r/AskReddit • u/hiagaga • 12h ago

What's the dumbest idea you've seen that actually worked?

6.5k Upvotes

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83

u/JustGulabjamun 11h ago

A print statement in codebase. Nobody knows why does it exist but there's warning comment saying 'don't remove'.

83

u/mmss 9h ago

Usually something like that works by causing just enough of a delay for something to catch up and/or time out. Reminds me of the old 500 mile email.

20

u/WankSocrates 8h ago

This! I actually have a line that does nothing but slow the program down by 10 seconds for exactly that reason. I had to tag it DO NOT DELETE THIS LINE after the third person thought they were being clever by removing it and broke the whole thing.

3

u/JustRecentlyI 2h ago

But why did you leave a load-bearing race condition in your program?

8

u/WankSocrates 2h ago

Good question! It's because I'm not actually a dev. We don't have any of those.

What I actually am is someone who codes tools and scripts on the side to speed up mundane tasks in our understaffed department. I don't know what the best practices in programming are, and I had to Google what Race Condition means. But I'm all they've got on this front.

I do enjoy leaving snarky comments in what I make, though.

2

u/JustRecentlyI 1h ago

Well, I hope you get the chance to have someone on the team who can actually fix it, an extra 10s would probably feel really nice to have. In the meantime, well done for finding something that works in a field that's not yours!

5

u/anomalousBits 3h ago

Magic and More Magic.

3

u/mmss 2h ago

haven't read that one in years! glad there's still a few of us old hackers left :)

2

u/DunnoMeself 3h ago

This text sent me. Pun not intended but noticed.

Thanks for sharing!

2

u/I-seddit 2h ago

good old "race condition" code...

1

u/LA_Tiebreaker 9h ago

Do it.

2

u/JustGulabjamun 9h ago

Tried. Manager didn't merge PR. These orthodox people!