Almost anything with autohotkey. Never outside of my own pc though.
Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
381–390 of 510 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
But docks work in a different way, such as XRender or just a PNG with an alpha layer. Much less expensive than copying a chunk of the backdrop and then "pasted" at your terminal background. Often docks will be able to show you the underlying windows behind it, even without compositing. But under the terminal with fake transparency you couldn't see another window behind it, just the backdrop part. I think X11 had some…
Why is it less expensive? Sounds like the exact same operation, except the OS is doing it.
No. XRender worked in a different way than ATerm/Eterm.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#383I once unfroze a pipe by packing Hot Hands hand warmers around it and burying it in horse poop.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#384Fixing a CD drive with Polish Kielbasa: The CD drive in my first computer broke. We couldn't afford to get a new one, and after almost a year of using floppies I got a bit tired of having to carry them across the mountains every time I wanted play a new game. (context: I lived in a small village in southern Poland at the time -- imagine Twin Peaks, but with fewer people and bigger hills). Sometimes getting a copy of…
Animal fats make a very good lubricant if the temperature of the parts doesn't rise too high.
Once upon a time, car transmissions used whale oil.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#385Earlier 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.
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.
Rodents are an issue of trash and food left around, not a problem of not enough cats.
Cats shit in my garden and leave dead songbirds where I grow food. No, we don’t need more cats.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#386...an awful one for posterity: an abomination of vim + awk as a proto-protocol plus UI editor. Basically awk would match `/^FOO / { system("foo.exe $0") }` ...you could get pretty darned far with that mechanism, for near minimal amounts of code. Any time you pressed "enter" on a line of text in vim, it'd get thrown through that awk script. If a line matched a command matched in the awk file (think GET, POST, SEARCH,…
You reinvented Acme in vi.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#387I was working on a graphing platform for a bank, back in the days of Adobe Flash. We were replacing server-rendered static charts with charts rendered in Flex, but as we neared completion and entered testing the client noticed an issue: they had a batch job that generated PDF reports containing charts, but the PDF still used the old server-generated charts!
Given that the new charts were rendered on the client, this seemed to be an impossible ask -- certainly the client didn't expect us to be able to solve it, once they realised their mistake.
I bodged together the standalone Flash player with a headless XServer and some extra logic in Flex, so it would repeatedly hit an endpoint, render a chart with the data returned, then post it back up to another endpoint. It took a couple of rounds of back-and-forth with their IT folk, but it worked! And we heard a couple of years later that it was still running happily in production.
For several years I left "Adobe Flex" off my resume, I hope it's dead enough now that I can safely admit to having known how to develop for it. I'm still quite proud of having invented the monstrosity that was "Server-side Flash".
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fake transparency is still a thing, for desktops without compositor. Not only in terminals, but also in docks.
But docks work in a different way, such as XRender or just a PNG with an alpha layer. Much less expensive than copying a chunk of the backdrop and then "pasted" at your terminal background. Often docks will be able to show you the underlying windows behind it, even without compositing. But under the terminal with fake transparency you couldn't see another window behind it, just the backdrop part. I think X11 had some…
From my experience this is wrong. If you set a transparent background in wxwidgets/gtk it will show you a grey background. And gtk3 even removed the ability to query the x background pixmap. So if there is better support for this at an X level, this is not available above.
See https://github.com/onli/simdock/issues/11, and if there really are good alternative solutions I'd be happy for some help.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#389I was working on a trading system at a bank that didn't have automated deployments so we relied on the Ops team to manually release code to production on our behalf. Release plans had to be documented in MS Word with step-by-step instructions that the Ops team would literally copy and paste into a terminal. It was the worst kind of Sarbanes-Oxley separation of duties theatre.
This system was built in Java and was launched using a simple shell script that used a `for` loop to build the classpath by looping over all the JARs in the lib folder and appending them to a shell variable.
With the release "process" in mind, hotfixes and patches had to be kept as simple as possible. To release a hotfix we would JAR up the one or two classes that needed to be patched and into a single JAR file, then modify the startup script to pre-pend that JAR file to the classpath so that the patched classes were found first, taking advantage of Java's classpath loading algorithm.
Re: Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a European I'd like to know how our numbers are differently formatted to yours! (Did you mean dates? The never ending source of pain!)
To me (USA) 1,000 is one thousand and 1.000 is one, and to me (Italian) 1,000 is one and 1.000 is one thousand :)
Ahh, that one. Do'h!