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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?

#471

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

constantly wrote: post #348
TonyTrapp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some incompetent people did it that way, but 1-bit transparency was very well possible with native Windows APIs in the 90s (see SetWindowRgn). Later on (starting with Windows 2000 IIRC) it was also possible to have semi-transparent (alpha-blended) regions.

In a thread about “if it’s not stupid if it works” you accuse people of doing something “incompetent” by doing something ostensibly “stupid but works” but totally miss on what was even possible “non-stupidly.” There feels like some form of irony here.

I'm not convinced it works though. A screenshot would break any animations playing underneath

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

#472

Post by pazimzadeh »

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…

That’s good. I took AP computer science in high school thinking we would learn how to make apps with graphical user interfaces (didn’t know there was any other kind) so I was uninterested and never payed attention/studied since when we only learned Java and not the kind for making UI’s.

I had a friend whose mom was a programmer and she would help us get the answers to homework problems. I would change variable names and a few other things, but one time we still got caught with way too similar answers.

In order not to get my friend and his mom in trouble, I told the teacher that I had in fact cheated but not from my friend. I stayed up for a few nights learning HTML and other things (well, modifying other code I found) in order to make a blog where a similar question as the homework problem was discussed, so that I could cite it as my source. At first I tried using blogging software but the timestamps are automatically coded as the current date, which wouldn’t work. So I had to make my own blog-looking site from scratch complete with several months worth of content, which was pretty much plagiarized I think.

It was way more effort than actually doing the homework would have been.

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

#473

Post by jpc0 »

earthboundkid wrote: post #469
jpc0 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So CSRF?

Plain CSRF wouldn't help because they're scraping the site and executing the JS. It has to be time delayed CSRF so they give up and submit before it's loaded. The real solution is to use a CAPTCHA, but they're so user hostile, that's the last resort.

Oh I got that, I was referring to the original solution.

And I can kind of agree with the CAPTCHA being the final solution, a question though, you can't implement the Cloudflare style "CAPTCHA" which is heuristics based and not "please click the bus" type?

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

#475

Post by callalex »

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.

Based on your statements here, it sure seems like you care. What motivates you to claim otherwise?

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

#476

Post by prox »

sedatk wrote: post #447
prox wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

Wow that’s great! I hope you are successful at keeping the site running!

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

#477

Post by nomilk »

arccy wrote: post #462
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…

consider --progress plain ?

That's definitely part of the solution, but alone it will get output only for uncached layers. The && echo "lakjdflkjsdf" hack above tricks docker into thinking that layer isn't cached (since, technically, it has changed and hence should be re-run). Otherwise, even with --progress plain, it will not re-run a previously run (cached) layer and hence not provide any console output.

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

#478

Post by mnahkies »

Added IE support to a web application that relied on web SQL by pollyfilling sqlite using asm.js. It was pretty slow, but it gave us enough breathing room to eventually replace web SQL with a local storage based implementation.

That was also slow, but was able to speed it up by using compound keys and binary search to do range queries of "tables" based on key prefixes (the bulk of the data was time series/event like)

Wasn't able to use indexeddb at the time due to compatibility issues as far as I recall.

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

#479

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#480

Post by kidfiji »

justsid wrote: post #456
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…

Out of sheer curiosity, could you name this game?
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