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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?

#491

Post by wiseleo »

Microsoft SQL Server Express has limits on its database size. Windows Internal Database, which is the same thing as far as APIs are concerned, does not. Well, it does, but the limit is over 500GB. So, I made Sharepoint and other vendor apps run on it.

In the same spirit, Microsoft shipped Business Contact Manager for Outlook on Office 2003 CD. That thing is functionally a CRM that was allegedly limited to 5 users. It, of course, runs on an SQL Server and so I made it run under Windows Internal Database, tested it with more than 5 users, and made it a lot more usable.

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

#492

Post by GnarfGnarf »

We ran out of columns in our 80-column Hollerith card master file. So we divided the 12-row columns into three groups of four bits, giving us the “240-column” card, with triple storage.

This was the 70’s, so our cards looked like lace doilies (0111).

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

#493

Post by singingfish »

caesil wrote: post #223
singingfish wrote: post #214

This regex that took about 10 minutes to generate was amazingly effective and helped me earn my highest ever daily rate https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/d43c884fbac0089d8523

>that took about 10 minutes to generate How?

https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/36df691fa395567cb73d1368e4345c...

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

#494

Post by singingfish »

phanimahesh wrote: post #338
singingfish wrote: post #214

This regex that took about 10 minutes to generate was amazingly effective and helped me earn my highest ever daily rate https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/d43c884fbac0089d8523

How did you generate this?

perl module Regexp::Assemble

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

#495

Post by singingfish »

veeti wrote: post #326
singingfish wrote: post #214

This regex that took about 10 minutes to generate was amazingly effective and helped me earn my highest ever daily rate https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/d43c884fbac0089d8523

Do they ever coin new suburb names? What happens then?

Yes they do. This was good for the early/mid 2000s - new suburbs are going to be a problem as australia post no longer give the list away for free.

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

#496

Post by singingfish »

wodenokoto wrote: post #330
singingfish wrote: post #214

This regex that took about 10 minutes to generate was amazingly effective and helped me earn my highest ever daily rate https://gist.github.com/dr-kd/d43c884fbac0089d8523

How is that better than just checking against a list of suburb names?

It's also handling what state the suburb is in, and can deal with various kinds of bad data (e.g. lack of uniformity of spacing and capitalisation).

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

#497

Post by eszed »

rcthompson wrote: post #192
sokz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to read it when it comes out. Where should I look for it when its published? Ignore if its a stupid question.

We will be posting it on a preprint server when we're ready to submit it to journal review, hopefully some time in February (but who knows, publishing timelines are murky at the best of times). The title will be something along the lines of "Reconstructing the temporal development of COVID-19 from sparse longitudinal molecular data", though that's likely to change somewhat.

Please post the paper to HN.

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

#498

Post by DamnInteresting »

justusthane wrote: post #115
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…

When you say it loaded before Wordpress loaded, what exactly does that mean? Was it a proxy that handled incoming requests and passed them off to Wordpress?

I wrote my own front controller, and used htaccess rules to direct all requests there instead of to Wordpress. If the front controller deems the request safe, it just hands off the request to Wordpress. Otherwise it quarantines uploaded files (if any), and responds with an error. Lemon squeezy.

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

#499

Post by qup »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #487

There was a very early MMO game which leaked its server files & people started doing custom servers. There was a VERY limited scripting language for the server. This had some commands but missed basics like variables. However you could track the number of NPCs in a room. So this led to some rather interesting new primitives: - "Chickens in a room" became my preferred method of counting / implementing any kind of pers…

I have some less-interesting stories of cramming functionality into places it was not intended. Like Salesforce's backend. And the Spree shopping cart library.

Makes me feel like macguyver. You kinda look around, see what you're working with, and figure it out.

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

#500

Post by bosky101 »

- gmail driven development. was small enough to start emailing myself when events happen, inadvertently mailing myself on (B2B) customer logins. But found it was a great time to also pick up the phone to catchup/guide. left this turned on as a feature!

- got rid of the concept of passwords. 2FA only.

- more of a productivity hack, but - spread sheets with columns that create sql statements, allowing ops to learn/run sql themselves

- bookshelves as standing desks. usb keyboard on lower shelf. laptop at eye level.

- raised an angel round with an android app with beautiful screenshots of the vision. but once installed the app only had a email waitlist implemented

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