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Am I misreading this or is that "How close is Spanish from Different Countries" graphic kind of jank? There's intersecting lines that are missing, like Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.


The intersection between Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic is the 0.42 right above the "1" in the PR column (5th from the left).

If you imagine the full graph of all countries horizontally and vertically, there would be a lot of overlap (the PR column and DR row, and the DR column and PR row). So to save that redundancy, for all countries except Spain (very top) and Argentina (far right) you have to look around a bit to see where it crosses any other given country.


that's amazing, do you know why it works?


The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL.

So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match URLs won’t necessarily see the two versions as identical. This is actually something worth testing your own sites against, to make sure including the root domain doesn’t do something dumb like bypass authentication or whatever.

Edit: also, forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know w/ regard to the root domain and stuff.


This is 50% of the reason, the other half is that all the tracking/ad requests hit an API endpoint on bloomberg.com (no dot at the end), which is now a separate origin as far as the same-origin policy is concerned. But the code is not expecting this to be the case, and doesn't set any CORS headers on the response, and the browser denies access to the response data.

This breaks the ads but also breaks any interactive charts, etc. that need data from the API.


New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.


The trailing "." becomes practically important if you have a client that believes in DNS search suffixes (yuck!). I imagine it might have some effect in this particular case if the user-agent includes the dot in the "Host" HTTP request header and it thus evades some non-canonicalizing layer of Bloomberg's paywall thing, while still being a perfectly okay request to the rest of the chain.


You know what’s also missing if you go to bloomberg.com./? All of the ads, and the animated stock ticker. I’m on mobile so didn’t dig into it further, but I bet that all JS loaded on request from another domain (probably including the paywall) is absent or broken.

The site itself loads fine though, because DNS still works and whatever routing layer in their app probably doesn’t care about the domain, just the path that follows it.


I once got a verbal C&D from a Novell web dev because they answered to any domain and I pointed (as a joke) a domain to their IP. Google ended up indexing, and customers were asking what 'reallystrangedomain.com' was when they searched for Novell error messages.

They asked me to stop 'mirroring' their content, and didn't understand I was just pointing my domain to their servers. I stopped, but part of me didn't want to.

Edit: Looks like archive.org picked it up: http://web.archive.org/web/20110623134639/http://thebergenef...


It shouldn't. It is the fault of hacky protocols like HTTPS that conflate routing with identity. If we had DNSSEC and IPSEC from the beginning, it wouldn't have been necessary to do it on application level.


The browser's same-origin-policy would still exist the same way without HTTPS.


I tried it and it only gives me a separate counter (i.e. 3 free articles on "bloomberg.com." in addition to the ones on "bloomberg.com".) This makes me suspect local storage or cookies.


For anyone else that’s confused, TLS = thread local storage


Yes, sorry, I figured that in this thread (eyyyyyy) it would be unambiguous, but probably should have elaborated anyway. Thanks.


"apps my mom could build" kind of describes Excel workbooks. People effectively use excel to build (highly constrained) GUIs for processing data using custom logic that they specify themselves. And excel's popularity speaks for itself, it's completely pervasive. So that's the answer; the audience isn't programmers, it's the officeworkers all over the world currently using Excel to automate office tasks and want a better delivery mechanism than a shared Excel file on the office LAN. That's such a big pie that even capturing a small slice of it might be a reasonably profitable endeavor.


You are spot on. I know a ton of people who fit your description. I wish this were higher up the comment stack. So many people are missing this simple viewpoint.


The .NET standard library docs are a thing of beauty because they intermingle autogenerated javadoc-style documentation with generally well-written freeform "remarks" sections that include more general explanations, context, and code samples.


>Don't all great projects start young and gain interested folks to make it widely used?

The counterpoint to this is that making a robust cross-platform GUI library is a massive endeavor and there is a veritable mountain of cross-platform gui projects out there and overwhelmingly they end up as never-finished abandoned projects. The exceptions like Qt and electron that actually succeeded tend to have large organizations behind them.


sort/index the db table by string length, start your search with the closest length strings (bigger and smaller) and then stop if you find a levenshtein distance that's smaller than that the length difference between the key and the next closest length string? In many(most?) cases you'd still end up searching the whole table but at least in some cases you could end the search early.


Spotify vs Google Play Music is the perfect showcase for this. They both get the job done but Spotify is better in so many small ways. Meanwhile, instead of being improved, GPM is in the process of being abandoned for the new shiny thing, Youtube Music.


> Spotify vs Google Play Music is the perfect showcase for this. They both get the job done but Spotify is better in so many small ways. Meanwhile, instead of being improved, GPM is in the process of being abandoned for the new shiny thing, Youtube Music.

What degredation have you noticed that makes you think it is being abandoned?


When they shut down the artist portal they said this:

> With the launch of YouTube Music last year, we eventually plan to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. In anticipation of this change, we are shutting down the Artist Hub.

Source:

https://9to5google.com/2019/04/03/google-play-music-shutdown...


Ah I had not seen this. Thank you!


I've been looking for an alternative to Google Play Music. I only use it to sync my albums from my pc to my phone and play them offline in the car. Does Spotify have a feature like that?

Edit: It looks like you have to pay for it and the music has to be in playlists. Not quite what I'd like.


I believe Spotify allows you to upload 10,000 tracks.


what about local filesystem access, os integration, and all the other things that you expect a desktop app to be able to do (like in this case executing a separate binary) which violate the security models of browsers?


App becomes a local backend server that has privileged access to the machine (with control over what it accesses, maybe give it a specific user), and a web UI to access the app.

Someone in the tree of replies for your parent explained and was contemplating actually going through with it.


I think you're overestimating how much development at tech companies is done using newer languages. Java is the dominant language at both Amazon and Google.


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