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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?

#61

Post by bryanlarsen »

btzs wrote: post #25

As a 12 year old: I tried to overclock my first "good" own computer (AMD Duron 1200 MHz). System wouldn't start at 1600 MHz and I didn't know BIOS reset exists. I ended up putting the computer in the freezer and let it cool down for an hour. I placed the CRT display on top and the power/VGA keyboard cable going into the freezer. I managed to set it back to the original frequency before it died.

I kept a supply of coins in the freezer. I would regularly toss a few into the heatsink on my TRS-80 that was unstable after a RAM upgrade.

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

#62

Post by foul »

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've seen a bit of SaaS and legacy websites-with-invoice-system doing that, with e.g. wkhtmltopdf. It isn't a lightweight solution, but it's a good hammer for a strange nail, a lot of off-the-shelf report systems suck.

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

#63

Post by _bbih »

gcr wrote: post #17
_bbih wrote: post #2

It'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.

That’s incredible! Why though??

A small contribution to the increase of nonsense in the world

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

#64

Post by SkyPuncher »

Adding a Content Security Policy of “upgrade-insecure-requests”. It does nothing meaningful for your security, but it’s enough to satisfy a bunch of these scanning tools that giving you a letter grade.

Yes, we want to add a robust CSP, but we currently have some limitations/requirements that make implementation more challenging.

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

#65

Post by _lvbh »

Snacklive wrote: post #53
_lvbh wrote: post #51

This was a while ago so it probably wouldn’t work today. I had to get past a captcha for automation and the solution I came up with was to always choose 2. If it was incorrect, just request a new captcha until it passed. For some reason, 2 was the answer most of the time so it actually rarely had to retry anyways

Definitely wouldn't work today. Nowadays you need to classify like 30 images of bicycles and 20 fire hydrants and pray to god before they accept your answer...

This is why I don’t have an account with Snapchat/Instagram/etc. I tried signing up and physically couldn’t get past the challenges. I take too long to solve them and then I’m asked to solve more…

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

#66

Post by bonton89 »

I used to be really into modding the game Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. The quirky engine has all sorts of weird bugs and limitations.

I created a flare gun weapon (similar to the stick rail gun missiles so nothing to crazy here) but found that if a player died when they respawned the flares were still stuck on them and damaging them when they respawned even though their whole location had changed. This bug would exist with rail gun missiles as well but since the death animation was long and the fuse so sort it would never present in the base game.

I experimented with using detach commands that ran on player death but they'd just instantly reattach to the player model because of their proximity. I ended up creating an invisible explosive entity that fired on player death from the center of the player which did a damage flag ignored by players but which destroyed the flares.

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

#67

Post by omgbear »

I built a vacation plant waterer with some tubing, 3d-printed heads, submersible pumps and an Arduino. For a longer trip, I needed a source of water that I could pump from.

I realized the toilet tank is self-refilling because of the float valve and won't overflow . So clean it out and a good place to pump my submersible pumps.

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

#68

Post by neilcar »

When I was a network support engineer, we had a case where a company had a bizarre & intermittent problem on workstations. Wish I could remember what the problem was but this is 20+ years ago now.

To troubleshoot it, we installed Microsoft Network Monitor 2.0 (this was well before Wireshark...) on a few workstations. NM2 installed a packet capture driver and a GUID front-end. And...the problem went away.

Our best guess was that the problem was some sort of race condition and installing the packet capture driver was enough to change the timing and make the problem go away. The customer didn't want to spend more time on it so they installed NM2 everywhere and closed the case.

I occasionally imagine somebody trying to figure out why they're still installing the NM2 driver everywhere.

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

#69

Post by BillyTheMage »

zeroCalories wrote: post #47
btzs wrote: post #25

As a 12 year old: I tried to overclock my first "good" own computer (AMD Duron 1200 MHz). System wouldn't start at 1600 MHz and I didn't know BIOS reset exists. I ended up putting the computer in the freezer and let it cool down for an hour. I placed the CRT display on top and the power/VGA keyboard cable going into the freezer. I managed to set it back to the original frequency before it died.

When I was a teenager my friend would throw his laptop into the freezer for a few minutes every hour when we were playing games. He probably threw it in there hundreds of times, and it worked fine for years.

I don't know why but this reminds me of how we picture-framed my friend's old Wifi chip after replacing it, because that chip failing all the time was basically the core feature of our group's gaming sessions.

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

#70

Post by karmakaze »

Way back I had a friend that wanted his (maybe) "Sargon" chess program to run faster. Luckily it was on the Atari 8-bit and I knew a thing or two. The program seemed to use standard b/w hires graphics nothing super fancy, so I thought I could make a pre-boot loader.

The theory was that the Atari spends a good chunk (30%) of its time for display memory access. That can be disabled (making a black screen) and re-enabled. My pre-boot program installed a vertical blank interrupt handler reading the 2nd joystick port: up/down for display on/off. After installing the handler, the program waited for diskette swap and pretended to be the original program loader reading the disk layout into memory and jumping to the start. Worked like a charm first go.

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