Cursed hacks, forcing proprietary software to do what you want through clever means, or just generally doing awful, beautiful things with technology?
Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
1–10 of 510 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#2It's not the best story - I'm sure there are some greats here - but I tricked GitLab into running scripts that looked like https://gitlab.com/jyavorska/c64exec/-/blob/master/.gitlab-c... by modifying a runner to pass everything through the VICE Commodore BASIC emulator. It would even attach the output file as an artifact to the build.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#3Sshfs so I can upload images onto my server to send links. :|
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#4I used SQLite for coordination between processes. It was a huge Python application that originally used the multiprocessing library and had to be migrated to Rust.
In hindsight, it would have been better to use a local HTTP server. Seemed like overkill at the time.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#5I had an old boiler that would sometimes trip and lock out the heat until someone went down and power cycled it. (It was its own monstrous hack of a gas burner fitted to a 1950s oil boiler and I think a flame proving sensor was bad.)
Every time it happened, it made for a long heat up cycle to warm the water and rads and eventually the house.
So I built an Arduino controlled NC relay that removed power for 1 minute out of every 120. That was often enough to eliminate the effect of the fault, but not so often that I had concerns about filling too much gas if the boiler ever failed to ignite. 12 failed ignitions per day wouldn’t give a build up to be worried about.
That ~20 lines of code kept it working for several years until the boiler was replaced.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#6`envsubst` on a k8s manifest, for templating. The space for templating/dynamic k8s manifests is complex, needlessly so I felt. But this... just works. It has been running in CI for a couple months now, deploying to prod. I'm sure the day that breaks down will come, but it's not here yet.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#7I worked at a startup where the core backend was 1 giant serverless Function. For error handling and recovery, the Function ran in a while loop.
For all its faults, it worked and it was generating revenue. Enough that the startup got to a sizable Series A. That experience completely changed how I think about writing code at startups.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#8I made my own version of AWS workspaces inside AWS because workspaces is a buggy piece of shit and the client sucks. It's just an EC2 instance which can be started and stopped by a makefile that runs awscli and I query the IP address and open it in MS RDP!
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#9I use a table object and a OnAfterModifyRecord trigger to process OData calls in Navision 2018 (ERP System). For some reason I can not call actions manually so I write whatever I want to do into a table and process accordingly with triggers.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#10`sed` text files as a replacement for templating.
In the text file you have something you want to template (or "parametrize") from an outside variable, so you name that something like @@VAR@@ and then you can sed that @@VAR@@ :-)