Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

Re:Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? by onion2k on Monday July 27, 2015 @02:33AM (#9953690)

This is exceptionally hard to answer because for every problem I solve I tend to end up looking at my solution and thinking "That wasn't so hard. Why did it take me so long? Am I bad at this stuff?"

To answer the question though, I think probably writing a robust web scraper to search events listings and turn them in to a sharable calendar. It'd be trivial these days but I did it in 1999 in Perl with regexs.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? by zallen on Monday July 27, 2015 @02:46AM (#9953738)

> "That wasn't so hard. Why did it take me so long? Am I bad at this stuff?"

Hah. Always. Hindsight bias and impostor syndrome are a fun mix! I remember writing a blog suite (with comments!) in Perl in the late 90s; back then, without S.O. and other knowledge-sharing beyond some Usenet forums, inventing the wheels as we went along... it was all hard.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? by stevoski on Monday July 27, 2015 @03:56AM (#9953935)

I coded the same thing (actually an online magazine with comments on articles, a forum, and a form for signing up for email updates), around the same time. I used classic ASP. I shudder to think of all the security holes I must have had.

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