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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?

#391

Post by 0xfeeddeadbeef »

yholio wrote: post #90

I somehow decided I needed to cheat to pass a certain exam because I was basically crap at memorizing stuff. So I used an analogue wireless headphone, an induction loop around my neck and a mobile phone. Since I lacked an accomplice to dictate, I read aloud the hundreds of pages and recorded myself, careful to preserve and properly serialize things like complex formulas. This was before the era of iPods and SDCard pl…

Crafty. Well done.

Similar (kind of) trick depicted in 1965 Russian comedy movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDn174Mf9PY

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

#392

Post by yread »

thirdsun wrote: post #389
yread wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made htts://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub to share interesting comments, feel free to add some

Your link is missing the p in https. An I agree, hnbestof sounds like a better name for the sub. Would love to see it become more popular.

It's a reference to /r/DepthHub - great Reddit comments

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

#393

Post by philpem »

Teaching a team of hardware engineers moonlighting as software guys to replace ZIP files and "version[1..n]_backup_2_reallyfinal.c" type filenames on a network share with proper version control.

Then static analysis and CI.

Then the supportive manager left, to be replaced with a new manager (one of the aforementioned hardware guys "promoted out of mischief) hellbent on going back to the "old, better way".

"Why should you get £1000 a year from capital expenditure just to keep our static analysis licence! You should write good code to begin with! Otherwise why did you get hired? Are you incompetent?"

Some problems are just unsolvable.

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

#394

Post by effie »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #384
effie wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like pouring sand into the gears of an engine: everything starts to break down. While true in general, cheating in that environment is also sometimes necessary to get on with your life unharmed. And sometimes cheating the system is actually regarded highly by the fellow citizens, because the people do not believe in the imposed system. Cheating is not beneficial to the system, but it often is to the people. No…

"And sometimes cheating the system is actually regarded highly by the fellow citizens, because the people do not believe in the imposed system. " If you live a totally corrupt system, maybe. But functional societies are based on the notion that cheating is bad, immoral, and nobody should do it. "Now, what is more ethical, doing what benefits the people or doing what benefits such system?" - ha ha ... this sounds like…

People who rob banks are not necessarily psychopaths. For a good (fictitious but convincing) example, see Toby Howard in the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_or_High_Water_(film) Robbing a bank is universally illegal, but it is not regarded as unethical in general.

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

#395

Post by simonbarker87 »

collyw wrote: post #357
simonbarker87 wrote: post #53

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…

Curious if your hourly rate at work works out at more than £28.5 per hour, as that's what your time would have cost. Saying that I imagine the satisfaction was worth it. (I do a lot of my own bike repairs and a 5 minute youtube video usually works out as closer to an hour or two when I try.)

I see where you are coming from but since I was already on holiday it would have been pure cost. It’s not like I could have spent that time earning money, I would have just come back from France feeling over charged for something that it turned out I could fix myself.

Very satisfying to do as well.

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

#396

Post by hycaria »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #17

Getting well with a genetic disorder while the world harangues me and accuses me of making that up. Next up: Figuring out how to talk to the world about it effectively. I'm not sure that's solvable. "Curing CF" seems easier.

It's just an hypothesis, but I think saying CF when you actually have an atypical form of it is a bit dishonest. I have no doubt that diet and lifestyle do wonders for many conditions including yours, but the CF everyone thinks about is the one discovered in infancy and the full set of symptoms, not the one with late onset (at an age which many CF patients do not even reach) and milder symptoms.

If you were willing to lift up that imprecision, I bet you wouldn't have such a hard welcome.

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

#397

Post by dangerface »

twtw wrote: post #146
StavrosK wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to learning than memorization.

There's more to exams than memorization too, and cheating because you don't like memorization is childish. If the exams really test only memorization, drop the class.

There is not more to exams than memorisation thats their only function, they don't teach then exam.

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

#398

Post by foldr »

effie wrote: post #367
steelframe wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the workplace, no amount of technical ability can compensate for a lack of ethics.

Cheating on an exam does not always mean one has 'lack of ethics'. It may mean the opposite - say, "my parents aren't paying out of their veins for me to waste time on this nonsense."

So drop out of college then. No-one is forcing you to take the exam.

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

#399

Post by foldr »

effie wrote: post #394
sonnyblarney wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And sometimes cheating the system is actually regarded highly by the fellow citizens, because the people do not believe in the imposed system. " If you live a totally corrupt system, maybe. But functional societies are based on the notion that cheating is bad, immoral, and nobody should do it. "Now, what is more ethical, doing what benefits the people or doing what benefits such system?" - ha ha ... this sounds like…

People who rob banks are not necessarily psychopaths. For a good (fictitious but convincing) example, see Toby Howard in the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_or_High_Water_(film) Robbing a bank is universally illegal, but it is not regarded as unethical in general.

>Robbing a bank is universally illegal, but it is not regarded as unethical in general

Erm, no, it is regarded as unethical by almost everyone except bank robbers.

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

#400

Post by m_ransing »

zerr wrote: post #319
herodotus wrote: post #197

When I was a CS prof, many, many years ago, our undergraduate lab had Macs with floppy disks. I asked the University to pay for installing 10MB Hard Drives in the Macs. I was asked to present my case to the deans council. At the meeting, I said that the students used the floppy to load their development environment. I said that, with a hard drive, it took 10 secs to load and be ready. With the floppy, I said it took…

I guess that trick would be harder to reproduce for my problem - bringing down compile times from 4 hours to 1 :)

In 4 hour duration, you can do some (or many) other thing. In 30 seconds, you can not, those 30 seconds are pure waste.
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