I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
Nowadays heavily discouraged, and would probably be deleted as unconstructive; that one still exists because of historical significance/was grandfathered in.
To be fair it is unconstructive. If you read the question carefully, it is clear is can be solved using a regex because it is about identifying tokens, not about parsing them into a tree. Parsers typically use regexes for the tokenization stage - indeed, what else would you use?
The answers are ridiculing the OP for asking a totally reasonable question.
Regexes are indeed a perfectly fine answer when you have the guarantee no corner cases will show up in the content, and I did and still do use regexes to quickly extract data form well-known HTML/XML as a quick hack (curl|grep). Otherwise you're much better served by using a parser and select nodes with xpath/css.
The question doesn't specify if the file to match against is unique/one-shot or if it's a general case. Without that info you can largely assume it has to handle any input. The regex will get unwieldy since you have to account for corner cases like:
The second line is not a corner case, that is simply not legal XHTML. You cannot have an unescaped < in an attribute value. You will need to take comments (and DTD's and CData) into consideration of course, but you can do that in a regex.
In any case, how would you use xpath or CSS to identity self-closing tags? They operate on the parsed tree, not on the token level, and the question is about identifying specific tokens.
Maybe not very constructive, but I think it's a technically fair answer given the question. The person asking is not intending to match individual tokens one by one to feed into a parser, but simply to use a regular expression to extract all instances of a set of opening tags in a whole document. The trivial solution he proposes, while perfectly sufficient for some subset of documents, quickly breaks in the general case when you consider comments and CDATA sections. For that you need to maintain an understanding of the whole document.
That said, this answer frequently gets linked in discussions even where using regular expressions is an entirely valid approach.
How is it technically fair? The answer is objectively wrong - you can tokenize XHTML using regexes. You cannot use a parser, since a parser does not emit tokens but emit the element tree and abstracts away syntactic details like the difference between <x></x> and <x />.
A technically fair answer would be to point out that the regex would have to take other tokens like comments, CData etc. into consideration, so it is more like a five-line regex than a one-line regex. If someone recommended a XHTML tokenizer or other tool which could solve the OP's task, that would also be a great answer.
> How is it technically fair? The answer is objectively wrong - you can tokenize XHTML using regexes.
Yes, but that you can tokenize XHTML using regular expressions is not the same thing as being able to use a single regular expression to extract XHTML tokens. Remember that context free languages are a superset of regular expressions. I don't personally know enough about the XHTML syntax to say off the bat whether the syntax can be described with a regular expression, but generally a recursive definition of valid syntax is not possible to express with regular expressions.
> You cannot use a parser, since a parser does not emit tokens but emit the element tree and abstracts away syntactic details like the difference between <x></x> and <x />.
You can use a parser, just not any XHTML parser. The parser would need to be constructed with the objectives in mind, to parse into a data structure that doesn't abstract these details away.
That said, maybe an even simpler solution exists, such as to use several regular expressions to first remove comment and CDATA before matching. I'm not immediately aware of any other cases that would cause problems for the trivial match suggested in the question post.
I think you're missing the point - if anything the reasons you gave would be cause for it to be downvoted, because it's still an anwer, just a bad one. The reason it would be deleted as unconstructive is the creativity, which is discouraged in the push for professionalism.
But it is not downvoted. It is heavily upvoted despite being wrong and misleading. Because it is fun and snarky so lots of people upvote it regardless whether they even understand the issue or not.
>Parsers typically use regexes for the tokenization stage - indeed, what else would you use?
This is completely wrong. One can also just write their own tokenizer reading one character at a time with a state machine. It's trivial compared to the complexity of the rest of the parser.
A standard state machine with no memory (other than the current state) is equivalent in expressivity to regexes (in fact regexes with back-references are more expressive); even if the state machine is non-deterministic.
The question is not about parsing. It is about tokenizing XHTML. So you are suggesting to write a hand-rolled tokenizer instead of using regexes for tokenization? Why is that better? That is exactly the kind of task regexes excel at.
Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.
What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.
I was ridiculed for posting a query about a C++ concept I was trying to learn from one of the authoritative books on the subject - I just couldn't 'get' the syntax being explained.
I persevered and then someone chimed in that, hey, there was a typo in the book's example!
For a discussion group I might agree, but SO is supposed to be a repository of legitimate questions and their legitimate answers, not a place for general banter.
It's kind of the same as here on HN. If unconstructive comments weren't discouraged here, the comments section here would look like on Reddit.
If unconstructive answers weren't discouraged on SO, I'm quite sure the more popular questions would be full of flippant half-answers trying to be funny or people posting memes to grab attention.
Totally agreed. Weird, as always, persists in small communities. Not large. Weird is still alive and kicking, but it's just as hard as ever to find, and e.g. Google prioritizes large (normal) results over small (weird) so the normal tools are unlikely to find them without effort.
