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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?

#371

Post by Levitz »

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.

I know little about plumbing, don't you risk breaking something by exerting pressure on the installation?

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

#372

Post by fourfour3 »

tbensky wrote: post #253

Back in the early days of Linux (~1993) or so, I was trying to convince my workgroup in grad. school that Linux was a nice alternative for running our numerical simulations (in C). But I knew I had to get the graphics working, since no one wanted to use a text-only interface. It was a Dell PC using some graphics card; the word 'tulip' is in the fog of my memory. The graphics driver was not loading, giving some error…

tulip is a set of DEC ethernet controllers that are from about the right time as your anecdote :)

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

#373

Post by mcherm »

tonyarkles wrote: post #209
whartung wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted a Smalltalk VM that did this. Eternally persistent VM, without having to "save". It just "lives". Go ahead, map a 10GB or 100GB file to the VM and go at it. Imagine your entire email history (everyone seems to have large email histories) in the "email array", all as ST objects. Just as an example. Is that "good"? I dunno. But, simply, there is no impedance mismatch. There's no persistence layer, yo…

That is so wonderfully fascinating to me. You could just download a file into a variable and when that variable goes out of scope/has no more references it’d just be automatically “deleted”. Since there’s no longer a concrete “thing” called a file, you can organize them however you want and with whatever “metadata” you want by having a dict with the metadata you want and some convention like :file as the key that poi…

So, I've occasionally played around with a language that pretty nearly does this.

Mumps is a language developed in 1967, and it is still in use in a few places including the company where I work.

The language is old enough that the first version of it has "if" but no "else". When they added "else" later on it was via a hack worthy of this post: the "if" statement simply set a global variable and the new "else" statement checked that. As a result, "if-else" worked fine but only so long as you don't use another "if" nested within the first "if" clause (since that would clobber the global variable). That was "good enough" and now 50 years later you still can't nest "if" statements without breaking "else".

But this very old language had one brilliant idea: persistence that works very much the way you describe. Any variable whose name begins with "^" is persisted -- it is like a global variable which is global, not just to this routine but to all of the times we execute the program.

It is typical to create single variables that contain a large structure (eg: a huge list with an entry for each customer, indexed by their ID, where the entry contains all sorts of data about the customer); we call these "tables" because they work very much like DB tables but are vastly simpler to access. There's no "loading" or impedance mismatch... just refer to a variable.

Interestingly, the actual implementation in modern day uses a database underneath, and we DO play with things like the commit policy on the database for performance optimization. So in practice the implementation isn't as simple as what you imply.

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

#374

Post by sim7c00 »

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…

a lot of my debugging involves just echo or print 'hello-N' tokens. some systems just need this :D love it. "hello-9". yay it almost worked xD.

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

#375

Post by Narciss »

Mr_Twinkles wrote: post #279

I once had a CD that I really needed to make a backup of, but it was scratched to hell and truly unreadable. I put it in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, and presto: the CD was readable for a while, letting me back up the files. It'd cool off and become unreadable again, but I'd just put it back on the stove and repeat until I had all of the data.

Wow, was not aware of this hack. Really cool! (no pun intended)

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

#376

Post by noduerme »

jwoq9118 wrote: post #282
noduerme wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hah. Well you always need to just learn new things. That's what my life taught me.

Check it out. Year is 1999 or so - [edit: scram that, more like 2001] and I'm working at a Starbucks on my laptop. Mind you, wifi does not exist. Having a color laptop is sort of posh. One other person who shows up there every day, this kid Jon who's my same age, he's got a laptop. We end up talking. No one even has a cell phone.

Jon's my age and he's writing PHP scripts. So am I. I have a client I built a website for that needs an online store - they sell custom baby blankets and car seat covers. They want a store where you can choose your interior fabric and exterior fabric for each item, and see a preview. They have 10 interior and 20 exterior fabrics. They sew these blankets by hand for each request, for like $100 each. This is a huge job at the time... it pays something like $4000 for me to write the store from scratch. (I'd easily charge $60,000 now for it). First I have to mock up 200 combinations in photoshop?... so instead I write a script that previews the exterior and interior fabrics. Then I write a back-end in PHP to let them upload each fabric and combine them.

One day I'm sitting at the next table to Jon (he was working on a game at the time, I think - fuck, who knows, we were both 18 year old drop outs) - and I showed him how I wrote these fabric combinations to text files. And he was like... "Dude, have you tried SQL? It's AMAZING!" And I was like, "what the fuck is SQL?"

Yes, people used to pay idiots like us to build their websites. I'm still sort of proud of a lot of shit I got to do back then. But I am thankful to Jon that he introduced me to SQL when I was at the time trying to invent databases from scratch with fopen('r') and fopen('w') and hand-built parsers ;)

[edit] Just one little thing I'd note my friend: If you have a brain, it's always the wild west. Those jobs that make you create something from scratch, they haven't evaporated. Sure, it helps to know newer technologies, but the more important thing is being sure you can do what they're asking for, and then figure out a way to do it. This is the hacker ethos.

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

#377

Post by wholinator2 »

mavili wrote: post #358
sedatk wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, whenever we enter an evidence war like this we must go back to the old standard. The burden of proof is on the accuser. It has to be. If the burden of proof is always on the defendant, all you need is 30 people making accusations and it becomes impossible to defend against. It's basically a legal DDOS.

Also, i think every logical person can see that its much much easier to provide a single example of a lack of moderation than it is nebulous "prove you have moderation". What kind of standard do you have for that and how do we know you're not going to shift the goalpost the moment they bring you what you ask for. An example is an example is an example. Provide your proof or cease accusations. I've seen this argument many times in my country, always used to shut down free expression and enforce repression. There's great books and videos on logical fallacies out there

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

#379

Post by francocalvo »

mavili wrote: post #358
sedatk wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reframing what you just said, you think people should prove they are innocent against any accusation because it would be "pretty straightforward"?

Either you like authoritarian governments or you have it in for this website (or both?)

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

#380

Post by phanimahesh »

rudasn wrote: post #31

Launching a headless browser just to generate some PDFs. Turns out, if you want to turn html+css into pdfs quickly, doing via a browser engine is a "works really well" story.

This also happens to be the easiest path. There are other options but no good ones
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