Setting CD pipelines for serverless functions and figuring out how to compile them and all of that work, just to get some code executed securely is tiresome. So, I developed Merebase as a solution to this problem. It's one JavaScript function that you can call in your front-end application and it handles the whole deployment process on our servers.
The security side is handled by giving users two keys, a private one and a public one. Functions are only compiled using the private key and can be executed safely in production using the public key. This ensures that no one will deploy malicious functions on your behalf. Furthermore, you can limit code execution to certain hosts.
You can also set environment variables through the dashboard, which are then loaded into your deployed functions. This means that you can access your database or any secured endpoints without having to set up a server.
I decided to keep Merebase in beta in order to tackle any security issues and freely change the API without disturbing users. Currently, it only supports Node.js with plans to add Go and Python.
What do you think? Are there any concerns that I need to address? Are there any features you'd want to see added before the public release?
I recently started working with Solid [1], it's like Svelte for React, and it's way faster than both of them. It has the same JSX syntax and very similar hooks to React. The only problem is that you will find yourself porting many React libraries since Solid is quite new and doesn't have as a big of a community.
Facebook's focus on unsupervised machine learning is a huge plus for under-resourced languages. They had a similar article for unsupervised machine translation[1] before, and I can see how it'll open doors for many African languages.
In all fairness, he does provide hints as to why regex will not work (namely: HTML is not a regular grammar).
Sure, it's somewhat obscured by the humorous rant, but it's not that bad an answer, either.
More to the point: I'm not sure I want to suck the humor out of everything. I agree that SO has problems, but humor and poetry are worthwhile things in otherewise serious places. It's all about quantity.
I disagree, I see it as saying "you don't know what you really want, but I can read your mind". It's disrespectful and not giving the benefit of the doubt.
>It's disrespectful and not giving the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, a good number of users who post questions on StackOverflow have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Browsing the site, you will occasionally come across questions which are the tech equivalent of asking "Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?"
Frame challenges are a necessary part of learning, so they belong on a Q&A site. If a user doesn't want their problem to be challenged, the onus is on them to clarify in the question why their particular approach is the necessary one. It's only possible to respond with alternative solutions when the problem is not specified enough.
> Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?
Note that this is a legitimate technique in UK sockets.
The live and neutral pins have a little gate over them that is retracted when you insert the earth pin, so you need to first stick a screwdriver into the earth pin in order to get your fingers into the live pin.
I can't parse if this is humour or a mistake. Putting your fingers on the live pin is not a great idea, trying this to get an euro 15 plug into an UK socket, also not great but in a different category.
Well, there's also a mains tester screwdriver which is a legit tool that you stick into a socket and also participate in the electrict current loop for the light on it to light up.
I'm not so sure benefit of the doubt must be earned. More like, any participant in a discussion forum must show it when answering, and do proper research before asking anything. If all questions are good questions, there's no problem. But, as you say, they really aren't. I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.
Are we trying to answer the question or to solve the problem?
Asking on SO is itself research. It is good to review the existing literature before taking contributors time, of course, but if the problem is not solved in the existing literature, then perhaps the framing issue isn't addressed by the existing literature either. In that case how could the learner know the best way to frame the problem in advance?
> I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.
This precludes the possibility that some contributors might want to address the framing problem, whereas others might want to address the specific question as asked. They may have different opinions about whether it is framed wrong at all. It also means the OP is losing karma or getting penalized for no fault of their own.
The problem is, the answers are useful to more than just the original questioner. Sure, the questioner may be doing things vastly wrong - but the people who land on that question's page via search may have legitimate reasons for doing things a certain way.
The silent majority of viewers will benefit from an answer that does both of (1) explaining why the answer is probably not what is wanted, and (2) answering the initial question _as written_ anyway, for future viewers.
Then those other viewers will either benefit in the same way from the frame challenge as a learning experience, or they will have a sufficiently-specific problem that they can ask their own questions with more justification for taking a specific approach.
Answering the question as written has the risk that any solution will be blindly applied without appreciating why the approach itself should be avoided. This is especially true for those users who see SO as a "write my code" site, and copy-paste anything in backticks.
