At amazon is was common to just restart the servers every 100k requests to deal with unsolved memory leaks.
Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
181–190 of 289 posts
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use AutoHotKey to remap it to launch TotalCommander.
Does AutoHotKey function on the login screen?
Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#183Here's a late version of Encarta. https://goo.gl/6uX4Qu Do you see that plain-looking dropdown menu with the rounded orange highlights? That is Internet Explorer. Just this one menu. It's an in-process instance of Trident, IEs old HTML rendering engine. So that little window is the equivalent of somthing like chromium embedded. I don't know why that menu is an instance of IE's HTML renderer. Someone wanted to style i…
Glass/gradients was a baaaad trend in visual styles. Very plastic, cheap looking.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#184I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…
this was an awesome way to start my Sunday, thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#185Not claiming "weirdest" by reading the other comments - but this is one off the top of my head. Application A is multi-threaded, huge, hardly maintained. It also constantly crashes. Would've probably taken a few ace C++ programmers quite a while to iron them all out. Solution? Write a custom watch-dog application that restarts it once it crashed. (This was on Windows, and a while ago. Being a *nix guy myself, I've no…
Sounds ridiculous until you realise they probably weren't given the proper time to ever fix it. What's better at that point? Restart it until it doesn't crash at a significant performance penalty, or just leave it broken?
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#186As a consultant I got a job from a major public company to fix a new touchscreen based in-car dashboard they had built. It was a web app running on a cheap android tablet full screen. The thing worked well, they said, except that it would get stuck in demo mode, and you couldn’t switch out of it. They’d paid an overseas contractor a significant sum to build this and eventually fired them when they got stuck at this p…
"Upon opening the code I discovered the entire program was a carefully constructed slide show with hundreds of jpgs in a jQuery carousel and some magic click areas coded in to jump the user between slides."
Based on my narrow understanding of "standard issue practices" in car dashboard UI:s workflows, this was a common pattern at least at one major German automobile company. Static views and transition rules between them.
I was a bit involved in dashboard software a decade ago and was really surprised to learn this.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#187I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.
I've mapped my caps key to ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ ｔｅｘｔ, initially for quick-response memeing but it turns out it's actually quite helpful for increasing expressiveness on various chat protocols.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#188A company I worked for in the early 2000's produced a reality tv series which was shot on an island about 1.5km out from the city shore. It needed a decent (but rather temporary) Internet connection and our company headquarters happened to be near by, so my colleagues set up a directional WiFi antenna pointed from the building's rooftop to the island. The total distance of the line-of-sight WiFi connection was about 2.5km and apparently it worked fine when the weather was okay.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any more interesting stories of working on game development for the PSX?
I only worked on the one title (NASCAR Racing) and so my war stories are limited, but I'll give you what I recall. Original dev boards were 3 full length ISA bus (IIRC) boards and were a PITA to get installed, all the IRQ conflicts resolved, etc. Later dev environment was a "blue PSX" (basically a production PSX with blue plastic that could run non-copy protected discs). I think the ISA boards had more memory than th…
Interesting story, I Played this game way-back-when. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do this, too. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to remove the caps lock key. I never used it in my 20 years of PC usages and I don't get why it's still there. Back in my CounterStrike gaming days I would also remove the Windows key because it would crash the game when accidentally pressed.
DON’T remove caps lock!!! Use it as an application switcher! Some of my most used shortcuts: Caps + C = Chrome Caps + S = Spotify Caps + A = Atom Caps + T = Terminal +1 for removing windows key if gaming
That's a really good idea. Most of my application switching needs are covered by the built-in Windows "Win+1 opens first icon on the taskbar, Win+2 opens the second...", but this could cover the lesser used ones like Outlook.