Getting a ddos attack and just running a few iptables by hand mostly fixed it until upstream blocked it for us
Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
41–50 of 510 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#42My CPAP's onboard humidifier failed.
I ended up swapping it out to a generic in-line CPAP humidifier, but at the same time, realized I could partially automate the process of refilling the chamber (and not have to keep unhooking hoses) by adding an in-line oxygen tee, some aquarium plumbing, a check valve, and a 12 volt pump and switch.
In the morning I just hold a button and the tank magically refills itself ;)
Introducing Semi-Autofill(tm): https://i.ibb.co/NmDbVvw/autofill.png
(Also: The Dreamstation, while recalled, was personally de-foamed and repaired myself -- I don't trust Philips any further than I can throw them now. I now self-service my gear.)
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
At Fastmail the ops team we ran fail overs all the time just to get our failures so reliable they worked no matter what. Only once in my tenure did a fail over fail and in that case there was a --yolo flag
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#44I've been using sshuttle to create a VPN to my server. It's a wonderful abuse of ssh.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Temp…
I eventually switched to an ESP32 and added temperature graphing: https://imgur.com/a/VM7nD74 IIRC, I used an RTD that I had left over from a 3D printer upgrade, but an 18B20 would fine as well. A 10K NTC resistor might even be good enough. For what I needed (and I think for what you need), just fixing the sensor to the outside of the pipe [if metal] will give you a usable signal. That sensor was just metal HVAC tape…
The pipes are insulated and I didn't want to cut into that, but maybe a small hole for a sensor wouldn't be too bad.
But as you say, timer works good enough and that means little motivation to continue to work on it -- countless other projects await :)
BTW I've also tuned the timer to run for longer in the morning to get a hot shower ready.
Edit: nice dashboard, what are you using for the chart? I like the vintage look.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#46My mom's place (about 100 miles from me) has a water heater that's of an age where it could fail, so I put together a Pico W and a water sensor. I had it notify me daily just to make sure it was still working. And for reasons unknown, every 8 days it would stop notifying. A reboot would resolve it. We tried logging errors and having it report upon reboot but I wasn't versed enough with Pi to figure out anything more than it being an HTTP POST error. So I changed the code so when it got to that error instead of logging it would just reboot itself, and all has been smooth since.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#47As 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#48Launching 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 implemented recently just the same thing, but for SVG -> PNG conversion. I found that SVG rendering support is crap in every conversion tool and library I've tried. Apparently even Chrome has some basic features missing, when doing text on path for example. So far Selenium + headless Firefox performs the best ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#49When I was a teenager I had a friend who wanted to build a PC on a very limited budget, and she wanted it to be able to play The Sims 2. Well after much bargain hunting and throwing ideas around, we couldn’t find a way to afford every component we needed, but we were close, so we decided to forgo a case! Just put the motherboard on the desk with other components arrayed around it. Cables everywhere. The tricky part is we had no power button, but I showed her which pins to sort out with a paper clip, and it worked great.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#50I worked for a US media company that forced us to use a half-baked CMS from a Norwegian software company, with no apparent provisions in the contract for updates or support.
The CMS was absolutely terrible to work in. Just one small example: It forced every paragraph into a new textarea, so if you were editing a longer news story with 30 or 40 paragraphs, you had to work with 30 or 40 separate textareas.
So I basically built a shadow CMS on top of the crappy CMS, via a browser extension. It was slick, it increased productivity, it decreased frustration among the editors, and it solved a real business problem.
If we had had a security team, I'm sure they would have shut it down quickly. But the company didn't want to pay for that, either!