Strongly disagree. The point of SO is for experts to answer questions. They've learned things the hard way and would like to help others do better. They're not being paid. As such, telling the questioner that their whole approach is wrong is appropriate and even preferable.
From what I've heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky had different views on this and Spolsky's more tolerant, "no such thing as a stupid question" approach won out within the company, but is less popular among the people who write answers.
I don't think it is disrespectful to suggest someone is falling victim to the XY problem.
Actually I think it is a common and expected outcome that when investigating a new problem, we often get stuck in "XY problem" traps while researching the solution.
I very much value any feedback that suggests I should rethink the entire problem with a simpler model, because without experience it's hard to know what the simplest models are.
Absolutely agree. In my experience this is one of the more valuable features of asking someone to discuss a problem I'm mired in. Because they haven't been looking under every rock and studying the bark of every tree like I have, they're very likely to quickly see when I've wandered into entirely the wrong part of the forest.
unfortunately sometimes people who ask questions are really junior, and need to be told they are going to have an unpleasant surprise if they go down the path they are planning on going.
sometimes people who ask questions know the pitfalls but don't clarify that they know adequately because they are pressed for time. in this case those people unfortunately run the risk of being talked down to and they should accept that.
on the other hand if they have clarified adequately that they know what they're doing and they still want to do something that might seem weird then I agree it is disrespectful. Which is a thing you see often enough on StackOverflow to be notable.
Maybe so, but what about the non-junior person who needs to do something weird for an actual valid reason and stumbles on the refusal to answer the question years later? StackOverflow answers aren’t just for the original asker.
I think in that case - the new person should probably post a new question.
The point is that the original question - as framed - was better served by saying "if you go back a step and reexamine your assumptions, you'll find there is a better path to your intended goal".
The new person has a different goal or a different set of constraints.
Because asking new questions and getting them closed as duplicate because they sound vaguely similar to an existing question is sooo helpful an experience...
Yeah - but I'm just playing with hypothetical ideal cases here. "Annoying flawed habits of Stack Overflow moderators" isn't something that's on my list of things I'm thinking about. ;-)
EDIT - which got me thinking. Maybe the "correct" thing to do is answer the original question as asked but gently point out to the person asking it that there is probably a better solution for them if only they had asked a different question.
The original question still stands and has an answer useful for other people. The original questioner has the opportunity to learn and ask the question they should have asked in the first place.
It's going to be annoying for someone - so it should at least be the person that kicked things off in the first place.
How do you respectful tell someone you think they are mistaken? I'd rather not be pussyfooted around by someone if I'm in the role of "person who has asked a question based on a faulty assumption". Don't be rude but don't avoid trying to answer truthfully to the best of your ability.
Yes, but I wish people who like to assume and answer saying so would still answer the question they think is wrong. Context matters and I don't think you can determine that with certainly nearly as often as some people online like to think.
In this case the answer is correct given the parameters of the question: There is no way to have a regex that only matches the things which OP wants to match, but not any of the things OP doesn't want to match.
Given a specific situation, like a particular page or something, sure, regexes are still a possibility for solving the problem. The 2nd highest answer on the page details exactly that. So what is the problem? Is every single contributer obligated to artificially entertain the OP's preconceptions before giving the advice which they believe actually helps best? For example, if I were knowledgeable about XML but not regex, should I just not contribute in such a situation?
Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?" Or do avoid going onto irrelevant tangents that get you labeled as crazy and just tell them the current time?
What time is it isn’t an invalid question. “How do I make my hamster grow wings and fly?” is. How to parse HTML with a RegEx is an in-between. For a specialized case, why not? Answer that question, then provide a counter example to show how it will be very fragile, then explain the theory, then show a better way. IME that tends to work better to teach someone what you think they should know.
>Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?"
Maybe you're (inadvertently) making a caricature by using a simple "what time is it?" question but many user questions are under-specified.
Because of that, Stackoverflow answerers in particular do go into the extra complexities because it's part of its editorial DNA to restate the q&a so it's a high-quality community knowledgebase instead of just answering the direct question as stated. I tried to explain this hard-to-grasp nuance previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438
But sometimes, this X-Y problem editorializing mechanism gets so enthusiastic that it can detract from a correct answer. Here's a famous example of a string bytes extraction question with smart people arguing with the correct answers from user541686 (was Mehrdad) and Michael Buen:
The meta layer issue is that the question is underspecified which causes 2 sides with very intelligent people arguing whether or not it's an X-Y problem!