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.
I don't think that posting tiny communities into a large one is a good idea. In my experience exposure to mainstream usually ends up with the community flooded with people who eventually somehow make the original members leave for one reason or another, leading to a slow (years) but painful death of said community.
I've seen it happen here actually. Occasionally a thread will come up on Reddit of people looking for alternatives and HN inevitably gets mentioned. Then there's a flood of people posting idiotic comments and memes on the posts here.
Thankfully due to the efforts of the longer-standing community this stuff ends up languishing at the bottom of the comment threads but it seems like it's only a matter of time. It's certainly become a lot more prevalent over the course of the 5 years that I've been here.
It's sort of a social web of trust, similar to HN/Reddit but about as different from those two as HN/Reddit are from each other. The way the site works is interesting: There is no moderation or downvoting, but if you do something lame, you'll be filtered out, at which point that person won't see anything you post anymore. In practice, it works very well. The content on it seems to be an order of magnitude more intelligent and interesting than HN or Reddit, but lacking in volume and discussion because there are so few people.
I am not worried about it being flooded with noise because of the way it is set up. It lends itself well to creating isolated subcommunities, and tends to reward thoughfulness rather than lowest common denominator content. When the Reddit community was looking for alternatives several years ago, a lot of people ended up at Hubski. But Hubski never became vile like a lot of other alternatives ended up.
Posts are tagged, and you follow tags and people you are interested in. It's possible to follow only people. When they post something or vote on something, it shows up in your feed. The frontpage when not logged in is fairly boring: it's all the stories voted above a certain amount.
If you go there, be nice. Talk to people like they're real people.
I will thank you for the link, since I would not have seen this conmment:
"kleinbl00 · 29 days ago · link ·
Ahhh, the busker economy. I have an opinion about this, much to the astonishment of the assembled intelligentsia.
Patreon, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, the lot of them are basically ePaydayLoans. They charge an absurd amount for basically acting as a payments processor. We've developed a Kabuki whereby the supplicant does the Kickstarter Dance so that their friends and relatives are cajoled into giving you money through the sheen of legitimacy. It also allows the supplicant to disregard the nonmonetary help of any and all comers - no less than four asshole directors I've worked with have turned down my assistance as a creative in favor of begging for my money so they can "afford" to do the work themselves.
And really - who uses these services? Generally people who do not have a product viable enough to stand up on its own. I really enjoy John Dolan's commentary but no, I'm not going to pay $5 per podcast to hear him ramble. 2,681 people do, though. That makes him one of the 1%.
Kickstarter is basically a business loan that charges you 20%. That's pretty fuckin' horrible terms. But if you can't find better because your idea is shit, go for it I guess. And I say this having underwritten three Kickstarters. In all three cases, they were ideas that would have been underwritten by conventional financing if only their creators had looked a little harder. Patreon? Patreon is a tip jar for people too introverted to sit on a street corner with an open guitar case... and I say that having supported a couple Patreons.
But it's shit, and it makes the world worse, and I hate it."
Point well made, however I'd like to consider shedding some light on "The problem is with you and not the internet. " -
For many people "the internet" is fbook. To some the net is what google says it is.
With F and B decided that some things should not exist at all, and other things should be downranked to basically never be seen, while promoting certain sets of sites -
I think the problem is more than the individual not really looking. It's more of an education problem where people don't understand the amount of censorship and how the down ranking and upranking is actually affecting the way most are using 'the internet' - which of course has the network effects of people only sharing what they (have been allowed to) see (and allowed to share) - sadly.
The time of web rings, less spam and less censorship made it more fun finding random things imho.
Times when tumblrs and torrents and geocities and others showed up in search results, along with click at the bottom to do a similar search with alta vista, lycos, etc..
was in some ways less weird, but more fun to surf and discover. at least for me.
Titled: How sex censorship killed the internet we love
I enjoyed here headings including:
When was the last time the internet made you feel good?
When was the last time the internet gave you hope?
When was the last time you felt free on the internet?
When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?
Glad to see others thinking of these issues. I worry that most people who connect online don't even realize the homogenized over pasteurized censored endless scroll publication is hiding stuff that multiple groups don't want to show - making so much basically not exist.
I think you're right. Two main reasons: the number of sites grew exponentially, and the ratio of "fun/weird" people seems higher to anyone that has been on the Internet long enough.
Why is that? Basically: because not everyone had access. So if you were there, you belonged to some sort of minority (privileged artsy, IT student, etc).
The Internet nowadays is a commonplace thing. Billions more are online. It's not surprising that the stuff you used to trip over everywhere is now not as prominent - that just reflects the ratio of like-minded individuals in the real world better.
But that doesn't mean weird/funny doesn't exist anymore. It just means that - just like in the real world - you'll need to know where to go to find it.
