I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …)
Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try.
So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day.
So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.
If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers.
> Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.
This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it.
Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working with plutonium, but I can never remember the proper CLI incantation to make the lead-lined glove box appear.
This would be perfect if you replaced “Joe” as the bottom with John to illustrate that this document has been edited five times and not brought back to consistency. And also that only one articulate person ever understood it and he got scared off.
... you'll need to refer to these pages on Confluence, but they haven't all yet migrated to the new Confluence documentation structure, which is here, so you'll need to search both. And then the really detailed documentation is in Sharepoint here, but when we update these documents we'll also need to convert them to PDF and publish them to our Customer-accessible ticketing system using this specific ticket number, which you'll need to remember because search on that system doesn't work very well.
There was a time when a previous employer looked like we were going to go down in flames -- 2008. I wrote such a love letter in the main include file (yay PHP) that told them how to figure out how the application worked and gave a credit blurb to all the previous devs and how they helped build the application.
We didn't go under quite yet and it was my extreme pleasure to allow two more devs to write their own blurbs and edit the letter to help future others. The company later went under and was acquired by a competitor, so I'm sure they've seen the letter in order to figure out how to extract data from the system. Effort not wasted.
... If you want to have a reliable copy of the database do not rely on the one that sits in the repo, ask Steven for one of the latest backups that he made and that should be in his own cloud drive. Then you can proceed safely to run the migrations, just remember to skip the one labelled as 20259999-9 as this was made for a prod hotfix and is still necessary. Edit your migrations table to skip it. The migrations table will be created when you run 'status'.
> I feel like this could be adopted for your <organisation's management shenanigans>
Welcome to $org. Up to this point in the hiring process, you may have believed that we are a principled, well-structured meritocracy where all talent and hard work are appropriately awarded.
I could have written this for my Ducati, but they nonetheless stole it, put it on a flatbed, tried to drill the ignition and fuel cap to start it and failed because Ducatis have had immobilizers for decades now. One dreams of a better class of thief but if they had the IQ would they be thieves of a multi-decade-old motorcycle? The tax that morons levy on the rest of us cannot be understated.
There is long-ago-deleted reddit AMA by a motorcycle thief who was never caught before retiring. The details he went through made me believe he was the real deal, even if not actually retired.
One of the things he stressed was all the ways people think motorcycles are stolen aren't they ways motorcycles are stolen, because those methods are used by would-be professional thieves who get caught. The professionals are the ones who don't get caught also don't use the same methods.
The thief mentioned replacing OEM ECUs with some sort of home-made jobber that was "good enough" to start the bike and ride it away--the actual way motorcycles are stolen--to a shielded transfer point, typically a delivery truck, where the buyer waits to collect and pay for the stolen bike.
I used to own an MG B GT, which was always in a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. One day I drove it to a nicer restaurant where I learned they only allowed valet parking. I urged the attendant to make an exception for me, but he refused. I shrugged, got out and it immediately stalled. I explained a few things to him, like not being shy about using the choke even after it was warmed up and running and a quick shot of throttle before putting it in gear to keep it from stalling, etc. Then I stood back and watched the poor guy lurch it past the rows of cars to the edge of the lot.
When I came back out, the attendant that had parked it was nowhere to be seen. I handed him the tag, he retrieved the key and a few minutes later off in the distance I heard him trying to start it. He managed to get it out of the parking spot before he gave up and motioned for me to walk down to him. After some discussion, he gave up and let me drive it out of the lot.
That must have been a while ago. The last time I encountered a "valet only" parking lot, I told the 20-something valet it was a manual, and his face turned white, he paused for a few seconds, and then he said, "go ahead, you can park it yourself."
> a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles.
Figures. You MG owners! Did you have a hammer with you for when the points in the fuel pump needed smacking? ;) I drove a '65 Triumph Spitfire for about five years back in the early 00's and it was reliable as a top (after I repaired all the hack work that previous owners had done to it).
