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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?

#321

Post by gia_ferrari »

azalemeth wrote: post #318
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!)

To me (USA) 1,000 is one thousand and 1.000 is one, and to me (Italian) 1,000 is one and 1.000 is one thousand :)

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

#322

Post by firebot »

Maxion wrote: post #288
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.

Ahh so THAT's how they did that!

It depends. Windows can be set to shapes going back to like Windows 95, iirc.

But alpha, specifically, would be faked at that point. Windows 2000 supported alpha for such things in a basic way, like XP. Vista with Aero and 7 then really expanded the themes and the window compositing.

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

#323

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

At a hacker con we built a public cluster of terminals. One set of terminals was a bunch of 486's that net-booted a mini Linux distro with just a kernel and an X client, connecting to a hardened X server.

I left a root prompt in one of the VTY's so people could mess around with it, but it being a net-booted BusyBox shell, there wasn't much to play with. We weren't concerned about MITM, because the network was token ring - in the mid 2000s. Convention full of hackers, and a bunch of machines with root shells open, but nobody hacked it, because nobody could get on the network.

We shipped all the gear up on an Amtrak from Florida to NYC. We had no budget nor interest in shipping them back or storing them, so we stacked them on the sidewalk and started yelling about free computers. In two hours they were gone.

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

#324

Post by eps »

fzeindl wrote: post #136

I wanted a smart thermostat but my 30 year old natural gas heater didn‘t support them. I only had a wheel which I could turn to set the temperature. So I took double sided tape, stuck a plastic gear on the wheel and put a servo on with another gear on the side, connected to a raspberry pi, that would turn the wheel when my phone would enter a geofence around the flat. Picture: https://ibb.co/nDvwndp I even had a bash…

This doesn't really qualify as "stupid" though.

That's just the good old "interfacing with legacy systems" routine. :)

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

#325

Post by stormking »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #317
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.

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.

Please educate yourself before you accuse people of incompetency. Of course it was about (pseudo) alpha blending because "smooth shadows" around everything became very popular in the late 90s.

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

#327

Post by lqet »

fzeindl wrote: post #136

I wanted a smart thermostat but my 30 year old natural gas heater didn‘t support them. I only had a wheel which I could turn to set the temperature. So I took double sided tape, stuck a plastic gear on the wheel and put a servo on with another gear on the side, connected to a raspberry pi, that would turn the wheel when my phone would enter a geofence around the flat. Picture: https://ibb.co/nDvwndp I even had a bash…

This reminds me of an old Bosch clock I own. This was one of the early electric consumer clocks. It looks very futuristic. But inside, it is simply a mechanical clock with an electric motor attached to the wind-up mechanism. Every few minutes, the motor spins up for a second and winds the clock up again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=0DU0KX9gIk8

The clock is extremely reliable, though. The last batteries lasted for 10 (!) years.

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

#328

Post by stormking »

hutzlibu wrote: post #284
stormking wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called double-buffering.

I think it was meant as a joke, so for anyone else reading it, no it is not actually double-buffering.

Half a joke, because the concept is very much the same. You "paint" to an invisible buffer and then you swap.

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

#329

Post by jddj »

nomilk wrote: post #85

Mine's getting command output out of docker. For long builds (I had one that took 4 hours), it was gutting to have it fail a long way in and not be able to see the output of the RUN commands for thorough debugging. So I devised a stupidly simple way: add && echo "asdfasdfsadf" after each RUN command. I mashed the keyboard each time to come up with some nonsense token. That way, docker would see RUN lines as different…

This reminded me of an ongoing hack that I have running in a production webapp.

When I was writing it there was no easy opt-in cache busting (renaming scripts at build time, or applying a static random querystring to the script requests, etc) in the minimal framework I was using and I was getting away with not using a task runner or anything like that.

It was one of those "would be nice, but effort is better spent elsewhere" things, so to this day before I do releases I still bump a hardcoded version number that I pass to the templating engine for each route.

I should fix that.

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

#330

Post by wodenokoto »

singingfish wrote: post #214

This regex that took about 10 minutes to generate was amazingly effective and helped me earn my highest ever daily rate https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/d43c884fbac0089d8523

How is that better than just checking against a list of suburb names?
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