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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?

#451

Post by sedatk »

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.

Funny you say that because Eksi Sozluk is the probably the only mainstream social platform to have site moderation logs open to all its users. There's a link to it under every page on the site. See it for yourself: https://eksisozluk1999.com/modlog

No other popular social platform has this level of transparency. Not Twitter, not Reddit, not Facebook. How did they prove they have moderation to Turkish government? How do they not get banned?

Do you know?

Do you want to know?

Do you care about what's right or fair, or do you just believe in something and want to justify your beliefs in whatever means necessary?

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

#452

Post by V__ »

ess3 wrote: post #298

As a kid I acquired my parent’s login to the school platform meaning I could call in sick myself. However one day I actually got sick so they had to call it in which means they would’ve seen all previous calls. So I downloaded the HTML for all pages required for this exact flow and removed the previous sick days. I then changed my etc/hosts file, gave them my computer and prayed that they wouldn’t try to visit any ot…

Have you ever told them?

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

#453

Post by lights0123 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #431
fxtentacle wrote: post #89

We have a production service running for years that just mmaps an entire SSD and casts the pointer to the desired C++ data structure. That SSD doesn't even have a file system on it, instead it directly stores one monstrous struct array filled with data. There's also no recovery, if the SSD breaks you need to recover all data from a backup. But it works and it's mind-boggingly fast and cheap.

Sounds fragile, C++ compilers are permitted to do struct padding essentially as they please. A change in compiler could break the SSD struct mapping (i.e. the member offsets). C++ arrays, on the other hand, are guaranteed not to have padding. That's essentially what memory-mapped IO gives you out of the box. https://stackoverflow.com/a/5398498 http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/#_structure_alignm...

I'm not familiar with C++ rules (the linked answer seems very suspect to me, their argument being "if you change the struct, the struct changes!"), but they could absolutely just be declaring them as extern "C" to use C's layout rules.

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

#454

Post by Rediscover »

dmazzoni wrote: post #254

In the early days of Google Chrome, I was tasked with making it work with Windows screen readers. Now, accessibility APIs on Windows were documented, but web browsers used a bunch of additional APIs that were poorly documented. Chrome's design was radically different than Firefox's and IE's, so it was a challenge to implement the APIs correctly. At first I was just trying to get it to work with completely static web…

Lynx is my most-used/favorite browser. I get variations daily of "your browser is unsupported" messages that almost always go away, without website degradation^1, once I have lynx self-report as "Mozilla" - argh, white-listing.

^1 Excepting javascript, of course.

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

#455

Post by welzel »

Back in the day we where running a very nice Lotus Domino Server for a small organisation. We needed a machine to handle a complex domain setup + routing, and i donated as a temporary measure my old workstation, as i didn´t want to mess with the actual server. 3-4 years later the "temporary measure" was still in place, but the machine didn´t boot up after a power outage. Long story short, the disk drive was frozen, as it was a small consumer HDD (2 GB?) and didn´t like to be operational for such a long time.

A very very oldschool sys admin helped out by opened up the poor machine, opened the HDD and then powered up the machine, given the disk a good spin at the right moment. The disk came back to life and so did the server, and we agreed to replace the machine with a new, proper server ASAP. As i left the organisation 2 years later the machine was still operational, the disk still spinning (ZERO defects!) and the disk was still open inside the case - running non-stop-no-problemo for 2+ years!

I also miss Lotus Notes - it was an amazing concept in many regards that got murdered by IBM.

And in case you ask: the machine was running Windows NT 4 Server.

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

#456

Post by justsid »

sowbug wrote: post #210

Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…

While this is a great hack, this feels like a terrible product to sell to customers. I work on a game with an SDK for plugin development, but sometimes third party developers go off and want to do things that the SDK doesn't offer. Since they get to be in our address space, it's pretty trivial to snoop around internal resources if you really wanted to. The problem is, when we update some core parts of the engine, we tend to break these things. Then users get upset with us and the third parties start to complain that we broke their hacks. It's just a bad experience for everyone.

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

#457

Post by justsid »

We are shipping an OpenGL driver with our Vulkan game. For legacy reasons, our plugin SDK requires an OpenGL contex that plugins can use for drawing. Sins of the pasts and what not. But the game itself has moved on and is now using Vulkan on Windows and Linux. At first we took advantage of the Vulkan/GL interop mechanisms exposed by the IHV drivers, which works by exporting memory from Vulkan and then importing it into GL. Unfortunately the interop path is pretty brittle, the IHVs don't care too much about it since it's rarely used and on AMD we have had huge issues with GPU barriers executing incorrectly, thrashing the result in the process and also just generally really bad performance.

So we took Zink, the Mesa OpenGL driver that emits Vulkan and slightly massaged it for our needs. I ended up having to implement a few missing GL extensions and also changing the Zink code a little bit so it would use our Vulkan device and instance instead of making its own. As far as plugins are concerned, there is still a real libGL.so/opengl32.dll just like there always was. But internally it's now emitting Vulkan calls against the device we use for our game. Solved both perf and interop issues and it's been one of my prouder achievements.

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

#458

Post by gary_0 »

isoprophlex wrote: post #240
noduerme wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

back in 1999 or so, I wrote an online shopping site this way, all the data stored as text files (one per category, with many items in my case ... I was 18 years old and had no idea about databases). The site ran smoothly for almost a year until the customer used "*" in the name of a product... which was the character by which all the product data in the text files data was split...

That's why you always delimit your data fields in a text file with a unicode snowman Surely noone will ever use that character!

And then https://brr.fyi/ breaks the Internet!

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

#459

Post by porker »

jawns wrote: post #50

I worked for a US media company that forced us to use a half-baked CMS from a Norwegian software company, with no apparent provisions in the contract for updates or support. The CMS was absolutely terrible to work in. Just one small example: It forced every paragraph into a new textarea, so if you were editing a longer news story with 30 or 40 paragraphs, you had to work with 30 or 40 separate textareas. So I basical…

ezPublish?

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

#460

Post by sedatk »

OJFord wrote: post #367
stavros wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, why do dictators love to ruin old stuff?

Because they think they oughtacrack. (That's the best I've got, clearly need more crackers.)

Because they did Nazi its value.
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