I was told this was a potential last-ditch way to escape if you stalled while crossing railroad tracks.
In hindsight, stalling while crossing railroad tracks, like quicksand, is a much less common danger in adulthood than I was lead to believe as a younger person.
I've done that, with an old Volkswagen. It wouldn't start, but I was able to use the starter to move it maybe 30 feet uphill in order to reach a position where I could coast-start it for a couple blocks. Got it running.
But I came really close to getting in trouble with a 1948 Chevy pickup. I backed it into my grandfather's garage, and then found out that it was a bit too far forward to be able to close the door. So I turned the ignition on, put it in reverse, and touched the starter.
Unfortunately, the engine caught with that brief touch of the starter, leaving me frantically stabbing for the clutch before I pushed through the back of the garage...
Fortunately, it idled very slowly, and I had (of course) given it no gas.
I read about this trick about four months before the input fitting on the fuel pump in my little car decided to just pop out of the pump. Tow truck left it about ten feet from where I wanted it, on soft ground so pushing was gonna take all my roommates. Or take a few months’ of life off the starter motor.
I had a friend who drove a 79 Datsun. Stalling and not starting was a surprisingly common occurrence. He would often go out of his way to park on a hill to avoid problems.
In my old Audi sometimes the clutch wouldn’t work so that’s how I started it. Also learned double clutching and to anticipate traffic lights so I didn’t have to stop.
This story reminds me that I have a recurring nightmare: I am driving a car and the brakes hardly work at all, so I am in constant fear that something will go terribly wrong. This nightmare was born from a real experience with my first vehicle, a VW micro bus that had horribly squishy brakes.
Many years ago, I was driving down the highway on my way to work and, when I pressed the breaks to slow down, the pedal just... went straight to the floor. I had to use the emergency break to slow down, get off the highway, and pull over. Luckily that still worked (I've owned many a car where that was the first thing to go).
So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it inspected the previous day... and they didn't mention anything was wrong. I did not go back to that inspection place again.
Had a 84' Chrysler LeBaron. Brakes went out on the way home from work. Managed to get it to the closet auto body shop. They had it for three days, charged me $1,200 for a new master cylinder and a bunch of other stuff I didn't know I needed. I paid $500 for the car and tried to tell them to do the absolute minimum to get it going. Apparently that was the minimum.
Drove it home, brakes worked like a dream. Got up next morning, third stop light, brake goes all the way to the floor, I'm drifting into the intersection. I panic, look both ways and gun it through safely. Drove that thing with brakes barely working back to the shop. Calmly told them whatever they did? Didn't work.
Same thing. Another $800 bill, this time the brakes worked for a few more days, then it happened again. I took it to another shop. The mechanic asked what they told me they did and what they charged me for. I showed them both invoices. He pulled me aside with my car still on the lift and whispered to me, "Look man, they didn't do anything. They just filled the brake fluid up. When it all leaked back out is why your brakes kept going out. Imma fix this for a super discounted rate, but you need to get a lawyer, you got lucky not getting into an accident or killed."
I sued the shop, got all my money back and then some. About six months after they settled my suit, I got a call from the local paper asking why I sued them because they were doing a story on the shop scamming hundreds of people out of tens of thousands of dollars.
I have that exact same nightmare! The harder I press on the brake, the less it does, as if the brake power is following a logarithmic curve. Although I don't really know why I have that dream, no specific experience comes to mind.
I've had that recurring nightmare too - I forgot about that! I've only had a little real world experience with it. I'm curious if anyone has had the nightmare without having experienced it in real life.
I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster.
Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.
My first girlfriend, Kate, bought an old VW Bug for $200 from someone on Page Mill Road up the hill from Palo Alto.
I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.
Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.
With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."
Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.
The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.
Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.
Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.
I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.
Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."
We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.
Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.
Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.
Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
Same here.. I'm usually driving some conglomerate of my first 3 cars (all VWs) - MK1 Jetta GLI, MK2 Golf GTi 16v or VR6 Corrado (or sometimes a Scirocco which is related to the Corrado). And gear shifts are like 30-50cm long, and then the brakes start to fade..
I stopped having that dream nearly as often when I bought my '05 Subaru Legacy GT wagon.
What's even stranger is that my current Kia Stinger (a fun car!) becomes an exotic Maserati or Aston Martin or Jaguar in my dreams..
A teenager slammed a beat up Chrysler 200 into the back of my rental car. Once he managed to get the door open, he said something along the lines of "yeah the brakes don't work so well". Of course this was in Florida so there was never any expectation for his car to ever have working brakes. Luckily I paid for the LDW on the rental so it was not my problem.
The only time my brakes went out on my I happened to be towing a 10,000lbs trailer. I was able to use the trailer brakes only for 10 miles of stop and go traffic (rural freeway under construction, the backup started just past the previous exit, and of course the brakes were working until then). I never want that to happen again.
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.
> 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
I'm a lifelong Porsche fan, and even owned an air-cooled 911 for a long time, but that part of my life is in the rearview now. Even so, I was happy to attend the Porsche festival Luftgekuhlt here in Durham last weekend.
I was astonished, upon turning a corner and seeing one, to realize I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that the 914 existed. It's one of those cars that was a dime a dozen in my 70s and 80s youth (along with MGs and proper, original VW Bugs) that slowly in inexorably vanished from the casual landscape.
Back then, I kind of hated them (the shared heritage with VW made them "not a real Porsche" in my eyes, which then as now preferred the lines of the 911s anyway), but now I find them charming little oddballs. We may take it as read that the examples at the show were in rather better running order than the one in the article. ;)
<Manipulating the gear shift lever will deliver vague suggestions to this rod...>
Great read. Several years ago I owned and drove a '67 Olds Cutlass for sixteen years. (Two door, auto-trans, AC, standard brakes.) I purchased the car in 1990 and everything was in working order. When the carburetor finally warped beyond repair, I cobbled together some other Olds carb body parts and, since the automatic choke parts were bad, I rigged up a manual choke line through the firewall. This made the car undriveable for the other drivers in my family! The sequence of gas pedal pumps and knowing when to disengage the choke was too much to surpass. :)
By now you’ve certainly noticed the smell. That is the aroma of Mobil 1 oil being boiled off
That sounds so familiar!
My first car was a barn-find 22 year old (at the time) 1964 Triumph TR4. It had a moderately bad oil leak, and the oil would land on the exhaust manifold and be blown along the transmission tunnel. Smoke would fill the interior around the shift lever.
It would smoke more heavily the harder you pushed it.
I love this car already. It has character, a personality. It’s the friend who’s kind of a pain in the ass but someone you usually have a good time with.
Reminds me of the car I learned to drive manual on. It would only start when the drivers side door was open. So if you stalled the car the process was: open door, clutch in, start engine, clutch out and go, close door. You learned not to stall…
It seems that it would be easy to automatically filter out these emails despite the small variability in the presented messages (basically selecting which issues are of concern to the citizen visiting and copying the message).
It would seem more effective if an LLM were used to paraphrase the concerns so it would be less amenable to automated filtering.
My dad hat a 914, sold it around 2014 or something. It was in decidedly better condition. But I definitely know that gear lever rod, shifting wasn't exactly smooth. And you'd have to apply a little gas in between shifts, otherwise you'd starve the engine. But it was an absolutely beautiful car.
If this were a 20yo Subaru (chosen simply because it has a shifter that can wear out in a way that roughly replicates these issues) rather than some "high brow" vehicle everyone would screech about how it's unfit for the road.
I owned an '86 BRAT. There was a bushing in the shifter that wore out, and you just about had to open the passenger door to pull the shifter far enough to the right to get it into reverse. A shim from a beer can will fix it temporarily until the shim wears through.
