alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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mlaretallack • today at 6:35 PM
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.
Groxx • today at 6:40 PM
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.
mikepurvis • today at 6:38 PM
Love that it's actually linked as well; too bad that user isn't still active.
blkhp19 • today at 5:11 PM
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)
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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.