Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by zblesk » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #286

YouWhy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scra…

That guess was actually quite close. The target system does support the GET way out of the box as a way to pre-fill data into a form; but only over GET.

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

#422

Post by MBCook » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #357

bongodongobob wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re correct. I think every box that got it started having problems (or at least most), the only reason any were still up is that updates were scattered in case of think kind of incident (and to avoid hammering out poor little server).

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

#423

Post by gavinray » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

menage wrote: post #193

At Google almost 20 years ago, a bunch of our machines (possibly with slightly bespoke CPUs?) were behaving oddly. These machines were mostly in use for serving Google's web index, so almost the entire RAM was devoted to index data; the indexserver processes were designed to be robust against hardware failure, and if they noticed any kind of corruption they'd dump and reload their data. We noticed that they were dump…

I have a burning desire to know what was going on here -- fascinating.

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

#424

Post by gavinray » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #75

Around 16 years ago, Wordpress security was just not up to snuff yet, and my popular Wordpress-based site kept getting hacked by pharmaceutical spammers and the like. After several such incidents, I wrote a "wrapper" that loaded before Wordpress to scrutinize incoming requests before a lick of Wordpress code was executed. It had blacklists, whitelists, automatic temporary IP blocking, and that sort of thing. There wa…

Hey just a thought:

16 years is a long time, many of those shell dashboard sources are probably lost.

It'd be interesting to upload them somewhere as a "historical museum" of sorts.

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

#425

Post by trws » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

Running the largest workload I’ve ever personally launched (4,200 nodes, 144 cores each, 16,000 simultaneous jobs with a mix of one 1,000 node cpu job, 1 AI selection service on one node, about 3,200 nodes worth of 4-core cpu input pre-processing jobs and 4 GPU jobs per node co-located with all the CPU stuff) at 2am the day of the deadline for something about 50 of us had been working on for most of a year, realizing something was set wrong in the launcher. It was our last chance for a full run, we couldn’t start it over or try again, and it was going to fail because of a single runtime value.

I attached gdb to the launcher, “print =” and detached. The run started going about 10 times faster and we got the whole thing done. Crazy, dangerous, but it worked.

Question also made me think of the last-minute change we needed to make to a database’s structure to avoid about 6 million lost user updates when all DB admins were out with no password. That was a fun one too. Not sure I should admit how we managed it.

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

#426

Post by pomatic » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

It's the early 90's. A large regional Theatre wants to migrate their billing and customer contact data - all of which is held on an ancient computer the size of a desk to a shiny 286 based PC. Only the proprietary database management application frontend was available; there was no documentation, no programming tools or anything similar, the equipment was just too old (and the internet was still in its infancy, it'd be much easier today). My solution was to knock up a script on a PC that emulated the serial printer that was connected to the ancient system, wire a custom cable between them and then tell the database to run a full report. Took a day or two to run as I recall, and job's a goodun.

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

#427

Post by MobiusHorizons » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

menage wrote: post #193

At Google almost 20 years ago, a bunch of our machines (possibly with slightly bespoke CPUs?) were behaving oddly. These machines were mostly in use for serving Google's web index, so almost the entire RAM was devoted to index data; the indexserver processes were designed to be robust against hardware failure, and if they noticed any kind of corruption they'd dump and reload their data. We noticed that they were dump…

That’s awesome

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

#428

Post by lawgimenez » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

rpastuszak wrote: post #304

Fixing 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…

Reminds me of my brother where he would bring 6-7 floppies to a cafe just to download an anti-virus update.

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

#429

Post by stephenr » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #420

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…

After all this time I don’t remember what the bug was. We did have boxes locally that we tested on of course. But somehow this got out. It might’ve been something that only showed up under certain configurations. It might’ve been something that just should have been caught under normal circumstances and wasn’t for some reason. It may have been something that worked fine tested off-hardware until some bug in packaging…

> I know what I’m doing, it will be fine

I don't think anyone is truly a programmer until they've learnt the hard way the outcome of "what could go wrong"!

Thanks for the update, happy holidays mate!

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

#430

Post by lelanthran » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

In the days of dialup internet, I used a phone company that offered, between 1900 and 0700, free calls for calls under 30m.

So I wrote a cron job that, at 1905, started a script which sat in a loop, dropping the connection, dialing again, and then `sleep` for 29m, until the time got to 0655.

Very stupid, but it worked, I guess.