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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?

#501

Post by mcherm »

govg wrote: post #393
mcherm wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I've occasionally played around with a language that pretty nearly does this. Mumps is a language developed in 1967, and it is still in use in a few places including the company where I work. The language is old enough that the first version of it has "if" but no "else". When they added "else" later on it was via a hack worthy of this post: the "if" statement simply set a global variable and the new "else" statem…

That global persistence model across executions is very fascinating. If you don't mind, could you explain what line of work this is and how it helps the use case? I have encountered similar concepts at my old job in a bank, where programs could save global variables in "containers" (predates docker IIRC) and then other programs could access this.

These days, Mumps is mostly used in elderly systems in the insurance and banking industries. In my case it is banking. I work at Capital One and one of the financial cores we use is Profile from FIS, which is (at least in older versions) built in Mumps.

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

#502

Post by rickytheguy »

Sometime in my teen years, I had an insatiable desire to..download..all these expensive programs and play around with them. One day I got ahold of Acronis Disk Director and did some repartitioning of some flash drives I had. If I remember correctly, it had the ability to repartition the currently utilized system drive via some built-in boot environment. Well, I had to try it out. Now is a good time to mention that I was doing this on old Toshiba Satellite that would shutdown after overheating sometimes. As you can expect, the repartitioning failed at some point in the middle because the laptop shut off. What remained was an unbootable drive and a teenager that really didn't know what the problem was, let alone how to fix it.

In my voyages of curiosity, I happened to have a gParted liveUSB laying around. I booted into it, took a look at the main drive on the laptop, and I noticed a few KB or MB of free space before the main partition. I thought this was weird for some reason and decided to use gParted to "shift" the whole partition to the left (the beginning of the drive). After some time it finished and booted up into my Windows install with zero issues.

To this day, I am equally baffled and amazed that it worked.

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

#503

Post by quickthrower2 »

gcanyon wrote: post #107

Back in the '90s I consulted at HBO, and they were migrating from MS Mail on Mac servers to MS Exchange on PCs. Problem was that MS Mail on the Mac had no address book export function, and execs often have thousands or even tens of thousands of contacts. The default solution was for personal assistants to copy out the contacts one by one. So I experimented with screen hotkey tools. I knew about QuicKeys, but its logi…

Par for the course Exchange/Outlook workarounds. My one and only awful experience working with Exchange recently would make me not surprised if this is still the best way to do this. Exchange feels like a flakey pre-alpha version of MongoDB - putting the "eventually" in "eventually consistent" with a real love affair with "sorry, just one at a time" UX.

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

#505

Post by poopbutt7 »

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…

[dead]

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

#506

Post by plz-remove-card »

We were developing software for an office in a timezone several hours different from our own. We flew there the weekend before the Monday launch, did several tests over the weekend and everything looked good.

Monday morning, minutes before go live we do a couple more tests with staff and discover a critical timezone bug that if not fixed, we cannot go live. Even if our developers were able to quickly turn around a fix and skip formal QA, it still would be ~30mins before everything was updated and another 30 for us to do local tests on site...

So we went around and changed the timezone on every computer in the office. The day was saved, devs fixed the bug during their day, our night and we fixed the timezones the following day.

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

#507

Post by kidfiji »

justsid wrote: post #484
kidfiji wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of sheer curiosity, could you name this game?

Sure, it’s X-Plane 12. But this really is a problem for any software that is continuously being developed and that sees active releases. Any time the internal API or ABI breaks, chances are you break someone’s work with it.

Thanks for sharing, again - I was just curious. That's a fair statement indeed :)

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

#508

Post by rcthompson »

eszed wrote: post #497
rcthompson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, will do!

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

#509

Post by dormento »

MBCook wrote: post #139
smallpipe wrote: post #20

Monkey patching vendor code. They agreed their code didn’t work and produced wrong results, but the correct version would be slower, so they didn’t want to change it. So I dynamically replaced the part of their code that was wrong. That monkey patch has run years and is still going :)

You just reminded me of an old story. The company I was working for purchased some kind of email spamming program to send mass emails. However they quickly found that when more than a small number (10 to 15,000?) of addresses were in the list it took forever. Support wasn’t being helpful, so I decided to look at it. It was some kind of PHP application and what I eventually found was it was doing a database query doin…

No good deed goes unpunished

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

#510

Post by 0xADADA »

I have a customer who refuses to migrate away from his Palm Pilot Desktop software Palm Desktop (Windows 7/8/10) last stable release was in 2008. No features have been added in 24 years. The Palm Pilot itself stopped working about 20 years ago. He runs the software in a Windows XP virtual machine.

He runs his entire business off the contact list in the software. Customer has over 50,000 contacts, which the software supports a max of 8k. I got around this limit by using the "Profiles" feature in the software, which allows you to configure multiple users-Each user allowed max of 8k contacts.

I created 10 profiles by dividing the English alphabet into 10 groups based on the frequency of last name first letter in his set of contacts:

Contact Group 1: A, K, T Contact Group 2: B, L, U Contact Group 3: C, M, V Contact Group 4: D, N, W Contact Group 5: E, O, X Contact Group 6: F, P, Y Contact Group 7: G, Q, Z Contact Group 8: H, R Contact Group 9: I, S Contact Group 10: J

Of course, when he needs to search or get data from his contacts, he needs to constantly switch profiles. I can only imagine how mundane that must be, but whatever floats your boat.

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