I used SQLite for coordination between processes. It was a huge Python application that originally used the multiprocessing library and had to be migrated to Rust. In hindsight, it would have been better to use a local HTTP server. Seemed like overkill at the time.
Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
161–170 of 510 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#162I figured out a way to have a desktop computer on the intranet, a python script to scrape lotus notes database and some way to push all this data to Teams list every 5-10 mins. Eventually the teams api team shut my access but fwiw I managed to get the list to sync with a teams channel for few months straight. Hacky, stupid and dumb. that’s how everyone could check the status without needing to open an app.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Old games also didn't use a database, they saved everything in a giant text file. I'm not sure if they were "extremely stable" though. Like Myspace, it might only work up until a certain point. What kills stuff is usually going viral.
I think you maybe underestimate the utility and reliability of flat text files on a filesystem. If you don’t trust a filesystem, you can’t trust anything that uses one. Flat files don’t scale past a certain point, but that point is way higher than most believe it is.
And "fork off a new process just to do the save" helps move that point farther away.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#164Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#165`envsubst` on a k8s manifest, for templating. The space for templating/dynamic k8s manifests is complex, needlessly so I felt. But this... just works. It has been running in CI for a couple months now, deploying to prod. I'm sure the day that breaks down will come, but it's not here yet.
I’ve been working on the same thing for a few months now.
Not only is it more customizable / less complicated than helm / other solutions, but GNU gettext is almost 30?! years old at this point, and environment variables are probably realistically double that age. They aint going anywhere anytime soon.
Plus I feel that more complex logic removes value from the configs we are building, and so am not interested in many other tools.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#166Anyway, we eventually developed a feature that allowed the application to copy out the lab process and equipment list to a separate database, zip it up, and FTP it to a server. It would also export a CSV file with the name of the lab, salesperson, date of sale, and other searchable information and FTP that up too. I wrote a "web service" (this was late 90s, before that term was cool) that would collect up these CSV files, aggregate them in one big CSV file, and then from within that application that CSV file could be searched and the appropriate ZIP file downloaded and merged with the local database. It was written in Perl and ran as a CGI script on some internal Windows NT machine's IIS instance.
It was janky as all get-out, but it worked and we did it a couple of years before the big web services mania hit.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#167I created the most popular Turkish social platform, Eksi Sozluk, using a single plaintext file as its content database back in 1999. It had taken me only three hours to get it up and running without any web frameworks or anything. It was just an EXE written in Delphi. The platform's still up albeit running on .NET/MySQL now and getting banned by Erdogan government for baseless or false reasons (like "national securit…
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#168I wanted a smart thermostat but my 30 year old natural gas heater didn‘t support them. I only had a wheel which I could turn to set the temperature. So I took double sided tape, stuck a plastic gear on the wheel and put a servo on with another gear on the side, connected to a raspberry pi, that would turn the wheel when my phone would enter a geofence around the flat. Picture: https://ibb.co/nDvwndp I even had a bash…
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#169I created the most popular Turkish social platform, Eksi Sozluk, using a single plaintext file as its content database back in 1999. It had taken me only three hours to get it up and running without any web frameworks or anything. It was just an EXE written in Delphi. The platform's still up albeit running on .NET/MySQL now and getting banned by Erdogan government for baseless or false reasons (like "national securit…
How did you make a Windows executable work on the web?
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#170I created the most popular Turkish social platform, Eksi Sozluk, using a single plaintext file as its content database back in 1999. It had taken me only three hours to get it up and running without any web frameworks or anything. It was just an EXE written in Delphi. The platform's still up albeit running on .NET/MySQL now and getting banned by Erdogan government for baseless or false reasons (like "national securit…
How did you make a Windows executable work on the web?
Here is a very simple example from the original sources: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi/blob/master/hede.pas