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Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#311

Post by dijit »

sedatk wrote: post #170
mattl wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you make a Windows executable work on the web?

Using CGI protocol on a Windows server. IIS (Windows' own web server) basically interfaces with executables by running them, feeding them HTTP headers, and server variables through environment variables, and gets the response HTTP headers and the body from their STDOUT. It's very inefficient, of course, since every request requires spawning a new copy of the executable, but it had worked fine in its first months :) H…

Don't sell yourself too short here, that's exactly how Perl/PHP works and that was defacto standard around the same vintage (and for a decade more).

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#312

Post by gia_ferrari »

Two car stories.

1. I got to my car and the battery was flat. Fortunately, I had ridden my home-built electric skateboard to it (this was before even the first Boosted Boards came out - completely homemade, I built the trucks, drive system, etc). I went to the Goodwill next door and bought an extension cord for the wire. I stripped the cord, wired the board's battery to the car, and was able to start it.

2. I was driving my classic car home when the alternator failed, at 2am, in the middle of a big city. With my headlights rapidly dimming, I managed to quickly exit and find a parking lot (just as my headlights completely died). Fortunately, I again had that skateboard. I rigged up the battery to the electrical system and made it to within a mile of my house before the fuel pump and spark ignition gave out completely. I easily walked home, put a new battery in my backup car, and I was good.

The moral? Replace your car batteries when they're weak :) Also, LiPo batteries are beasts.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#313

Post by andylynch »

Needed a hard drop copy of data from an industrial metering device for auditing and backup.

It was the handover point for the delivery of natural gas for a large field and a quarter of the country’s energy supply.

The engneers wired an extra serial port onto the lead and plugged it into a printer we had going spare.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#314

Post by unnouinceput »

rudasn wrote: post #31

Launching a headless browser just to generate some PDFs. Turns out, if you want to turn html+css into pdfs quickly, doing via a browser engine is a "works really well" story.

I had Chromium component added to a project just to show the users the help file which was a giant PDF document. The PDF file was from a 3rd part vendor who didn't know better/refused to change the system so we had to show it "as is" to the users. Any PDF reader component we tried failed because the PDF file had some crappy features in it that none of those component knew how to parse. Chromium engine, for its hate that gets nowadays, had no problem with any of those PDF files.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#315

Post by onli »

anthk wrote: post #296
xxs wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing (screenshot and all) was routine done in the 90s with all those fancy non-rectangular applications/demos/launchers [usually available on CDs that came w/ magazines]. They had transparent/alpha zones that copied the screen under them.

Back in the day terminals under Linux did that to fake transparency: they just copied a chunk of the root window (where you put some wallpaper) as the terminal background and applied an alpha layer if the user wanted a translucid color.

Fake transparency is still a thing, for desktops without compositor. Not only in terminals, but also in docks.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#316

Post by cracrecry »

I bought a lot of DRM books that I could only read in restricted platforms in Windows. I wanted to use in any of my devices without limitations. So I created a VM image of windows inside VMWare inside a Linux computer and basically automated the scanning of the pages in ultra high resolution just using keystrokes from a Lisp Domain Specific Language.

The first iteration hack was done in minutes. over time it could OCR almost anything and convert to ebook readable.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#317

Post by TonyTrapp »

xxs wrote: post #261
sowbug wrote: post #210

Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…

The thing (screenshot and all) was routine done in the 90s with all those fancy non-rectangular applications/demos/launchers [usually available on CDs that came w/ magazines]. They had transparent/alpha zones that copied the screen under them.

Maybe some incompetent people did it that way, but 1-bit transparency was very well possible with native Windows APIs in the 90s (see SetWindowRgn). Later on (starting with Windows 2000 IIRC) it was also possible to have semi-transparent (alpha-blended) regions.

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#318

Post by azalemeth »

hennell wrote: post #59

Needed to get data out of a CRM system for specific printed orders - when it was printed, who processed it, what was on the order etc. The process of authenticating with the CRM was complex and there wasn't a way to get anything at print time and most of the data was stored all over the place. But I found the printed report knew almost everything I wanted, and you could add web images to the paperwork system. So I ad…

As a European I'd like to know how our numbers are differently formatted to yours! (Did you mean dates? The never ending source of pain!)

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#319

Post by thesoursloth »

sedatk wrote: post #203
HaZeust wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy to see you! Some time ago, I was actually looking to add Eksi to Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) since several users reached out and wanted to add it alongside their other platforms to share on their profile, but we couldn't find out the URL convention for user profile feeds! It seemed to be " https://eksisozluk1999.com/{{username}}--{{7 digit value}}", but we couldn't find any rhyme or reason to the 7 digits. Are…

User profiles are actually stored like https://eksisozluk1999.com/biri/{{username} }. "/@{{username}}" also redirects to "/biri/{{username}}". You shouldn't need numbers at all. The numbers are only at the end of topic titles. They are title id's (sequential integers assigned when they're created) to disambiguate conflicting Latinized forms of Turkish words.

additionally: if a nickname has spaces, we have to type "%20" instead of spaces in the links with "/@{{username}}"

i've submitted an entry about this a few minutes ago. https://eksisozluk1999.com/entry/143247963

Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

#320

Post by wodenokoto »

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #197

When I was younger I learned that Sed was turing complete. So I did was any young woman would do. I build an entire search engine in Sed. But it wasn't like a useless little search tool that provided bad search capability for a website, no, nearly every page (minus a few like the about page) of a site was nothing more than a presentation on top of the search query results. Several thousand hardcoded "known" pages and…

Did you have a file named “main.sed” or was everything a giant bash script that started with “sed $(cat << EOF …”?
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