I think the reason is simple. Previously, the internet didn't have a real purpose, so everyone on it was mostly for the weird/fun stuff. Nowadays, as mentioned in the blog, it also has legitimate serious uses, so by definition the ratio of weird to serious is lower.
But I think expecting the internet to only be one way is not only naive but also unrealistic. You may enjoy it being that way, but not everyone does, and the internet is for everyone. There's something for anyone, you just need to find your corner of the web.
Agreed. The Internet is just as fun and weird as it always was, if not more so.
However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
True. But another issue I feel with today's internet and apps is that it has lower rate of serendipity
Most of our experience is controlled by an all-knowing black-box algorithms. The game is to converge all experience into a small set of patterns
An Example - youtube
Earlier I could spend hours on youtube and discover everything from new music to weird funny videos.
Today you literally get boxed into a list comprising of your history and recommendations that have hardly 1 degree of separation from your history
Every ML recommender driven website should have a control so you can adjust Straight <> Weird. People would love cranking the weirdness up. Instant dopamine hit (unpredictable reward function) and it would bust them out of their filter bubbles.
Let's be fair though, kids ran into that stuff all the time in the past and they turned out mostly fine. I don't see this as big of s problem as the people that get outraged make it sound.
The problem/fear isn't that kids run into this stuff, it's the media/lawyers blowing it out of proportion and negatively affecting the share value of Big Important Companies.
^ hah. that is a genuine problem
But on a serious note, mature services like youtube/instagram can do it - they know more about me than anyone else. How hard would it to be to filter by age!
I would pitch in https://lainchan.org/ and https://arisuchan.jp/ which are nice little tech image boards. They are that lovely blend of out there and slightly off kilter that I remember from the image boards of old.
I would not merely because the denizens of those kinds of boards are in some state of obnoxious wallowing in self-pity (not clinical depression outside of the actual one or two posters who actually might have it), unless you consider that "off kilter". Reading people incessantly moan about the "good ol' days" of everything is negative content. The discussion is all fueled by that wallowing and none of it is constructive or interesting.
I would argue that smaller *chan boards are much different from larger boards you are referencing in this post. Smaller chan boards are more akin to single topic forums with a distinct community. Lainchan for instance has a large lisp and functional programming community on it, and lots of positivity. You should try clicking links before you judge them.
I am not referencing larger imageboards, I am responding specifically about lainchan as I've lurked there for some time and sometimes posted there. Lainchan is nothing more than a hyper-focused /g/ with "cyberpunk" theme. In fact, lainchan split some two years ago into two different sites that are, content-wise, exactly the same because some of its members threw a hissy fit over a new administrator for childish and inane reasons - as if its old one was any better. Maybe one out of every half-dozen posts on /lambda/ is worth reading - most others are noncommittal sound bytes, wordy demonstrations of vocabulary, or nostalgia-chasing about the "good ol' days" of imageboards like 4chan.
I agree that the split was for a dumb reason (however it was inevitable with the prior issues) but that's why I listed both sites. Besides that though, communities split all the time and often for dumb reasons.
Also, on your comment that it's just a cyberpunk focused /g/, well ya that's kind of the point. It's a cyberpunk board. It's centred around a lot of the themes from its namesake. As for the value of the threads on /λ/, most of them are either fairly focused discussions of various topics in Computer Science or language discussions. There's obviously some noise in the posts but the moderation results in fairly reasonable quality levels compared to the larger chans.
As for your final comment, I respectfully disagree. It's not for everyone but that's expected.
Also in case there was a misconception, I am not threwawasy1228 and they are not me.
I see that kind of attitude even on twitter and large subreddits. I don't think its specific to imageboards, in my experience it's just a very popular attitude/outlook among those currently in their late 20s/early 30s.
That type of post is rather uncommon in my experience on these particular boards. Those types of posts are heavily self moderated and shut down by the community unless they are on /hum/ (The emotion/feels board). I'd give these small chans a chance as I find them fairly unique in the world of image boards.
I second this, these are some of my favorite places to go on the internet today. They are a bit slow in terms of posting speed but I like the slowness.
There’s a footnote giving context to the erratic design:
> This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
Also funny how they link to https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/accessibility-y... at the bottom of the page, but the link itself is almost unreadable because it's small, orange font on top of grey. Not arguing the page itself needs better accessibility - it's art after all.
The author seems to have totally missed Tumblr which allows for editing of theme htmls and is easy to share which fosters and exploring creative community.
Kids these days have significantly stronger design aesthetic and coding ability so it's less haphazard; though it still has a very personal style.
I completely concur. Some of the weird stuff I have stumbled upon in my internet explorations have defied description; many of those places have evaporated into the ether since then. I think when that happens, humanity has lost a bit of itself.