Funnily enough, I did not impress a date by roll-starting it when the starter was intermittently flaky.
Very fun. I have a similar check list for thieves for my '75 land rover series 3.
I tried to have a friend 'steal' it out of my garage once - it didn't go very well.
Don't these cars pass the mandatory yearly review? In my country I passed mine recently (yearly, because the car is older than 10 years) and the first thing they said was "ok let me in the vehicle". If there is anything so utterly broken like in the article or the comments here, you got an insta-failed checkup, which means the vehicle's license to drive in public roads is removed, with the sole exception of going to/from a mechanic shop.
Cool read and and as an owner of Porsche 911 Carrera from 1988, I can both relate and not relate. I bought my 911 at 26 y/o in 1999: the car was 11 years old and had 135 000 km / 85 000 miles. I then used it as my daily for five years straight.
The year is 2025. I still have it (never had the heart to sell it) and still use it so now I own it since 26 years. This thing is rock solid reliable. It's certainly a bit manly to drive (no assisted steering and no ABS) but every time I use for something mundane (like going to the pharmacy or to pick my kid at school) I keep thinking "it's insane that this thing is so reliable I could still use it as my daily if I wanted to".
Now of course a Porsche 911 from the 80s ain't a Porsche 914 from the seventies but still: quite a different experience over 26 years (and my car is now 37 years old) from the experience in TFA.
psadri|4 months ago
Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try.
So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day.
So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.
If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers.
… someone else please take over… :-)
dreamcompiler|4 months ago
This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it.
Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working with plutonium, but I can never remember the proper CLI incantation to make the lead-lined glove box appear.
hinkley|4 months ago
> 3 years ago (about the time John quit)
> ask John (if he is still around)
BLKNSLVR|4 months ago
... you'll need to refer to these pages on Confluence, but they haven't all yet migrated to the new Confluence documentation structure, which is here, so you'll need to search both. And then the really detailed documentation is in Sharepoint here, but when we update these documents we'll also need to convert them to PDF and publish them to our Customer-accessible ticketing system using this specific ticket number, which you'll need to remember because search on that system doesn't work very well.
McGlockenshire|4 months ago
We didn't go under quite yet and it was my extreme pleasure to allow two more devs to write their own blurbs and edit the letter to help future others. The company later went under and was acquired by a competitor, so I'm sure they've seen the letter in order to figure out how to extract data from the system. Effort not wasted.
aitchnyu|4 months ago
ainiriand|4 months ago
heresie-dabord|4 months ago
Welcome to $org. Up to this point in the hiring process, you may have believed that we are a principled, well-structured meritocracy where all talent and hard work are appropriately awarded.
Well I find it necessary to inform you...
arjie|4 months ago
Look at what these lead-lickers did https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CBgoi28hXoI
Obviously, I recovered the bike and repaired it only to nearly be killed by an Uber driver at which point I called it a day.
paulnpace|4 months ago
One of the things he stressed was all the ways people think motorcycles are stolen aren't they ways motorcycles are stolen, because those methods are used by would-be professional thieves who get caught. The professionals are the ones who don't get caught also don't use the same methods.
The thief mentioned replacing OEM ECUs with some sort of home-made jobber that was "good enough" to start the bike and ride it away--the actual way motorcycles are stolen--to a shielded transfer point, typically a delivery truck, where the buyer waits to collect and pay for the stolen bike.
YeGoblynQueenne|4 months ago
roflchoppa|4 months ago
geoffeg|4 months ago
When I came back out, the attendant that had parked it was nowhere to be seen. I handed him the tag, he retrieved the key and a few minutes later off in the distance I heard him trying to start it. He managed to get it out of the parking spot before he gave up and motioned for me to walk down to him. After some discussion, he gave up and let me drive it out of the lot.
technothrasher|4 months ago
> a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles.
