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Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
51–60 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#52I made an email mailbox using S3 object versioning.
Every email address was an s3 object so every new email sent to that email address was saved as a new object version.
Presenting that email as an mailbox was just a matter of reading all the versions of that object.
It worked!
I used this contraption as a domain level catch—all inbox for a while until cloudflare started supporting email forwarding.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#53Ask a seasoned quant investor. The most successful strategies and sustainable strategies are usually the simplest. ML and AI solutions are short-lived.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#54Several years ago we had a data processing framework that allowed teams to process data incrementally, since most datasets were in the range of terabytes/day. The drawback is that it's append-only; i.e. you can't update previously processed output; you can only append to it. One team had a pipeline that needed to update older records, and there was a long discussion of proposals and convoluted solutions. I took a look at the total size of the input dataset and it was in the range of a few gigabytes only. I dropped into the discussion and said "This dataset is only a few gigabytes, why don't you just read it in full and overwrite the output every time?" Suddenly the discussion went quiet for a minute, and someone said "That's brilliant!". They only needed to change a few lines of code to make it happen.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#55- before ML try linear or polynomial regression - buying a bigger server is almost always better than distributed system - Few lines of bash can often wipe out hundreds of lines of python.
> Few lines of bash...
Windows admin in the room -- you'd be amazed what can batch together from DOS batch. I provision APC UPS monitoring cards with a sub-15 line script to bring them into our management.
PowerShell? Hardly knew 'er.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#56I worked as a intern for the government many years ago. They were doing a study on "ice dams" in Maine. Ice flows down river gets stuck and causes flooding an property damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_jam
they had about 5 options for mitigating with technical solutions (structures in the rivers), a price analysis for each. The last option was to buy the very rurual land that were flooding. It was deemed cheaper. I'm not sure what they ended up doing.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#57Could have sworn this was asked last week or so.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#58When working at an influencer marketing company a while ago, back when Instagram still allowed pretty much complete access through their API. As we were indexing the entire Instagram universe for our internal tooling, we had this graph traversal setup to crawl Instagram profiles, then each of their followers etc. We’d need to keep track of visited profiles to not loop and had an Apache Storm cluster for the entire sc…
How long ago? I’m surprised you got anywhere near their servers with 10k requests per second from a single machine.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#59Prefetching critical API data on the index.html of an SPA instead of using SSR.
Re: Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
#60Renamed the "Sign In" button on the website to "Launch App". That way there’s no need to check if the user is authenticated to show the username.
IOW, I can serve the website statically. So no iframe is needed for dynamic parts, or allowing the cookie from a subdomain on the www.