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Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#73

Editing a Minecraft save with sh and dd to resurrect my girlfriend's wolf.

Oh man, if Minecraft counts, I would say implementing a fully automated resource processing and storage system in FTB pre-Applied Energistics with Red Power and Buildcraft.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#74
I’m surprised and slightly disappointed that my memories don’t bring up a clear answer to this.

The hardest problems I’ve faced were never exactly solved, just moved past or muddled through. Things like loss of close friends and family, acknowledging my own limitations, and accepting the inertia of flawed institutions.

Any problem that eventually found a solution I remember as feeling relatively simple in retrospect.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#76

Fixing a SRAM 11 speed GX rear shifter on my mountain bike. I was on a downhill MTB holiday and fell off, snapping the thumb trigger on my rear gear shifter. Replacing the shifter is usually like a £30 part, but I was in an alpine resort in summer so the shops that stocked them were charging nearly £100! I had my tools and some super glue so sat down to repair it. The snapped part fixed in two minutes but getting tha…

I decided to dismantle my Saint shifter one day. Good fun. That big coiled spring got me.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#77
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you approach this problem and solve it?

Not OP, but it seems like Electrum maps the wallet seed to standard English words. The other thing that helps is that the redaction isn't complete. So what I would do is: 1. Estimate the possible locations of spaces (e.g., using OpenCV). 2. "Guess" certain letters based on what is visible above and below the black bar; these are your constraints. 3. Look up dictionary words that meet the constraints found in (2). 4.…

Yes this is generally the idea. Didn't know about OpenCV though. Was a font-matching and trial and error by hand in MS Notepad + some scripts to help brute force the thing kind of solution... Turns out there are actually at least a couple dozen possible solutions based on what is visible so some small amount of information was lost through the redaction, but not tons.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#79
Probably not hardest, but one that sticks in my mind was that I downloaded an old copy of Jedi Knight II onto my computer and was excited to play it again... but it crashed on launch. Or rather it would throw a modal dialog (complaining about graphics something-or-other) and go into a loop of system beeps.

So I attached to it with gdb... and started going down a rabbit hole of stack traces and assembly code. I don't remember ultimately what the problem was (I think the code had been (partially?) stripped of symbols) but I do remember ultimately flipping a bit in some conditional that finally got it to launch!

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