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Was a really fun article to read/podcast to listen to.

Favorite fact is that 127 is the DEL because for hole punching it removes all the info. I love those little nuggets of history


As an aside, Chat GPT is very good at giving you a baseline for mermaid diagrams given a technical spec/ hand drawn image


This came up on an interview test where I had to implement this from scratch! Fun to read


huh, TIL that regex wasn't a thing in vanilla excel. Thought that'd be a basic thing that's included.


I realized that long ago... it's incredible that it took this long given how common it is in programming.


The strategy of freezing VBA and BAT scripting, offering better alternatives, and hoping they'd go away on their own hasn't worked.


You can using VBA functions and VBScript.RegExp. This is restricted to Windows though. Microsoft wants to get rid of VBScript, so maybe they are going through the most common use cases in Excel.


Have they officially said they want to get rid of VBScript?



Yes, but that doesn't include getting rid of VBA. They probably do want to do that though, to allow mobile apps and web-based Excel to run interactive sheets using Javascript. Of course they've been trying for years to allow Javascript in Excel, but at least in the first versions that ran using Internet Explorer in the background. I'm not sure if that has evolved further now.


You never expect basic ergonomics from an ALL CAPS language. They all suck.


That’s super cool!!! Looks like quite a niche/technical hobby with amazing output. Do you mind sharing how much equipment costs to get similar results?


It's a wonderful niche/technical hobby, but it's not cheap. You could even say it's "pay to win". I didn't buy all of my stuff at once, and I had some mistakes, but I'd guess I use on the order of $10k in equipment.


Just to follow on, you can gets started with quite a bit less. My dad took a stab at some basic shots with his prosumer Nikon and a basic tracking tripod.

That's still $1000 body, $1000 glass, $500 tripod, give or take. So far from cheap if you're starting from scratch. But if you already have a body and some glass, it's not a stretch. Or, if you're ok with hunting for used gear, the body and glass can be ~half off new retail.


I'm assuming that'd be a non-moving/automated tripod?

I have a d850 full-frame DSLR and either a 200mm 2.8 or 500mm 5.6, with some decent tripods; but earth's rotation tends to get me pretty quickly with any long-exposure photos :(


I've seen some pretty impressive stuff done with a relatively cheap / simple DSLR setup.

The basics of astrophotography aren't that expensive, but it gets exponentially more expensive to meaningfully "zoom in". Because DSLRs with typical lenses are pretty zoomed out you can get away with much cheaper gear. You might look into getting a "star tracker". It's like a telescope mount for a camera; it'll keep the still relative to the stars but because they don't need to be as accurate they're far cheaper to make. They'll probably work just fine for your 200mm 2.8 lens for a fraction of the cost of a mount.


I think it's rotating, but doesn't have a secondary camera as described above. Maybe he spent more than $500, but I tend to doubt it, but I'm also not sure of the specifics beyond he's using a crop-frame Nikon DSLR with a lens he already had for birding (I think).


Reminds me of this project: https://github.com/trichner/gitc0ffee which is used to take a commit, append some header to it to force the hash to collide with some prefix, such as `c0ffee`

>6 character prefix: less than a second

>8 character prefix: in the order of one or more minutes

No affiliation with this, but I tested it, and it was fast!


what's the website? Sounds cool


Recommend the book "Why we sleep" for people who want to learn a bit more about effects of sleep deprivation


I liked how easy the demo was to play around with! I don't have the most amount of use for this product, but kudos to making something that clearly works very well!


I like how it looks! Would prefer 2 textboxes for the inputs rather than inputs/some stats about how many unique points it's visited before.

reminds me of the pipes animation in old microsoft screensavers!


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