Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them “hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it”, or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Regular expression magic.

    A lot of ad networks have a pattern to the name or the window the advert appears in.

    Using regular expression you can find just the adwindow and ignore the actual content.

    Now what is regular expression? A wizard language.
    ask any programmer about RE after 4 beers and watch the hate wash over their face.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      The first language I learned was Perl, so regex are very close to my heart. I’m also quite excitable when I drink (I’m a happy drunk), so ask me and I’ll give you a very enthusiastic explanation while not noticing that you aren’t interested in my detailed explanation and examples. Do it. I dare ya.

    • JPAKx4@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I love regex, I’m not even gonna lie. To be fair, my expressions haven’t been 50+ characters long, but still.

      • Zikeji@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Same, I’ve never understood the hate. But then again I memorize based off of patterns and regex in my brain is just a pattern.

    • Mbourgon everywhere@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Zawinski’s second law - “Sometimes a person looks at a problem and says ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll use regular expressions’. And now they have two problems.”