Comment by glenstein
7 hours ago
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.
My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Reminds me of https://github.com/jtolio/gls which implement a "thread local storage" in golang
Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/27/arthur-c-clarke-hazards...
The declaration of an impossibility of a given task or goal is a reflection of the perceived barrier by the individual, rather than the task itself.
1 reply →
Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
Adversarial software development is also when I do my best work
Adversarial personal development is definitely a thing too.
The solution to every software problem is another layer of indirection :-)
They're kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort/reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask "WHY??!!?", the better.
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
So many. The Dropbox comment on HN
Funny enough about the Dropbox comment, it caught so much flak that it’s gone full circle and I’ve often found people defending it saying what the guy said made sense at the time etc
I guess Reddit is just less empathetic than HN
Agreed. Also who doesn't like knocking a smug commenter down a peg
100% agree, I find that sometimes I hit a dead end, but the things I build or learn on the way are usable at a later date.
Love that it's actually linked as well; too bad that user isn't still active.
Now tell me your opinion on P==NP being confirmed within 5 years.
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)
It's a variation of "because it's there" when asked why would you climb some giant mountain.
Impressive work! Now run Dolphin on it. ;)
Yes, I’ve found at work that the best way to get me off my ass and work furiously is to tell me something isn’t possible