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

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

#221

Post by anon_cow1111 »

sowbug wrote: post #215
anon_cow1111 wrote: post #204

All 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…

For those without a pneumatic cannon, look for a "drain bladder" that attaches to a garden hose. Costs about $10. Mine has never failed me.

*Note for those with a drain bladder, it will be much safer and more practical than blasting something with a cannon, but not as much fun as blasting something with a cannon.

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

#222

Post by sedatk »

mavili wrote: post #213
sedatk wrote: post #131

I 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…

[flagged]

Among the millions of entries on the platform, not one single piece of content on the platform was presented as evidence for the ban decisions. Just ambiguous words or false claims.

Shouldn't it be straightforward to prove that Eksi Sozluk lacks "meaningful moderation"? Shouldn't it be a requirement for such a drastic action like banning the whole web site?

Twitter produces orders of magnitude more disinformation in volume, amplified way faster and way broader too, yet they don't get any ban from Turkey whatsoever. How do you explain this kind of double standard?

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

#224

Post by blub »

anon_cow1111 wrote: post #204

All 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…

I was kind of scared to read until the end. :)

How did you cap them so that the caps didn’t get blown off by the pressure?

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

#225

Post by noduerme »

sedatk wrote: post #203
HaZeust wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy to see you! Some time ago, I was actually looking to add Eksi to Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) since several users reached out and wanted to add it alongside their other platforms to share on their profile, but we couldn't find out the URL convention for user profile feeds! It seemed to be " https://eksisozluk1999.com/{{username}}--{{7 digit value}}", but we couldn't find any rhyme or reason to the 7 digits. Are…

User profiles are actually stored like https://eksisozluk1999.com/biri/{{username} }. "/@{{username}}" also redirects to "/biri/{{username}}". You shouldn't need numbers at all. The numbers are only at the end of topic titles. They are title id's (sequential integers assigned when they're created) to disambiguate conflicting Latinized forms of Turkish words.

back in 1999 or so, I wrote an online shopping site this way, all the data stored as text files (one per category, with many items in my case ... I was 18 years old and had no idea about databases). The site ran smoothly for almost a year until the customer used "*" in the name of a product... which was the character by which all the product data in the text files data was split...

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

#226

Post by ivolimmen »

Pentium machines where just available on the market. I just stared working for a company and some customers started calling that their new machines could not run FoxPro with the applications we build for them. When running FoxPro it would crash with the message: "Division by zero". Nobody knew how to fix the issue (also no word from Microsoft or Intel). I told the customers to use SLOWDOWN.COM a tool I used to run the Digger game on 286 machines and that also worked for more modern machines. Customers where happy and my employer was baffled.

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

#227

Post by shw1n »

My wife was pregnant and tired of doing cold video outreach for our recruiting business, so I wrote a python script that took her best video and just spliced in audio of her saying different people’s names and LinkedIn profiles.

To hide the lips not matching the audio, she did a little wave that covered her mouth at just the right time.

Example: https://www.loom.com/share/3162a767905c422b8fd423f7448e16f8

It ended up working so well it generated us over $500k in new business

And I ended up turning it into a SaaS (https://dopplio.com)

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

#228

Post by al_borland »

I was given a spreadsheet with a bunch of data and told I needed to use that data to make a couple thousand Outlook email templates.

We started out having interns do it, but it was taking too long and they were making a lot of mistakes. I ended up writing an AutoHotKey script to copy stuff out of Excel, switch to Outlook, then build the template and save it in the specified format. It required finding a lot of obscure keyboard shortcuts to make it all work, but it got the job done. It was still a bit manual to run, as it was too fragile to let it all go in one go, and I had to watch it. But it turned days or weeks of tedious work into something that only took a few hours once the script was done.

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

#229

Post by gia_ferrari »

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.

Once my phone died from a cracked solder joint. I had cold veggie sausages in the hotel room fridge. Holding my phone against the sausages let me grab a couple more files off of it. Saved my OTP keys that way (I've fixed my backups now :) )

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

#230

Post by speedgoose »

taneq wrote: post #160
brysonreece wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. How do design decisions get made that result in these types of situations in the first place?

Someone says "hey if we had 900GB of RAM we could make a lot of money" and then someone else says "that's ridiculous and impossib- hang on a minute" and scurries off to hack together some tech heresy over their lunch break.

By the way, you can find single servers with 32TB of ram nowadays.
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