Ask HN: What's the most outlandish solution for a problem you've built?

7 points by schmorptron ↗ HN

7 comments

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Problem: rustbucket first car, frame breaks; axle shackles break; etc... can't fix it because ya can't weld rust.

But you can tie it back together with bailing wire. Lots of small strands and weave a cable knot around the bits that should have been united but are now not.

It worked very well, it gave the car a flexibility and spring that enabled some incredible stunts. Like the wood wing spar on a Spitfire, it made the machine much more alive. with the brake locks and our rear axle that moved 12in under load, we could hop from a standing start.

I just read in "Dealers of Lightning" [history of Xerox's PARC R&D lab] that an engineer optimized all the memory-handling bugs out of an early hardware prototype/product, only to necessarily return them because a consumer software program wouldn't run without these known bugs present (this was in the days of hand-woven memory beads for bootROM).

The fix was to re-implement the severe memory bugs in hardware, so the software would "work" correctly.