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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?

#291

Post by hutzlibu »

philwelch wrote: post #218
throwup238 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There’s a theory that cats mostly domesticated themselves; human settlements and their large grain stores proved to be a reliable source of rodents for them to hunt, and the humans tolerated the cats because they kept the rodent problem in check, but these cats would have lived a semi-domesticated lifestyle around human settlements without initially being kept as household pets. Maybe the feral cats of Istanbul are t…

When I was a kid, that still used to be the norm on farms. There were farm cats and house cats. The farm cats were there to kill rodents and otherwise minded their own buisness. You could not just take them up, they would have bitten you. I think this has gotten out of style, as I have not seen the division nowdays and all cats seem to be gotten tame.

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

#292

Post by wodenokoto »

Saigonautica wrote: post #256

Years back, there was a CDROM drive I really needed to work at the moment, but it was jammed shut. I could hear it trying to open, and failing. I reasoned that the motor holding it shut had mostly failed in some way, but could still exert some force. So I popped the cover off the drive, took out the magnet that holds it shut, cooked it on a gas stove for a few seconds, and put it back in. Th Curie temperature for a n…

Didn’t all cdrom drives have a pin-hole you could jam a needle into and manually open them?

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

#293

Post by nomilk »

hyperhopper wrote: post #285
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?

I had tried && openssl rand -base64 12 but docker assumes if the command hasn’t changed (even though it generates a new random value) then it can rely on the cache for that layer. A comment below the answer on stack overflow points out you could do the same thing using an environment variable (with guid or datetime to ensure no duplicates), that’s a nice approach

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

#295

Post by sedatk »

weinzierl wrote: post #275
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…

It should not have to be said, but (especially in in the West) we tend to forget about it: Turkey has more inhabitants than the most populous country in western Europe (Germany). Turkey is also significantly larger than the largest country in western Europe (France). When it comes to the number of Internet users it is on par with Germany and beats all other western European countries.

True. I think the number of Internet users in Turkey has surpassed 70 million. Eksi Sozluk used to receive 30+ million unique visitors monthly before it got banned.

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

#296

Post by anthk »

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.

Back in the day terminals under Linux did that to fake transparency: they just copied a chunk of the root window (where you put some wallpaper) as the terminal background and applied an alpha layer if the user wanted a translucid color.

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

#297

Post by explaininjs »

throwup238 wrote: post #151
pjot wrote: post #143

Earlier 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.

Would love to see that implemented here in USA. People in places like NYC love to catch and spay every cat they see, then go on to complain about too many rodents around.

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

#298

Post by ess3 »

As a kid I acquired my parent’s login to the school platform meaning I could call in sick myself. However one day I actually got sick so they had to call it in which means they would’ve seen all previous calls.

So I downloaded the HTML for all pages required for this exact flow and removed the previous sick days. I then changed my etc/hosts file, gave them my computer and prayed that they wouldn’t try to visit any other page than the ones I downloaded.

Worked like a charm. Later I called in sick myself.

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

#299

Post by hutzlibu »

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.

Any ideas on what the "right way" would be in this case? To me the solution seems the most straightforward.

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

#300

Post by Agentlien »

rented_mule wrote: post #78

15+ years ago, I was working on indexing gigabytes of text on a mobile CPU (before smart phones caused massive investment in such CPUs). Word normalization logic (e.g., sky/skies/sky's -> sky) was very slow, so I used a cache, which sped it up immensely. Conceptually the cache looked like {"sky": "sky", "skies": "sky", "sky's": "sky", "cats": "cat", ...}. I needed cache eviction logic as there was only 1 MB of RAM av…

This reminds me of something I encountered when working on surgical training simulators about ten years ago.

There was a function which needed to traverse a large (a few million vertices) mesh and, for each vertex, adjust its position to minimise some measurement.

The original code, written by a colleague, just calculated in which direction to move it and then, in a loop, made changes of decreasing magnitude until it got close enough.

This function was part of a performance bottleneck we had to solve, so I asked my colleague why he hadn't solved it analytically. He shrugged and said he hadn't bothered because this worked.

So, I rewrote it, calculating the exact change needed and removing the loop. My code took twice as long. After analysing why, I realised with his heuristic most triangles required only 1 iteration and only a handful required at most 3. This was less work than the analytical solution which required a bunch of math including a square root.

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