Later I replaced F:\login.exe with my own version written in Turbo Pascal to get the edge over a nemesis or two. :-D
Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
211–220 of 510 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#212I used to work at a small company. We had a few remote embedded devices that did work and sent data back to the mothership over the internet. Their firmware could be remotely updated, but we were always very careful. Well one day a mistake was finally made. Some of the devices went into a sort of loop. They’d start running the important process, something would go wrong, and they’d just retry every few minutes. We ca…
Your company had remote embedded devices but didn't keep one "locally" for debugging issues?
Your question comes down to "Why didn't you just deploy bug free code using perfect processes? That's what I always do."
I mean, cmon.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#213I 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?
#214Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#215All of these other anecdotes are (understandably) sysadmin or developer-related, though I have a couple very stupid ones that are completely physical and mechanical. My first residential plumbing fix was a simple unclogging of a shower drain, which was accomplished by putting a couple inches of water in the tub and blasting repeatedly into the drain with a pneumatic cannon. The splatters hit the ceiling, but it was t…
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> since you can check again for the actual matches. Can you explain this?
An aggressive stemmer might stem both "generic" and "general" to "gener". Then if your query is "what documents contain 'generic'?", you look in the index for "gener" and then open each of those documents and check if it actually has "generic" using a stricter stemmer (that accepts generic{,s}, genericness{,es}, genericit{y,ies}, generically ... this is a bit of a bad example since they all have the prefix directly).…
That alone ruled out doing anything like this on the device I'm talking about. The goal, which we reached, was to be able to search 1,000 documents in 5 seconds. Opening a document took nearly a second given the speed of our storage (a few KB/s). The search itself took about a second, and then we'd open up just enough of the documents to construct search result snippets as you paged through them.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#217Me: oh yeah, I just hacked it together and never finished cleaning it up to make sense and be adaptable. Here's enough context to hack it again quickly, or if you have time here's my old notes on how to do it right.
.
I.e., stupid things that seem to work for now, tend to turn into technical debt later.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using Apple’s translate function I was able to read many of the posts - very interesting to see the differences between American and Turkish social media. There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that
> There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that Turks have a wonderful relationship with cats, especially in Istanbul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cats_in_Istanbul There is a nationwide no-catch and no-kill policy for feral cats.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#219I only noticed after business hours that it is necessary to use DOS software build by the professor, and it is impossible to buy it during the weekends. It was available in the computer rooms, but I had no access. I got a copy of the SW in the net, but needed a license key. It was based on a challenge. Luckily I had a friend who had the SW, and could give me a sample license key. I figured the challange would be based on time, and I was right, it was using epoch as a seed. So I made a script that booted a DOS box, and brute forced one license key a time. It took me a few hours but I succeeded in cracking the SW so I could start the excercise.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason why they are not taking the 1999 version of the domain down?
Because the platform switched to it only last week, no other reason. It was on eksisozluk1923.com before that. The moment this new domain catches up on popularity, they would find an arbitrary reason to ban that too.