Figures. You MG owners! Did you have a hammer with you for when the points in the fuel pump needed smacking? ;) I drove a '65 Triumph Spitfire for about five years back in the early 00's and it was reliable as a top (after I repaired all the hack work that previous owners had done to it).
chris_st|4 months ago
wingspar|4 months ago
Growing up, a friends dad would use this as a ‘feature’ on his Datsun to move the car out of traffic when it wouldn’t restart.
Put it in first, release the clutch, crank the starter, and move the car out of the way.
wat10000|4 months ago
In hindsight, stalling while crossing railroad tracks, like quicksand, is a much less common danger in adulthood than I was lead to believe as a younger person.
firecall|4 months ago
They did note that it’s only good for manual cars. Automatics were not standard in the UK in the 80s.
All from memory, so might be mangling the details :-)
*Or could have been the Australian version.
AnimalMuppet|4 months ago
But I came really close to getting in trouble with a 1948 Chevy pickup. I backed it into my grandfather's garage, and then found out that it was a bit too far forward to be able to close the door. So I turned the ignition on, put it in reverse, and touched the starter.
Unfortunately, the engine caught with that brief touch of the starter, leaving me frantically stabbing for the clutch before I pushed through the back of the garage...
Fortunately, it idled very slowly, and I had (of course) given it no gas.
hinkley|4 months ago
wombatpm|4 months ago
staplung|4 months ago
vjvjvjvjghv|4 months ago
james_marks|4 months ago
Did it many times when a starter or battery died; just need a bit of a hill or a good push.
selimthegrim|4 months ago
nlawalker|4 months ago
stavros|4 months ago
_whiteCaps_|4 months ago
DYK Miata is a recursive acronym? It stands for: Miata Is Always The Answer.
EvanAnderson|4 months ago
zamadatix|4 months ago
fallinditch|4 months ago
RHSeeger|4 months ago
So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it inspected the previous day... and they didn't mention anything was wrong. I did not go back to that inspection place again.
at-fates-hands|4 months ago
Drove it home, brakes worked like a dream. Got up next morning, third stop light, brake goes all the way to the floor, I'm drifting into the intersection. I panic, look both ways and gun it through safely. Drove that thing with brakes barely working back to the shop. Calmly told them whatever they did? Didn't work.
Same thing. Another $800 bill, this time the brakes worked for a few more days, then it happened again. I took it to another shop. The mechanic asked what they told me they did and what they charged me for. I showed them both invoices. He pulled me aside with my car still on the lift and whispered to me, "Look man, they didn't do anything. They just filled the brake fluid up. When it all leaked back out is why your brakes kept going out. Imma fix this for a super discounted rate, but you need to get a lawyer, you got lucky not getting into an accident or killed."
I sued the shop, got all my money back and then some. About six months after they settled my suit, I got a call from the local paper asking why I sued them because they were doing a story on the shop scamming hundreds of people out of tens of thousands of dollars.
CitrusFruits|4 months ago
red369|4 months ago
I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster.
Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.
thr0w|4 months ago
Stratoscope|4 months ago
I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.
Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.
With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."
Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.
The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.
Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.
Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.
I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.
Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."
We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.
Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.
Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.
Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
hn_acc1|4 months ago
I stopped having that dream nearly as often when I bought my '05 Subaru Legacy GT wagon.
What's even stranger is that my current Kia Stinger (a fun car!) becomes an exotic Maserati or Aston Martin or Jaguar in my dreams..
wildzzz|4 months ago
bluGill|4 months ago
gdevenyi|4 months ago
kerblang|4 months ago
- I am utterly fucking shitfaced drunk and having great difficulty with reality in general
- I am completely blind, albeit sober
- I am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least)
- I am going uphill, but the hill keeps getting steeper, until finally I am completely vertical, and to my surprise, traffic is passing me
- Don't ask me how I know, but I have entered a no-oxygen zone and have to get out of there before I pass out
Zhenya|4 months ago
He was equally entertaining and knowledgeable in class.
tombert|4 months ago
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.
quotemstr|4 months ago
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?
