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

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.

Running an Excel financial model through a lib, having an issue with the engine, ending up fixing up and optimizing it, then sharing the load across lambda functions, then understanding that AWS SDK for PHP was probably broken and find a workaround to it.

Not my best engineering moment...

https://thedarkside.frantzmiccoli.com/experimentations/2019/...

I am converting my TypeScript file sharing application into a fully distributed operating system without hardware drivers.