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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#91

Post by sd9 »

jychang wrote: post #58
xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

[flagged]

Of course the Epstein files are serious.

But not everybody has every single global development / news event IVed into their veins. Many of us just don’t keep updated on global news such that we may not be aware of an event that happened in the last 3 days.

Important news tends to get to me eventually. And there is usually nothing I can do about something personally anyway (at least within a short time horizon), so there is really very little value in trying to stay informed of the absolute latest developments. The signal to noise ratio is far too low, and it also induces a bunch of unnecessary anxiety and stress.

So yes, believe it or not very many people are unaware of this.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#92

Post by avemg »

SCdF wrote: post #53
xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

Presumably the Epstein files, but I'm not on twitter so not sure

Jeff Epstein? The New York financier?

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#93

Post by throwaway_61235 »

bayesnet wrote: post #74
lvncelot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

I know this is grumpy but this I’ve never liked this answer. It is a perfect encapsulation of the elitism in the SO community—if you’re new, your questions are closed and your answers are edited and downvoted. Meanwhile this is tolerated only because it’s posted by a member with high rep and username recognition.

As someone who used to write custom crawlers 20 years ago, I can confirm that regular expressions worked great. All my crawlers were custom designed for a page and the sites were mostly generated by some CMS and had consistent HTML. I don't remember having to do much bug fixes that were related to regular expression issues.

I don't suggest writing generic HTML parsers that works with any site, but for custom crawlers they work great.

Not to say that the tools available are the same now as 20 years ago. Today I would probably use puppeteer or some similar tool and query the DOM instead.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#94

Post by bobince »

kapep wrote: post #72
josefx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#95

Post by DangitBobby »

kapep wrote: post #72
josefx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

People have shared it here and on reddit a bunch of times because it's funny. I always found the pragmatic counter-answer about using regex and the comments about how brittle it is to parse XML properly assuming a specific structure to be much more useful.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#97

Post by 1718627440 »

dgan wrote: post #18
flexagoon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you post a comment on HN, the server inserts HTML tags into your input. Isn't that essentially the same thing?

No, because there is a clear separation between the content and the envelop. You wouldnt expect the post office to open your physical letters and write routing instructions to the postmen for delivery But I agree with sibling comment: it makes more sense when its called "encoding" instead of "inserting chars into original stream"

> You wouldnt expect the post office to open your physical letters and write routing instructions to the postmen for delivery

Digital communication is based on the postmen reading, transcribing and copying your letters. There is a reason why digital communication is treated differently then letters by the law and why the legally mandated secrecy for letters doesn't apply to emails.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#98

Post by jcynix »

tiborsaas wrote: post #20

> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?

"BITNET was a co-operative university computer network in the United States founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET

BITNET connected mainframes, had gateways to the Unix world and was still active in the 90s. And limited line lengths … some may remember SYSIN DD DATA … oh my goodness …

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=execution-systsi...

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#99

Post by jcynix »

Pinus wrote: post #29
tiborsaas wrote: post #20

> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to…

EBCDIC wasn't the problem, this was (part of) the problem:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=execution-systsi...

And BITNET …

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