"Just learn to ignore the expected errors, bro" is the most infuriating "workaround" for this lack of basic log hygienehinkley|4 months ago
But I am surprised this is (2022) I would have taken bets that it was more like 2016 if not earlier and was a repost the first time I saw it.
ubermonkey|4 months ago
I was astonished, upon turning a corner and seeing one, to realize I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that the 914 existed. It's one of those cars that was a dime a dozen in my 70s and 80s youth (along with MGs and proper, original VW Bugs) that slowly in inexorably vanished from the casual landscape.
Back then, I kind of hated them (the shared heritage with VW made them "not a real Porsche" in my eyes, which then as now preferred the lines of the 911s anyway), but now I find them charming little oddballs. We may take it as read that the examples at the show were in rather better running order than the one in the article. ;)
https://luftgekuhlt.com/
bloomingeek|4 months ago
Great read. Several years ago I owned and drove a '67 Olds Cutlass for sixteen years. (Two door, auto-trans, AC, standard brakes.) I purchased the car in 1990 and everything was in working order. When the carburetor finally warped beyond repair, I cobbled together some other Olds carb body parts and, since the automatic choke parts were bad, I rigged up a manual choke line through the firewall. This made the car undriveable for the other drivers in my family! The sequence of gas pedal pumps and knowing when to disengage the choke was too much to surpass. :)
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489
dang|4 months ago
A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 - July 2023 (303 comments)
A few things to know before stealing my 914 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 - April 2022 (417 comments)
LightBug1|4 months ago
Much more work, but much more worthwhile ... that and the joy of having a choice of entering one of the last places left not hooked up to the web.
RhysU|4 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Egan_(columnist)
For example: https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/2016/11/1/the-very-l...
drewg123|4 months ago
That sounds so familiar!
My first car was a barn-find 22 year old (at the time) 1964 Triumph TR4. It had a moderately bad oil leak, and the oil would land on the exhaust manifold and be blown along the transmission tunnel. Smoke would fill the interior around the shift lever. It would smoke more heavily the harder you pushed it.
doodaddy|4 months ago
Reminds me of the car I learned to drive manual on. It would only start when the drivers side door was open. So if you stalled the car the process was: open door, clutch in, start engine, clutch out and go, close door. You learned not to stall…
DoctorOetker|4 months ago
It would seem more effective if an LLM were used to paraphrase the concerns so it would be less amenable to automated filtering.
avhception|4 months ago
haunter|4 months ago
danesparza|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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potato3732842|4 months ago
mauvehaus|4 months ago
Funnily enough, I did not impress a date by roll-starting it when the starter was intermittently flaky.
gregorvand|4 months ago
jacquesm|4 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092
ziofill|4 months ago
locao|4 months ago
justinator|4 months ago
Seems a lot less bother just to pick it up.
HardwareLust|4 months ago
ForOldHack|4 months ago
ChrisMarshallNY|4 months ago
I have a friend that had a 914, and sent it to him. Made his day.
j1elo|4 months ago
abstractspoon|4 months ago
TacticalCoder|4 months ago
The year is 2025. I still have it (never had the heart to sell it) and still use it so now I own it since 26 years. This thing is rock solid reliable. It's certainly a bit manly to drive (no assisted steering and no ABS) but every time I use for something mundane (like going to the pharmacy or to pick my kid at school) I keep thinking "it's insane that this thing is so reliable I could still use it as my daily if I wanted to".
Now of course a Porsche 911 from the 80s ain't a Porsche 914 from the seventies but still: quite a different experience over 26 years (and my car is now 37 years old) from the experience in TFA.
unknown|4 months ago
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timonofathens|4 months ago
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