Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 510 posts

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

#351

Post by timbaboon »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #317
xxs wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe some incompetent people did it that way, but 1-bit transparency was very well possible with native Windows APIs in the 90s (see SetWindowRgn). Later on (starting with Windows 2000 IIRC) it was also possible to have semi-transparent (alpha-blended) regions.

It's not stupid if it works...

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

#352

Post by eps »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #137

I was pitching a “Slack” app five years before Slack was released. Everyone I pitched to thought it was stupid because people already used IRC.

Slack was an internal side project for something else they were working on, so they too weren't thinking much of it at first.

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

#353

Post by LeonB »

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…

Sedat, you’re a legend, and a machine, great to see you here or anywhere. Good luck with the legal challenges.

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

#354

Post by uxp8u61q »

zo1 wrote: post #257
rented_mule wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then open each of those documents 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…

Gosh this story makes me lament the state of our field. If the current gen of devs were to build this, it would all be done "on the cloud" where they can just throw compute at the problem, and as long as the cost was less than 5$ per month they wouldn't care. That's the problem of the product managers, marketing execs and VCs.

This lament is about as interesting as complaining about kids not knowing how to use rotary phones.

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

#355

Post by marginalia_nu »

I built a recipe detector. You can, you know, train some sort of AI model to do this like with fasttext, or maybe roll it old school and do naive bayesian inference, but as it turns out, you can also:

https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...

It works annoyingly well.

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

#356

Post by thesoursloth »

thesoursloth wrote: post #319
sedatk wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

additionally: if a nickname has spaces, we have to type "%20" instead of spaces in the links with "/@{{username}}" i've submitted an entry about this a few minutes ago. https://eksisozluk1999.com/entry/143247963

*months, not minutes. sorry for autocorrect (i wasn't using english keyboard.)

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

#357

Post by stephenr »

bongodongobob wrote: post #259
stephenr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said they should test for everything. OP's description suggests it was an error that's common to all the deployed instances that received the update, rather than some specific combination of environment and that deployment. It would have allowed them to run the same deployment locally and use physical access (serial, a display, sd card, whatever) to capture the error log. What they came up with is clever but…

No, they said some.

Emphasis is mine:

> We caught the issue almost instantly since we were watching the deploy, and were able to stop updates before any other devices picked it up. But those that already got it were down.

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

#358

Post by mavili »

sedatk wrote: post #222
mavili wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

It should be pretty straightforward for you to show you have any moderation whatsoever, I dont believe you do. The whole of the site is full of rubbish.

If I were the Turkish government I would never even do the favour by banning the site, cause that draws attention the site doesn't deserve. I dont care if it's most visited site whatever, it's just useless.

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

#359

Post by TonyTrapp »

constantly wrote: post #348
TonyTrapp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some incompetent people did it that way, but 1-bit transparency was very well possible with native Windows APIs in the 90s (see SetWindowRgn). Later on (starting with Windows 2000 IIRC) it was also possible to have semi-transparent (alpha-blended) regions.

In a thread about “if it’s not stupid if it works” you accuse people of doing something “incompetent” by doing something ostensibly “stupid but works” but totally miss on what was even possible “non-stupidly.” There feels like some form of irony here.

Yes, obviously there a grain of irony in the reply. ;)

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

#360

Post by smeej »

wodenokoto wrote: post #292
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?

Sure, but weakening the magnet lets it return to more or less "normal" functionality, not requiring you to reach over and stick a pin in a very small hole every time you want to change the disk.
Post reply on HN