/dev/chat

Faheem Mitha

7:20 AM

@PrabhjotSingh But the stock then did a dive, for no apparent reason. But there is no understanding markets.

@StephenKitt Sanity is an illusion, life doubly so.

ilkkachu

11:57 AM

@StephenKitt "Endeavour to survive with an acceptable level of sanity loss."

@StephenKitt at least you're not in psychology/psychiatry. (Right?) Because then it would be weird.

Stephen Kitt

12:13 PM

@ilkkachu ha ha yes, it would be weird! Although many of the people I know in the medical world have a very dark sense of humour so it wouldn’t be all that surprising.

Jeff Schaller

12:24 PM

another thing you should not do in bash:

> what should i write code in bash script for c++ program if i am using compiler as Turbo C++.

I mean, cat > program.c++ maybe?

or as the quote goes, cat | cc

jesse_b

12:36 PM

> In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

Faheem Mitha

@jesse_b Yes, I've heard that before.

@jesse_b Personal experience?

jesse_b

@JeffSchaller I don't even understand that question

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Who uses Turbo C++?

Also, I don't understand the question. Perhaps it's too deep for me.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha 13 poor souls this year alone

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha lots of people in India apparently, it’s still used as a teaching tool in a bunch of courses

Faheem Mitha

12:42 PM

@JeffSchaller That's so sad.

@StephenKitt People were hoping free software would make big inroads in India.

jesse_b

I prefer supercharged C++

Jeff Schaller

1:09 PM

@jesse_b the greatest part of that question is that it's an Answer! :) cc @FaheemMitha. Lost souls everywhere.

jesse_b

2:09 PM

random is hard

ilkkachu

2:57 PM

6

😬

terdon

3:15 PM

@ilkkachu Nice! Well done! And just in time: they're sending out swag again.

Kusalananda

3:34 PM

@ilkkachu Well done you!

Jeff Schaller

4:26 PM

@ilkkachu congratulations!

jesse_b

4:39 PM

@ilkkachu quick, downvote 6 posts

Hey I just lost 12 rep...

αғsнιη

5:56 PM

@jesse_b 😂😂😂😂😂

myBigGod

no need he downvote 6 posts, you can downvote only 3 for his answers 😜😜😜 @ilkkachu can we? and yes, congratulations 🎊 for 100K, well done!

@terdon what does GTF file means?

@jesse_b thought @ilkkachu voted that 6 downvotes on your answers? 😂😂😂

@FaheemMitha I used 10years ago, do you need help or what?

Jeff Schaller

@αғsнιη guessing it's a biology thing -- bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/2242/… and bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/565/…

apparently Gene Transfer Format

jesse_b

gym, tan, food

Jeff Schaller

among other possibilities :)

why am I terrible at linking things?

αғsнιη

@JeffSchaller hmm, I wanted to say maybe that's Gene text file, but now I see what actually that is used for. thanks

Jeff Schaller

ahhh, google had "helpfully" inserted some (parenthetical) text

αғsнιη

6:06 PM

@JeffSchaller why? you are good enough at that

Jeff Schaller

I just can never keep Stack Exchange's idiosyncracies in my head about which format is valid where, so I had to fix that GTF link several times

αғsнιη

ahh, you have a copy of things then?

I mean you log the links?

Jeff Schaller

no, it's just hacking away at it until it looks right :)

αғsнιη

ahh, I see what you mean

Faheem Mitha

6:41 PM

@αғsнιη No, that was a rhetorical question.

Faheem Mitha

6:56 PM

But thank you for the offer.

αғsнιη

7:10 PM

@FaheemMitha OK : )

Kusalananda

9:58 PM

Again, another user working with a structured document format that doesn't want to (or "can't") install the specific tools needed to work with that format. What is it with these people specifically?

@ShelbyAnne You need to have a word with your managers about what tools you have to work with. If you were working in any other area and you were not given the correct tools to work with, you would be absolutely correct in calling your managers negligent. — Kusalananda ♦ 50 secs ago

Michael Homer

10:24 PM

I don't share your confidence that everybody can get additional software installed on machines they have to use and to be honest I find the aggressive individuated pursuit of that idea troubling

jesse_b

I dunno, I worked at a bank where it was incredibly hard to get new software approved but if you had a valid justification for it, it was certainly doable

I bet that in most of the cases where someone says "I can't install anything new" what they really mean is it's difficult to do and they don't want to

Andras Deak

"I didn't try so I couldn't" :P

that being said, there's usually an overwhelming amount of shit advice on the internet, so if you're a layperson and try to do something, it might not be that straightforward