A useful feature of recording everything would especially be for TOS/EULA getting stuff that's hidden in scroll areas. I'd love to be able to revisit things.
It should be feasible. I've got multiple bookmarklets that do this for downloading blogs and webcomics for later offline reading (some are so heavily scripted it's impossible to just fetch them).
Add something to the above so that it inlines referenced files in base64, and you're basically done (I tend not to bother as I'm only after the text content). For actually interactive files, it gets more complicated; you'll need to save the current JavaScript state as well as the page resources.
Demoscene is totally alive and kicking, but I don't think it has the same following as during the PC / Amiga era. Many of the old demogroups are defunct (obviously!), but not many new ones have replaced them.
There are still many jaw dropping demos and I recommend that people check them out and give some appreciation and respect to those absolutely l33t guyz
The feeds of the internet, Facebook, Twitter and such don't tend to be weird because of course they are selective, by upvotes, follows and friendships, and reach a normalcy between the influences. So it won't be fed to you unless you have weird friends.
So, you need to search for it. Be active about your intetests and seek them out.
I dunno, there's plenty of twitter that is just plain weird. Full of bizarre dadaist humor and all sorts of super referential jokes that require like a bibliography unless you are up to speed in the relevant sub-communities where the original jokes circulated.
I think the OP doesn't think the Internet is fun and weird anymore because he's looking at it in relative terms, whereas you're looking at it in absolute terms (so both of you are probably right). It is true that increasingly more and more of the time one spends on the Internet is spent on a few key websites, but it is also true that the number of weird places one can check out on the Internet is much higher now than in the past. If you're looking for these weird pockets of the Internet, a good place to start is this collection: https://find.xyz/map/weird-corners-of-the-internet
Agreed - I appreciate the sheer variance in comment quality and the threads are easy to consume. To take something like /ck/ (cooking), you have a mix of some generally good advice, along with a fair amount of madness and absurdity. The mix works for me. I am glad they split off the "work-safe" boards to 4channel.
I agree that it probably has had little effect on the site overall, and huge quotation marks as you say. I am assuming they did it for more flexibility with advertisers or something.
For me it is more psychological--there is a fair amount of decent content there, but being one click away from /b/ and /pol/ can be a detriment if I want to share a link or show something to my girlfriend. "Here's a bread recipe that sounds tasty or some /diy/ project--but don't use your work computer and you might want to fire up VPN."
But that stuff isn't mainstream. SO is but not answers like that.
All this fun and weird stuff lives on separate disconnected islands from a practical point of view. Maybe it really has to do with coding becoming more elite - although by all rational means it got easier. On the other hand hardly anyone would dare to upload static html websites anymore without non-trivial css/js. That's a shame.
Maybe this also has to do with the general obsession for super clean and lean code. This design has to be like that as well, same goes for the whole gist of the endeavor.
FWIW shitty forums always have been there, but there used to be a lot actually useful forums. Now those have been eaten up by streamlined and polished high quality web or native apps.
There is probably even more weird stuff than ever however search engines are not the neutral tool they used to be, there is quite a lot of censorship at the search level. But this could present a great business opportunity.
I remember seeing a piece of code on dwitter where someone was trying to see if they can inject any code in the page. And it was working. So yeah, I'd very much rather avoid that website. Trying to allow users to put their own code on a page someone else is seeing is perfectly ripe for exploitation. Sure, it might be fun initially, for most people, but not anymore when someone uses that power to harm your website and other users.
And I agree you could work hard to try and somehow verify their code, but I doubt it's possible to let them do something useful and at the same time prevent any possible attack.
I went to visit dtwitter and first comment seen was ‘Yeah fuck off u goddam pollack piece of trash’. That is not the fun internet I am looking for, where ‘anonymous’ 12 year old write comments of this kind. What is good in FB which I do not use is that thay required real names so you would not hide behind a nick name to write comments like the one i pasted above.
Well, if the comment section (powered by facebook) on a number of national newspapers can be a sample, having real names associated with a comment doesn't do a lot to prevent nasty comments.
But few people know about any of that stuff. There are new subcultures on Mastodon/Pleroma, tons of small self hosted projects people are now trying out .. sure .. but the average user isn't going to find any of that.
Where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite, Yahoo, et. al., we have a fraction of the various search engines today and most people just know and use the big-G.
Reddit use to have all sorts of communities. Then they started banning everything, a CEO edited comments and didn't step down and now it's all 'safe' and single opinionated (Even /r/unpopularopinions went away).
This is a cute project and I hope it's self-hostable, because I might give it a shot. So far it doesn't seem like there's any code released.
I think the future of the Internet needs to be distributed. We need more things like Sandstorm, PeerTube, Pixelfed; thinks that make it easier for people to pay to host their own content and have control over it.
https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.
https://dwitter.net needs no comment
Stack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
Half of tumblr is totally out there.
I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.