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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?

#151

Post by throwup238 »

pjot wrote: post #143
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…

Using Apple’s translate function I was able to read many of the posts - very interesting to see the differences between American and Turkish social media. There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that

> There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that

Turks have a wonderful relationship with cats, especially in Istanbul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cats_in_Istanbul

There is a nationwide no-catch and no-kill policy for feral cats.

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

#152

Post by _zoltan_ »

brysonreece wrote: post #94
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.

Wow. How do design decisions get made that result in these types of situations in the first place?

it's a very reasonable thing to do if you need performance.

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

#153

Post by YouWhy »

MBCook wrote: post #118
zblesk wrote: post #79

I implemented an enterprise data migration in javascript, running in end-user's browsers. (So no server-side node.js or such.) It was a project scheduled for 2-3 months, for a large corporation. The customer wanted a button that a user would click in the old system, requesting a record to be copied over to the new system (Dynamics CRM). Since the systems would be used in parallel for a time, it could be done repeated…

That’s horrible. I love it! I’m not quite sure I understand why it was GET though. No way of running something like fetch or (more likely) XMLHTTPRequest?

I think the OP (hat off!) needed a way to transfer data to the front-end of another application. Since there's no back end involved, the only available channel is the request URL

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

#154

Post by lepisma »

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.

Very interesting. Can you give a sense of the speed up factor?

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

#155

Post by rnoorda »

swissfunicular wrote: post #126

My corporate VPN wouldn't connect to same public IP after 24 hours (I work from home). So I wrote a very crude bash script on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (which also runs local DNS server), which would telnet into the router 5 minutes before my login time, and reboot the router

I had a router that would need to be restarted every once in a while, so I just plugged it into a Christmas light timer to go off for 15 minutes early every morning. Worked well until we left that apartment.

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

#157

Post by jwsteigerwalt »

Sales commission sheets that are just text files. Started doing it in 2007 in VBA when it was not a horrible solution. Between mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures of that sales org, I have rebuilt that system so many times. Today, a full serverless solution, but the output is still 90% the same and could be from the 80’s.

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

#158

Post by Tknl »

Back when I was a junior engineer I made a small system for dealing with industrial printers that took either direct printer language commands or pdfs and exported the printer driver output to a file via the Redmon printer driver output file exporter and then ftped it to the printer over the network. This avoided manual driver installation of hundreds of printers and may still be sold in a new project. It's hacky af but still works and beats alternatives.

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

#159

Post by MBCook »

YouWhy wrote: post #153
MBCook wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s horrible. I love it! I’m not quite sure I understand why it was GET though. No way of running something like fetch or (more likely) XMLHTTPRequest?

I think the OP (hat off!) needed a way to transfer data to the front-end of another application. Since there's no back end involved, the only available channel is the request URL

Oh that would make sense. Thanks for the guess.

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

#160

Post by taneq »

brysonreece wrote: post #94
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.

Wow. How do design decisions get made that result in these types of situations in the first place?

Someone says "hey if we had 900GB of RAM we could make a lot of money" and then someone else says "that's ridiculous and impossib- hang on a minute" and scurries off to hack together some tech heresy over their lunch break.
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