Programming

A 10 minute read covering some YAML edge-cases that you should have in mind when writing complex YAML files

I have some background in Python and Bash (this is entirely self-taught and i think the easiest language from all). I know that C# is much different, propably this is why it is hard. I've been learning it for more than 4 months now, and the most impressive thing i can do with some luck is to write a console application that reads 2 values from the terminal, adds them together and prints out the result. Yes, seriously. The main problem is that there are not much usable resources to learn C#. For bash, there is Linux, a shit ton of distros, even BSD, MacOS and Solaris uses it. For python, there are games and qtile window manager. For C, there is dwm. I don't know anything like these for C#, except Codingame, but that just goes straight to the deep waters and i have no idea what to do. Is my whole approach wrong? How am i supposed to learn C#? I'm seriously not the sharpest tool in the shed, but i have a pretty good understanding of hardware, networking, security, privacy. Programming is beyond me however, except for small basic scripts

This is what it looks like in my head.

https://github.com/albert-tomanek/timevisu/

This (old) post details how to interfere with randomness to make it feel more random to the end user.

This reminded me of how many games “cheat” in a similar way to make critical hits seem more fair (increase the probability when it has not triggered for too long and decrease it when it just triggered)

id like to ask if there is some guideline/advice for asking for open source contributions.

initially i thought i could just have open source code, documentation and communicate about it, but that doesnt seem to work for gaining contributors.

maybe there is something else im overlooking?

contributors would be using their own valuable time and effort so it could just be that my projects are not interesting enough. it might be worth concluding that i should proceed on this solo.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24400832

This is a simple example of the level of Java inter-op bjForth currently provides.

Hey!

I'm currently hitting the limits with Postman's free tier and need your recommendations for alternatives. My company isn't planning to upgrade to the paid version, so I'm specifically looking for:

Must-have features:

• Unlimited API requests
• Collection runner or similar batch testing capability
• Data import from spreadsheets for test automation
• The collection runner feature is crucial for my workflow: I heavily rely on being able to import Excel data to generate and map multiple API calls without manual setup.

Has anyone switched from Postman to something else that offers these capabilities? What's your experience been like?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! 🙏

Many of my friends use calorie trackers like Lose it! or MyFitnessPal. And I've heard many complaints about them locking basic functionality behind a subscription. The straw that broke the camel's back was not allowing barcode scanning without a sub. I've been looking for a meaty, pun intended, side project to pick up and decided to try to do some good while saving some people money!

• Built using Tauri in order to use Angular for the GUI and get mobile platform support.

• Data is stored on-device using SQLite.

• Initially I'm only targeting Android, I'd love to target iOS too but I don't own any Apple devices to dev+test on.

• I'd say it's a "late alpha" as of right now. It has most but not all functionality, but has only been tested by me so there are likely small bugs that need to be found.

• My wife really likes manatees, hence the name.

• I've commissioned an artist for a logo so that should be coming by February.

Would love to hear people's thoughts! Currently you'd have to build the app yourself, though I do have an item on my to-do list to generate signed APKs via a github action. Mostly I'm just looking to start spreading the word now and hopefully get some good feature requests or bug reports. If you've read this far, thanks for your time!

Edit: I figured out how to generate signed APKs via GitHub so I have a v0.2.0 Pre-Release up. It's already led me to finding out there are some bugs on Samsung phones that don't happen on my Pixel so please submit any issues you encounter! Thank you!

I'm thrilled to announce the release of bjForth v0.0.3 🎉

There's been a a heap of improvements and additions compared to the last release.

What's best is that they are automatically tested every time a change is pushed 😎

I dare you to Grab the latest tarball and hack yourself some serious Forth 😄

One of two Azure CDN providers was Edgio, which filed for bankruptcy.

azureedge.net dotnet CDN URLs will cease to work sometime next year after January 15th.

We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other kinds of breakage.

We maintain multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) instances for delivering .NET builds. Some end in azureedge.net. These domains are hosted by edg.io, which will soon cease operations due to bankruptcy. We are required to migrate to a new CDN and will be using new domains going forward.

Affected domains:

• dotnetcli.azureedge.net
• dotnetbuilds.azureedge.net

Unaffected domains:

• dotnet.microsoft.com
• download.visualstudio.microsoft.com

Sometimes I create a solution to a simple problem. However instead of making use of the solution, I keep extending it unnecessarily. This is why for this kind of project, I want to systematically restrain my future self from adding new features beyond the initial vision e.g. by actively refusing generic and re-usable code.

What is the search engine friendly term for this approach or at least for this situation? "Ad-hoc programming" may be literally what I'm talking about, but in practice it's associated with unplanned happenings.

I'm making this thing called BDServer for my website blenderdumbass . org and I am coding some analytics tools for it right now, because apparently I found a new way to procrastinate.

I made some of the calls accessible to the public:

https://blenderdumbass.org/json/analytics/ua?days=10&skip_me=True&human_only=True

https://blenderdumbass.org/json/analytics/rss?days=10

https://blenderdumbass.org/json/analytics/totals

And also made a UI version: https://blenderdumbass.org/analytics

Am I going crazy?

After needing to find a small delimiter for my data format I started wondering if I could use 0x1E-0x1F?

They are part of the control codes so I thought they might do something weird?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_separators

I'm creating a JavaScript UI framework for my own projects. It's a learning journey and I'd like to share my progress.

I've written some blog posts about my progress so far:

1. Functional Web Components - https://positive-intentions.com/blog/dim-functional-webcomponents
2. Functional Todo App - https://positive-intentions.com/blog/dim-todo-list
3. Async State Management - https://positive-intentions.com/blog/async-state-management
4. Bottom-up Browser Storage - https://positive-intentions.com/blog/bottom-up-storage

Note: The UI framework is far from finished. I want to share progress to see if there are any outstanding issues I'm overlooking.

I created a solution...with a pi 4 but it just doesn't seem to work very well. OCR is very finicky and while I was able to get pytesseract to pull the images off of a webcam, the numbers that get returned are very wrong. It looks like they only allow businesses to pull the powermeter data if I am reading this right: https://www.pge.com/en/save-energy-and-money/energy-saving-programs/smartmeter.html

My rate has increased 6 times this year, so power is very expensive here: 50c per KWH...on the lowest consumption rate. I need to figure out how to cut back or get solar panels. But I want to see in near real time how much energy we are using.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17683690

Archived version

Download study (pdf)

GitHub, the de-facto platform for open-source software development, provides a set of social-media-like features to signal high-quality repositories. Among them, the star count is the most widely used popularity signal, but it is also at risk of being artificially inflated (i.e., faked), decreasing its value as a decision-making signal and posing a security risk to all GitHub users.

A recent paper by Cornell University published on Arxiv, the researchers present a systematic, global, and longitudinal measurement study of fake stars in GitHub: StarScout, a scalable tool able to detect anomalous starring behaviors (i.e., low activity and lockstep) across the entire GitHub metadata.

Analyzing the data collected using StarScout, they find that:

(1) fake-star-related activities have rapidly surged since 2024

(2) the user profile characteristics of fake stargazers are not distinct from average GitHub users, but many of them have highly abnormal activity patterns

(3) the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots

(4) some repositories may have acquired fake stars for growth hacking, but fake stars only have a promotion effect in the short term (i.e., less than two months) and become a burden in the long term.

The study has implications for platform moderators, open-source practitioners, and supply chain security researchers.