I think the top answer in your example is highly misleading and deserves to have the caveats highlighted more clearly even though it's not "wrong". It is saying, "you don't need to worry about encoding", but really the point it is proving is "if you just use ONLY toCharArray and BlockCopy on ONLY one system and framework version then you can be sure they always use the same encoding as one another, so in that situation you don't need to worry".
So, the solution works, but only in specific situations which are not clearly explained and might be totally unrelated from OP's situation, and furthermore it doesn't really address the second part of OP's question "why take encoding into consideration?" I wouldn't necessarily call the problems with that answer just "XY pushback".
Only when you know enough about the person's context to be able to tell them what question they should be asking instead.
If you don't have that context, then the correct thing to do is to ask for more information, or say, "did you consider this", or find some other way to come up with a constructive response. You don't just assume you know what the person really wants to do and then try to mainsplain it to them.
If the question were about full validated parsing of HTML with a regex, then I'd agree that "You can't do that" might be part of a valid answer. But finding tags is not doing a full validating parse.
Note that the set of valid C programs is not a context-free language. Yet it's common to use a context free-based approach to parsing. You just add additional code to handle the context-sensitive aspects (such as a symbol table).
I find this type of answer infinitely more paletable than "your question is answered here" or "comments are not for extended discussion, this conversation has been moved to chat"
Yes, I have been down-voted and scolded for answering a question as literally described simply because others would rather assume the ignorance of the questioner. Yes I know people will often ask a question due to not understanding what they are doing, but when 10 other people have already responded with "don't do it that way!" I think it can be useful to actually answer the question as stated (if possible).
Not true. The questioner has not provided anywhere near enough detail to determine if regular expressions are sufficient. For example: should <br> match, or not? Its semantics are identical to <br />. To determine if regular expressions are enough, you would need to know exactly what markup you’re dealing with, and that has not been provided.
Yeah. I guess in other parts of this discussion I'm arguing for always probing hidden assumptions and missing background whilst here I'm saying "let's interpret the question in the most charitable way possible".
Plus - Stack Overflow is about trying to generalize any given question to maximize it's wider usefulness.
> Plus - Stack Overflow is about trying to generalize any given question to maximize it's wider usefulness.
Since when? You don't get extra points if you write stuff that doesn't concern OP's problem. Most SO problems don't get viral and get lots of upvotes from other people. From a game theory perspective, it doesn't make sense to add more to an answer than to make it the accepted one.
If you have slightly different constraints you are encouraged to open another question. Discussions are frowned upon and sometimes even interrupted by admins so you can't discuss if your situation is different from OP's situation and so could warrant a different answer.
This has always been the intent of Stack Overflow, from its very earliest days. One of the stock reasons for closing a question used to be “too specific—this question is unlikely to help anyone else” (or words to that effect), though that has been removed now (I think because it upset too many people who took its blunt message the wrong way). People have always been nudged towards adjusting questions so that they’ll be generally useful.
Discussions on questions are routinely about unrelated or not-closely-related matters, and quite apart from that Stack Overflow wants to be a Q&A platform, not a discussion platform.
Native Hebrew speaker here; this looks nothing at all like Hebrew, except for some characters having prominent ascenders and descenders that look drawn right to left.
Apparently people have had success [1] with Wine, but that's presumably not ideal. It does have some customizability but probably not as much as you're looking for.
I used to use TGS excessively and TabsOutliner has completely changed my workflow. Now I just sort tabs into categories and then kill the entire window until I am in that context.
I personally use OneTab but it's worth noting that in the GH issue on TheGreatSuspender there's some ongoing (and mostly unsubstantiated, in this thread) concerns about OneTab's data collection and management[0].
It is "mostly unsubstantiated" because the thread makes multiple claims without proof. The bookmark pages on Google provide some evidence for one of the claims but it is, by no means, proof of the claim's validity.
I've been using it for the last few weeks, and it's been pretty good so far. It doesn't suspend music tabs when they're not playing (which TGS did automatically), but nothing much to complain about.
