopping question that gets asked. Do it.

the SU equivalent would be "I am getting STOP 0x0000005B, please help!!!!!!"

I'm not entirely sure, while certainly an overasked question, it's not one in which the underlying premise is flawed...

good point, that's a bad example

OH

I KNOW

16

A: Convert mp3 to wav

No. This is an information-theoretic impossibility. MP3 is what is known as a "lossy" format, meaning that when you encode information into an MP3, some of it is lost (but, usually, not to the point that the listener can detect the loss in quality -- the goal of good lossy encoding is to lose in...

meant to link the question not the answer

although that answer probably exhibits severe flaws in its underlying premises as well; it's bound to happen when my IQ is dropped just by reading the question

At least he begins with asking if his premise is valid

r.tanner.f

8:32 PM

he's still asking to create something out of nothing...

"Can a .zip file be unpacked to recover the original file?"

good point; that's still a bad example! gee, this is hard in the SU world. We need a question where they ask how to do X, fully assuming, blatantly and arrogantly, that X is possible and advisable, and expecting us to tell them how to do it.

stupid/common questions are out; asking whether one's premise is valid is out; so we need... bad premise, querant assumes bad premise is valid; extrapolates from there to ask crazy questions

and the shopping rec is too easy to prey upon... almost boring in its frequent occurrence...

that's more about misunderstanding the rules/topicality of the site rather than misunderstanding the subject matter

true. I have this mental image of a crazy old dude with crossed eyes cackling to himself as he giggles, "But if I plug my USB mouse into the display port, I can use the laser as a projector!" now.

2

THAT would be a classic SU question

"How can I display files on my ceiling by plugging my DisplayPort projector into my USB hub?"

Now we just need something that's asked frequently enough that someone in the community would crack over seeing the same false premise presented over and over.

8:38 PM

hmm... kinda like Spectate Swamp Desktop Search, the way we've formulated this question

if you don't get the reference, google ... but I forewarn you, your head will explode upon realizing what "technology" this guy actually writes

and don't you DARE attempt to read his VB6 source code

r.tanner.f

ahhh VB6 ^_^ brings back good memories

of being 12.

A: Do SSD's really last 285 years?

0

Asking whether SSDs would really last 285 years is like asking whether you can drive 20000 miles with your car tires, there are a multitude of possibilities: You decide to go drive through nails or police street spikes after 10 miles, your tires fail. You crash into a wall after 1000 miles, now...

r.tanner.f

aww the link to the video is dead. what does he go on about?

Wait, I can make it 10 miles after police spikes?

That's plenty far to escape

Brb.

@DarthAndroid: Uhm, no, you're reading that sentence wrong. :D

Plugged in my blog post at the end... Muhahaha. ^^

8:44 PM

You know, one thing better than using regex to parse HTML is to use VBScript's built-in string functions... Mid, InStr, Replace, etc

Oh. I wish you would have said that before I ... um... Brb again.

@TomWijsman why do you put spaces between the list points?

because he wants to trip up SE's HTML parser which is based on regex

well it's probably based on goto and if but one can dream

@soandos I don't, those are just newlines.

If you want spaces, they are in front of the list points! :D

@TomWijsman, I meant newlines

8:50 PM

Because I can? :)

Oooh, War Games on bluray is out soon.

I need a special tool to remove my Otterbox Defender from my Droid Razr Maxx. Otterboxes are made of hard plastic; my fingernails are made of... something substantially softer on the hardness scale.

9:06 PM

Roll, little popcorn! ROLLLL!!!!! Head east and straight on til morning! (Anyone seen my popcorn under their desk? It's certainly not here. It's GONE.)

Nope, but I seem to have a spare power cord and keyboard under here.

I thought about our predicament of finding a terrible question to throw tables at and fly off the handle about. "Why is my wireless slow?"

the next time I see that, I'm posting an answer similar to the parsing html with regex guy

it's a question that's deceptively simple and looks valid at the surface, until you examine underneath the hood and realize that something is not quite right... in this case, it's basically the entire premise of WiFi running on an unlicensed band with a horrid standard chock full of proprietary vendor extension points and sharing spectrum with microwaves, vacuum cleaners, bluetooth, cordless phones, and CPUs with spread spectrum disabled or improperly configured

WiFi is the 2000s generation's equivalent of TV rabbit ears. damn things constantly have to be fiddled with to even semi-work

9:22 PM

@allquixotic the thing I don't understand is that I know that Perl 6 Regexes are turing complete, and there are a lot of people who like to do strange things, so why has no-one built an HTML parser in Regex?

why has no one written an entire operating system in perl 6 regex?

that sounds much harder

plus, writing and OS in <random language> is not a common question

HTML parsing in regex is

no, it's exactly the same difficulty. it makes you want to replace your eyeballs with samples of highly radioactive ununoctium.

it rather loses something if your eyeballs disappear in <1ms

its for the nerd cred, not the usuability of the thing

as does your understanding of the regex, since all regexes are write-only

9:26 PM

what stops them from being recursive?

and why do they ever need to write? why not just find some instance?

(they do a lot of reading in my experience...)

I mean to say that the code of the regexes are write-only

in other words you write them and then you can never understand them again

gotta go, filesystem permission debugging calls

have fun

9:47 PM

@soandos regular expressions can't parse input in the format of a^n b^n

catonmat.net/blog/recursive-regular-expressions

Or do you mean someone else?

And we have a new comment troll...