Michael Homer

Or they're doing something once, today, and not in six weeks when the change request is processed

jesse_b

@MichaelHomer true

The thing with the bank too is that nothing goes right into prod. There is a dev, qa, staging, and prod environment. So if you are developing a new tool you would have to do it in dev and therefore you might as well get the process to install some new software going at that point anyway

to get new software approved though you needed to submit a form to the security team requesting it and I definitely worked with some people that treated that as "we can't install anything that isn't already approved"

Kusalananda

@MichaelHomer I just find it incredible that a company would be ok with a solution that would easily break and that would potentially be insecure, when it's easy to do the same thing correctly.

jesse_b

10:35 PM

@Kusalananda See that doesn't surprise me at all, I've worked for a few non tech focused companies before and I would never go back

Michael Homer

It may be incredible, but visiting that onto the powerless is unnecessary

Kusalananda

I also find it very strange that these sort of things always seems to crop up when it's about structured document formats. Never when it's formats used in bioinformatics or some other applied field.

Michael Homer

In any case, many XML documents are essentially line-oriented, like this one, so text tools are not inappropriate when they are known to be, or when the output is to a person

The bioinformatics people absolutely think that sed is the tool for gene processing

Kusalananda

It would be difficult, or at least cumbersome, to decode encoded entities with sed or any other tool that does not know about them natively.

Michael Homer

Indeed, entity processing is one good reason not to use XML-aware tools for processing untrusted data

Kusalananda

10:39 PM

@MichaelHomer But they are usually happy to switch to other tools once they get to know about them.

@MichaelHomer Well, you do you.

Michael Homer

Billion laughs attack

In computer security, a billion laughs attack is a type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack which is aimed at parsers of XML documents.It is also referred to as an XML bomb or as an exponential entity expansion attack. == Details == The example attack consists of defining 10 entities, each defined as consisting of 10 of the previous entity, with the document consisting of a single instance of the largest entity, which expands to one billion copies of the first entity. In the most frequently cited example, the first entity is the string "lol", hence the name "billion laughs". At the time thi...

Kusalananda

@MichaelHomer I don't really see that as enough of a reason to parse XML with sed.

And certainly not as a reason to advocate parsing XML with sed, or awk, or some other such tool.

Michael Homer

If you know what format the data is in, and you know it looks like that example, there's no reason not to use a line-oriented tool on it, not to parse it, but to extract some text from an identified line

If it's generic XML, you'll need to use another tool

Kusalananda

@MichaelHomer Then I'd expect someone to start suggesting using head, tail and cut instead of sed.

I mean, if you know what line it is and what column, you could treat the file as fixed-format.

It would also make answers here really unusable for anyone but the person asking.

Michael Homer

Yes, you could, and that would potentially be a fine answer too

I just don't like aggressively going after the peons trying to get by for process decisions that are out of their hands, and I don't think the expectation that getting new software installed for what's potentially a one-off is so readily doable is universally or even all that widely applicable

That's not to say that suggesting more generic tools isn't suitable, but the hectoring isn't necessarily constructive

Very many text-processing answers on this site are single-user, yes

jesse_b

10:48 PM

had to google hectoring

Kusalananda

@MichaelHomer I'm agreeing with you there. I'm just never going to upvote an answer using sed to parse XML, JSON or YAML when I aware of correct, safe, efficient and convinient ways of working with these formats.

It's like teaching how to cheat on tests.

jesse_b

If you aint cheating you aint trying

Kusalananda

@jesse_b It's easier to learn the stuff and apply it than it is to cheat, in the long run.

jesse_b

Michael Homer

Here is an XML parser in awk, which should satisfy all parties

ilkkachu

11:24 PM

@terdon thank you, thank you, @Kusalananda @JeffSchaller and everyone else too. Good heavens, I still have trouble dealing with feedback like that; I mean I just write random stuff on the internet and then somehow the imaginary points keep increasing... /o\ 😬

@jesse_b darn, didn't think of that... Could have downvoted 7 and fallen back to 99 999 :D I saw it was at 99 996 and took a screenshot of that, I thought it was cute enough :P

@jesse_b Depending on the era, Hector is either a Trojan prince and warrior, or a Finnish musician. So "hectoring" obviously means either warring, or playing diverse sorts of music...

@MichaelHomer great Scott, please tell me there's a dialect of XML where that isn't a thing? Or at least that XML parser libraries in general use have some way of limiting memory use or recursion level or branching factor or such...?

Andras Deak

11:39 PM

There's a safe extension of XML called JSON

Python stdlib xml has a nice red warning, and it links to third-party defusedxml for safety purposes

Michael Homer

11:54 PM

@AndrasDeak And an unsafe extension of JSON called YAML!

@ilkkachu There isn't a "dialect" as far as I know, but parsing libraries sometimes have the option to disable entity processing

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