Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by progbits » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:31 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #5

I had an old boiler that would sometimes trip and lock out the heat until someone went down and power cycled it. (It was its own monstrous hack of a gas burner fitted to a 1950s oil boiler and I think a flame proving sensor was bad.) Every time it happened, it made for a long heat up cycle to warm the water and rads and eventually the house. So I built an Arduino controlled NC relay that removed power for 1 minute ou…

I have a similar one.

Our boiler has a pump to cycle hot water around the house - this makes it so you get warm water right away when you turn on a faucet and also prevents pipes in exterior walls from freezing in the winter.

This stopped working, the pump is fine but the boiler was no longer triggering it.

I just wired up mains through an esp32 relay board to the pump and configured a regular timer via esphome.

Temperature based logic would be even better but I didn't find a good way to measure pipe temperature yet.

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

#22

Post by smallpipe » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:31 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #5

I had an old boiler that would sometimes trip and lock out the heat until someone went down and power cycled it. (It was its own monstrous hack of a gas burner fitted to a 1950s oil boiler and I think a flame proving sensor was bad.) Every time it happened, it made for a long heat up cycle to warm the water and rads and eventually the house. So I built an Arduino controlled NC relay that removed power for 1 minute ou…

Couldn’t that be achieved with a mechanical timer switch and zero lines of code ?

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

#23

Post by naikrovek » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:32 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #7

I worked at a startup where the core backend was 1 giant serverless Function. For error handling and recovery, the Function ran in a while loop. For all its faults, it worked and it was generating revenue. Enough that the startup got to a sizable Series A. That experience completely changed how I think about writing code at startups.

this is great. if you look at older game source code you find things like this. things that we view as horrible hacks which are both extremely stable and perform well.

i see no reason to stop using these types of solutions, when appropriate.

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

#24

Post by quickthrower2 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:33 PM UTC

YaBa wrote: post #15

A bunch of SQL triggers and procedures to overcome software limitations and workaround certain bugs which the developers won't fix (3rd party app).

Reminds me when we started implementing features as an Oracle trigger. It was meant to be “just a trigger” but then there are so many edge cases when you do an end—run around application code that it took a couple of week total. Boss was like “couple of weeks for a trigger!”

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

#25

Post by btzs » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:33 PM UTC

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.

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

#26

Post by rolisz » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:34 PM UTC

cr3ative wrote: post #18

simonbarker87 wrote: post #12

I had a GCP Cloud Run function that rendered videos. It was fine for one video per request but after that it slowed to a crawl and needed to shut down to clear out whatever was wrong. I assume a memory leak in MoviePy? Spent a couple of days looking at multiple options and trying different things, in the end I just duplicated the service so I had three of them and rotated which one we sent video renders to and do eac…

This reminds me of a service I recently found that was routinely crashing out and being restarted automatically. I fixed the crash, but it turns out it had ALWAYS been crashing on a reliable schedule - and keeping the service alive longer created a plethora of other issues, memory leaks being just one of them. That was a structural crash and I should not have addressed it.

How many memory leaks were discovered only during the winter code freeze, because there were no pushes being done, so no server restarts

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

#27

Post by paulgb » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:35 PM UTC

I used a WiFi smart switch and a USB thermometer to make a sous vide cooker. I plugged a slow cooker into the smart socket, put the thermometer in it, and wrote a program to turn the switch on/off depending on the temperature the thermometer registered.

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

#28

Post by falcor84 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:36 PM UTC

In a previous role, I automated an unholy amount of business processes by adding doGet() / doPost() handlers to expose google sheets as basic web services. It's a bit slow for large sheets, but was quite nice to work with and troubleshoot, and the built-in history in google sheets allowed me to experiment with little risk of data loss/corruption.

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

#29

Post by spacecadet » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:37 PM UTC

Define works? Ive seen stupid and not working but convinced it's working until proven otherwise...

I use to work part time restoring Fiat, Porsche, and VW rares for an old head out in the mid west, lots of "stupid but works" in those old cars... Mercedes Benz once (1980s or so) employed glass containers to solve for fuel pressure problems. Insane coolant loop designs or early Fuel Injection systems that develop "Ghosts" lol...

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

#30

Post by tomduncalf » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:38 PM UTC

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.

Hahah this is amazing!