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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?

#261

Post by xxs »

sowbug wrote: post #210

Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…

The thing (screenshot and all) was routine done in the 90s with all those fancy non-rectangular applications/demos/launchers [usually available on CDs that came w/ magazines]. They had transparent/alpha zones that copied the screen under them.

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

#262

Post by amiga-workbench »

justusthane wrote: post #115
DamnInteresting wrote: post #75

Around 16 years ago, Wordpress security was just not up to snuff yet, and my popular Wordpress-based site kept getting hacked by pharmaceutical spammers and the like. After several such incidents, I wrote a "wrapper" that loaded before Wordpress to scrutinize incoming requests before a lick of Wordpress code was executed. It had blacklists, whitelists, automatic temporary IP blocking, and that sort of thing. There wa…

When you say it loaded before Wordpress loaded, what exactly does that mean? Was it a proxy that handled incoming requests and passed them off to Wordpress?

I imagine just including the code in index.php before the bootstrapping process actually loads up Wordpress for real. That way you could just halt the script early after noticing a funny request.

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

#263

Post by stormking »

sowbug wrote: post #210

Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…

That's called double-buffering.

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

#264

Post by bmitc »

There was once an API for an instrument, I believe using COM, that was primarily designed to build an interface with. It had very limited actual functionality to get data from the API, whereas most data was simply to be displayed on user interface elements. We needed a piece of data, programmatically to do something with, that was only available via a user interface element. So I wrote and trained a vision application that would OCR the numeric indicator by taking a programmatic screenshot of the user interface element and then return the value. So at the top level, one simply made a function call that returned a number, but below, it was doing the UI display (hidden), screenshotting a region of the hidden window, OCRing it, and then returning the number.

You'd be surprised at the hacks required when interacting with scientific instrumentation. I am not a hacker at heart, but I do take pride when I'm able to wrap a hack such that you'd never know what it was doing underneath. Leaky hacks are no fun.

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

#265

Post by simonbarker87 »

seer wrote: post #111
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…

Hah welcome to cloudrun! I was evaluating it a few years ago to host some internal corporate app. It worked great and was way easier to deploy than k8s setups. However after some testing we found out that the core logic of the app - a long running process, would just crawl to a halt after some time. It turned out google wanted to push you to use their (paid) queue / pubsub solutions, but they didn’t want it to be _to…

Ah, that would make sense! It was always the second video being processed at about the same amount of time through it. Thanks

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

#266

Post by yard2010 »

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…

Why do dictators love to ruin old stuff?

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

#267

Post by yard2010 »

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]

Don't try to normalize Aladdin by saying everything he does is Aladdin. He is such an Aladdin you can't defend him by saying he's Aladdin!!

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

#268

Post by yard2010 »

system2 wrote: post #220
sedatk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's hope things change after 2028. Optum kardesim.

I don't think that "elections" change the result of dictatorship
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