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?

#441

Post by reddit_clone » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #197

When I was younger I learned that Sed was turing complete. So I did was any young woman would do. I build an entire search engine in Sed. But it wasn't like a useless little search tool that provided bad search capability for a website, no, nearly every page (minus a few like the about page) of a site was nothing more than a presentation on top of the search query results. Several thousand hardcoded "known" pages and…

I had a friend who wrote a minimal dbms in awk just because someone told him it couldn’t be done!

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

#442

Post by krallja » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #403

binwiederhier wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voice thing is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.

I did a similar thing in the Win9x days. I had some sound alert going off once in a while and I couldn't figure out what was causing it, worse, I didn't even recognize the sound. (It wasn't the standard "ding" or "chord".) And when I went into the Windows sound scheme configurator, it had wacky names for some events like "asterisk" and "critical stop", with no explanation of what might trigger them. So as a first ste…

Did you ever figure out what was causing the sound?

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

#443

Post by myself248 » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

krallja wrote: post #442

myself248 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a similar thing in the Win9x days. I had some sound alert going off once in a while and I couldn't figure out what was causing it, worse, I didn't even recognize the sound. (It wasn't the standard "ding" or "chord".) And when I went into the Windows sound scheme configurator, it had wacky names for some events like "asterisk" and "critical stop", with no explanation of what might trigger them. So as a first ste…

Did you ever figure out what was causing the sound?

Nope. And every time I asked "is there some sort of program that just logs every time another program makes a sound?", I was told it was deeper system-level magic than anyone sane would ever attempt.

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

#444

Post by krallja » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #57

cr3ative wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"on error resume next" never died, it just became serverless!

A customer of mine wraps their Python code into try except pass so it never stops because of errors, it just skips what would have run in the code after the exception. I added some logging so we're slowly understanding what fails and why.

Of course, there’s a package for that https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy/blob/master/README.md

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

#445

Post by anthk » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #388

anthk wrote: post #335

Earlier 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…

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.

Ah, too bad then. So, lots of stuff got deprecated, I didn't notice that until right now.

Still, there was another tech not querying the background pixmaps, but used from old X11 software to do non-rectangular windows. Oclock, maybe.

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

#446

Post by sedatk » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

huseyinkilic wrote: post #440

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…

I hope things go back to normal soon. Good to see you here, Sedat. Cheers.

Thanks, Huseyin! <3

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

#447

Post by sedatk » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

prox wrote: post #310

sedatk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very glad to hear that it's readable using a translator! In fact, the community dynamics resemble Reddit a lot despite having significant differences in layout and format. Irony, sarcasm, harsh criticism are common yet tolerance of differing viewpoints is relatively high compared to other platforms where people just flock to their own bubble or just block everyone else who they don't agree with. It's fun too, has…

Don’t forget to archive it with responsible parties, like for future history and anthropological research. It would be a shame to loose so much of public discourse, especially if it’s so influential.

It's been subject to many academical research projects[1], I lost count now. It even made it into books[2][3]. We used to provide raw text dumps to researchers, or they would crawl the site themselves. One interesting paper claimed that Eksi Sozluk users were able to detect earthquakes very early and reliably[4]. Internet Archive also hangs around the site, archiving here and there. But a proper and full archive should be preserved, I agree.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lr=lang_en&q=eksi+sozluk&...

[2] https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Global-...

[3] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

[4] https://gc.copernicus.org/articles/4/69/2021/

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

#448

Post by krallja » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

Our ElasticSearch cluster was running out of RAM. We were doing everything in 32-bit mode, for performance (we couldn’t do Compressed OOPs for some reason) so each node could handle, effectively, 4GiB of data. And we didn’t have the budget for a new machine.

But I did notice that the most-recently-added node had 16GiB of physical RAM, for some reason. So I added a hypervisor and spawned two more VMs inside of it, each running ElasticSearch as well, thus increasing our cluster capacity by more than one year of growth!

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

#449

Post by sedatk » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:34 PM UTC

LeonB wrote: post #353

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.

Thank you, Leon! <3

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

#450

Post by brirec » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 7:39 PM UTC

This one is something I’m way too proud of, because it’s about as cursed as these hacks can get!

I used to work full time as one of a two-person IT department at a consulting company that worked with construction.

The owner of the company wrote backend business logic code nearly 30 years ago, in dBASE 5 for DOS, and switching to anything else was a non-starter. This code base was his baby, and he made it clear he’d sooner close up shop than rewrite it, despite the many reasons why it would have been a better idea than what followed.

When I started with the company, they were using computers running Windows XP, which shipped a 16-bit/DOS emulation layer called NTVDM, which was used to run this terrible dBASE software. This was after Windows 7 was released, and we knew that using NTVDM on our office desktops wasn’t going to cut it for much longer — only 32-bit Windows supported NTVDM, and most newer hardware was only getting drivers for the 64-bit variant of Windows.

Of course we tried DOSBox first, and it almost worked perfectly, but we were bottlenecked by a very slow network write speed even on a fast Core i7 at the time. This wasn’t going to cut it, either.

At the time I had been first seriously getting into virtualization, had gotten pretty good at PowerShell, and was intimately familiar with Windows’s RemoteApp functionality from a prior project. This was software that would serve any running Windows GUI application to a remote thin client. And when I tried it, an NTVDM-powered COMMAND.COM window worked just fine as a RemoteApp! Things were getting interesting.

I ended up using and using PowerShell + DOS Batch files to glue together a handful of tools to ultimately build extremely stripped down and locked down 32-bit Windows Embedded VM images, with just enough components to run these DOS applications and serve them over RemoteApp sessions. I basically built a fucking CI/CD system for remotely running DOS applications on thin clients.

The best part? Now this stupid DOS software that we couldn’t get rid of was even usable on Linux, Macs, and mobile devices. Despite it being an awful idea, we really gave that horrifying piece of software a new lease on life!

I no longer work there full time, but I still consult to them occasionally, and to this day they use this setup, and it still works super well!

It’s horribly insecure (though I think we managed to segregate that Windows VM and its access very well), and probably violates numerous EULAs, but it was just about the only way to keep that specific application in service…

(By the way, I’m looking for full time work at the moment if anyone needs a devops/automation engineer that can wrangle cursed environments… My email is hn(at)ibeep(dot)com.)