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tomberttoday at 1:51 AM1 replyview on HN

It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now.

For example, I mentioned that my speakers on my laptop sound like shit under Linux to a friend. I mentioned a few of the fixes I had tried, none of which really improved anything, and eventually the friend recommended I buy some headphones or an external speaker. Yes, that would "work" in the sense that I would have higher quality audio, but it doesn't really "fix" my problem, just makes it easier to ignore it.

This article shows the logical extreme of that thinking, I love it.


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quotemstrtoday at 1:54 AM

> It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now.

My favorite is this pattern that occurs in every big backend job-running script in every place I've worked: the success paths spams the log with expected errors. Something tries to connect to something else on start?

  FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT
  debug: retrying... (1/3)
  FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT
  debug: retrying... (2/3)
  Service connected! 
  Startup succeeded
"Just learn to ignore the expected errors, bro" is the most infuriating "workaround" for this lack of basic log hygiene
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