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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?

#281

Post by lemper »

throwaway914 wrote: post #260
dmazzoni wrote: post #254

In the early days of Google Chrome, I was tasked with making it work with Windows screen readers. Now, accessibility APIs on Windows were documented, but web browsers used a bunch of additional APIs that were poorly documented. Chrome's design was radically different than Firefox's and IE's, so it was a challenge to implement the APIs correctly. At first I was just trying to get it to work with completely static web…

That is a good story :) It makes me wonder what future Wayland protocol may enable clients/apps to advertise themselves as screen-reader capable.

[flagged]

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

#282

Post by jwoq9118 »

noduerme wrote: post #255
isoprophlex wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you always delimit your data fields in a text file with a unicode snowman Surely noone will ever use that character!

live and learn. It was the re-split when they saved the new products through my brilliant parser that royally fucked it all up. Genius that I was, I used "|" to separate attributes, but I also definitely used a double asterisk to mean something else. Nothing teaches you not to get clever better than screaming customers and abject failure. And having to find/replace a thousand asterisks to figure out which ones were m…

Early career chap over here. Awesome hearing stories like this. Those wild west days certainly have passed. We’ve got so much now to get us started as programmers that it almost robs us of learning experiences somehow.

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

#283

Post by sideshowb »

As a kid programming games in BBC basic on the Archimedes, I didn't know how to do graphics with things moving around smoothly, but I found some code for changing the sprite for the mouse pointer and moving it to a desired location on screen.

Guess how I implemented my main character.

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

#284

Post by hutzlibu »

stormking wrote: post #263
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.

I think it was meant as a joke, so for anyone else reading it, no it is not actually double-buffering.

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

#285

Post by hyperhopper »

nomilk wrote: post #85

Mine's getting command output out of docker. For long builds (I had one that took 4 hours), it was gutting to have it fail a long way in and not be able to see the output of the RUN commands for thorough debugging. So I devised a stupidly simple way: add && echo "asdfasdfsadf" after each RUN command. I mashed the keyboard each time to come up with some nonsense token. That way, docker would see RUN lines as different…

Why cant you echo a newly generated guid?

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

#286

Post by mkl »

YouWhy wrote: post #153
MBCook wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s horrible. I love it! I’m not quite sure I understand why it was GET though. No way of running something like fetch or (more likely) XMLHTTPRequest?

I think the OP (hat off!) needed a way to transfer data to the front-end of another application. Since there's no back end involved, the only available channel is the request URL

> Since there's no back end involved, the only available channel is the request URL

Not quite. I have a system that uses a custom userscript to create an extra button on certain webpages that, when clicked, scrapes some data from the current page and copies a lightly encoded version to the user's clipboard. They then switch to another webpage and paste it in a box.

I've also gotten data from place to place using scraping from temporary iframes (same site).

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

#288

Post by Maxion »

xxs wrote: post #261
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.

Ahh so THAT's how they did that!

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

#289

Post by BiteCode_dev »

In 2010, one of my client employee kept complaining the report she downloaded from our intranet app couldn't be opened.

It was only her machine. It worked on all others.

I looked at the file, and it was a tad smaller than on the other machines.

I disabled her anti-virus, it worked !

Realizing kaspersky was taking a bite at the report, I created a self signed tls certificate so the anti virus could read it.

Worked.

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

#290

Post by plugin-baby »

SCUSKU wrote: post #145
2024throwaway wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why remote work is so important. You could have been home the entire time.

To play devil's advocate, had OP not wanted to go home so badly Parkinson's Law would've kicked in and OP may have tried to do things the "right way" which may have taken much longer.

Also if the DB was on-prem, then the latency when connecting from home might have been too high for the hack to work.
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