> "every third thursday"
... nice. Other folks are beating ya up based on their first try but mine was exactly correct!
Adding to my cron tools bookmarks - cool stuff.
Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite cron “feature” is that the day of week field operates acts as an “or” and not an “and”. This will come as an unpleasant surprise when you try to schedule something to run on, say, the first Friday of the month. There are workarounds, mostly involving backticked date invocations, but they’re hard to both write and read.
Are you sure? The man page for Vixie cron at least doesn't imply that and it's not what I remember, and the web page this links to also doesn't think that's true. So "First Friday of the month at midnight" gives "0 0 1-7 * 5".
Aside from the manpage, you can also check ones you're unsure of on crontab.guru - https://crontab.guru/#0_0_1-7_*_5
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
"spaghetti": “At 12:00 AM, between day 8 and 14 of the month, only in January through April and June through December”
That's a good one. BTW, it's case sensitive: "on independence day": “At 12:00 AM, only on Thursday, only in July” (0 0 * 7 4) "On Independence Day": “At 12:00 AM, on day 4 of the month, only in July” (0 0 4 7 *)
Hey, it understood Cinco de Mayo: 0 0 5 5 *
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#54Really liked, "Last Monday of every month except August". I tried other hard ones and got rate limited :(
I tried "whenever it feels good" and it returned:
"0 0 * * * *" (Every hour)
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#55Oh, this is just cool. Nice work.
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of the "English to regular expressions" that was on here a few weeks back, and got it right about 10% of the time. We have created structured, unambiguous domain languages for a reason. Converting from English is ambiguous at best, impossible at worst.
But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? So it is possible, although humans make mistakes, too. Maybe fewer, or different mistakes than "AI", but still, fundamentally it's the same. Maybe an alternative to natural language processing could be pattern recognition from a number of user supplied examples, and its e…
> But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job?
No, I wouldn't say so. Even if the programmer is given the schedule from someone else (in English), they have additional context and can ask clarifying questions that this AI doesn't have.
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#57A fun game is to put an emoji or two in the prompt and see what comes out :)
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#58This was inspired by previous work using GPT-3 to generate regex. It uses the new codex model and works surprisingly well. Let me know if you get any interesting results!
Hey, awesome work! What are the steps I need to take to build something similar, let's say to generate awk or sed processors/filters using plain english?
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? So it is possible, although humans make mistakes, too. Maybe fewer, or different mistakes than "AI", but still, fundamentally it's the same. Maybe an alternative to natural language processing could be pattern recognition from a number of user supplied examples, and its e…
> But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? No, I wouldn't say so. Even if the programmer is given the schedule from someone else (in English), they have additional context and can ask clarifying questions that this AI doesn't have.
That's my point. Without additional context, humans would make the same mistakes. Having all information that humans have, this AI could perform at human level.
One of the hardest aspects of software development is communicating with the customer, for humans and AI alike. But a translation from layman English to machine code has to happen, at some point.
Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? No, I wouldn't say so. Even if the programmer is given the schedule from someone else (in English), they have additional context and can ask clarifying questions that this AI doesn't have.
That's my point. Without additional context, humans would make the same mistakes. Having all information that humans have, this AI could perform at human level. One of the hardest aspects of software development is communicating with the customer, for humans and AI alike. But a translation from layman English to machine code has to happen, at some point.
You are describing it as if the developer writing the regex/cron has no prior involvement with the app, project, or company and is brought on to transcribe a specification from English to code and nothing else. In that situation an AI-driven translator app makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't match reality.
The software developer has a lot of context with the app and project that cannot be easily passed into the translator (whether AI or human). Going from that state of knowledge to the code by an intermediate, compressed, lossy, ambiguous step of natural language is necessarily inefficient. Whether that translator is operating at human level or not is not the point, going through English is the problem.