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.
Virtual environments are an incomplete solution at best. In particular, they really don't help much with the use case of wanting to install a tool: if you're installing a tool and not just setting up a development environment for working on a specific project with its dependencies, then you probably want to make that tool usable without activating its venv. The virtual environment capabilities shipped with Python itself don't really have any affordances for that.
> then you probably want to make that tool usable without activating its venv. The virtual environment capabilities shipped with Python itself don't really have any affordances for that.
The only reason it isn't "usable" is because the wrapper script isn't on your system's path. Unless your tools actually depend on venv-related environment variables being set (for example, because they make subprocess calls and assume that `'python'` will use the currently running Python when they should correctly be using `sys.executable`), which IMX is very rare, you don't ever actually have to activate a venv to do anything with it. In particular, you don't need to activate it to use its REPL; you can instead directly specify the path to its Python executable.
The missing affordance basically looks like `ln -s path/to/venv/bin/tool ~/.local/bin`. Which is a big part of what Pipx does for you. (And once I realized that, I started using Pipx's vendored shared copy of pip: https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/01/07/python-packaging-...)
> Isn't that really obviously about five steps too many to be considered a reasonable way of installing a package?
That's why I use pipx. But the activation and deactivation in that example are completely unnecessary, and the last line is just using the installed package. Installation actually looks like:
which is only two steps too many if we acknowledge that there has to be at least one step. This all of course can also just be put in a shell script, or a function in your ~/.bashrc.
Pip just happens to be laser focused on the actual installation of packages, so it doesn't provide that wrapper. (With PAPER I'm aiming for slightly broader scope, but still something intended specifically for users that's only one piece of a developer toolchain.)
> (And you didn't handle getting an appropriate version of python installed.)
When was the last time you tried to obtain an application that could be installed as a PyPI package and your system Python wasn't compatible? Everyone knows the CPython release cadence now and is strongly pressured to advance their own support in lock-step with that. Similarly for libraries. There's already a full set of wheels for the latest version of NumPy for 3.14, 22 of them. Even musl-based distributions are provided for. Even 32-bit Windows is provided for, for those few holdouts.
If your target audience doesn't have Python and understand on a basic level what that is, why will they be able to understand using the uv command line and accept using that to install a program?
That requires you to be running the right version of python at the system level, and for all your installed tools to have compatible package versions. It doesn't work very often for me
What sorts of things are you installing that you "often" need to care about having the "right" version of Python? It's normal in the Python ecosystem that packages explicitly support every non-EOL Python version. Numpy already has wheels out for 3.14. And even if you use an older Python, the older compatible Numpy versions don't go away.
Can you give a concrete example of an installation you attempted that failed?
Don't, use `uv`. Literally just install uv and then try something like `uvx bakeit` and it'll download and run the tool in its own virtualenv. You don't need to bother with anything.
Everybody else uses virtual environments and alternate installations of python instead of using and installing packages in the system python installation. It is not that hard.
These days, if I'm feeling generous I'll spend a minute or two to see if I can get a promising Python tool to install with uv. If it's not going to easily submit to a `uv tool install`, then I move on and forget about it.
uv has not really done that much. It's all been possible, and usually about as ergonomically. It's just opinionated in a way that people currently seem to like, and fast primarily due to good internal design (not because it's written in rocket emoji Rust sparkle emoji, although that certainly is a net positive to performance).
UV hasn't done anything except for all the parts that matter. (And while there are compelling arguments that Rust has nothing to do with it, the correlation is pretty strong)
UV has provided easy solutions for engineers that are easily frustrated by a lack of easy solutions.
There's nothing wrong with easy solutions, but any python engineer worth their salt has long since solved and moved on from the issues that UV claims to solve.
I believe UV provides value, even significant value, to lite python users, but for those working with python day in and day out, maybe you're using a new tool, but life has not changed significantly for the better. Or you just sucked and didn't reach for any of the perfectly usable solutions to all of these problems that existed before UV showed up.
uv provides a breadth of functionality that no single tool has before, and that no simple, easy combination of tools has before. For developers, it replaces poetry with something much faster and more reliable, and replaces pipenv. For end users, it replaces pipx and pyenv, and pretty much replaces pip itself (which no longer wants to be used by end users). And most importantly, uv relieves you of having to remember which of the preceding tools are suitable for which use cases.
I do have a blog post planned on the topic that's hopefully only a few posts away, and a renewed commitment to start frequent blogging again. And this has all been off topic, so I'll spare the reply.
uv has done for Python what Docker did for containers. Could you accomplish what Docker did with OS primitives like cgroups? Of course. Do most devs know what those are, much less how to use them? Doubtful.
I consider myself to be fairly good with Python, and excellent with *nix. uv is far and away the best tool for managing Python projects, tools, and scripts, bar none. Sorry, Poetry - you had a good run.
Any project written in a language with big user base java, C#, C++, perl, rust even fortran has this problem. The only thing that helps is experience with the language. I very seldom see code that survives ten years, even no deps things fail because your compiler interpreter changes.
It is just part of the job. Sure I am not a big fan of C# or PowerShell but a big part is just that I have no experience.
That’s not generally true for .Net, though the use of third party libraries could create an issue in some cases.
.Net was designed deliberately so that multiple versions could be installed side by side and an executable would pick the version most likely to work based on target version and compatibility. In most cases .Net is also forward
compatible so e.g. a .Net 3 app continues to work on a PC where only .Net 4.8 is installed. In addition, libraries could be part of the application installation and in modern .Net, the framework can be part of the application installation.
In most cases, everything will just work, and when it doesn’t, one can just install the older .Net version needed and nothing will be broken.
Is Python still that bad? I remember the big problems were during the Python 2 -> Python 3 transition, but in the last few years I've managed to get away with a single Python install and haven't really had any compatibility issues.
I stick with Python.org packages for macOS, and the official Python packages on Ubuntu, and everything seems to work just fine.
There are better tools for managing the madness, certainly. uv makes python management almost pleasant (sandboxing the whole environment by default is a wise choice).
That sounds like a good way to greatly increase the disk and ram required for each tool or running copy of a tool or application. Almost as bad as turning everything into an Electron app.
You aren't wrong, but it's pretty much the only sane way to deal with an ecosystem that doesn't allow multiple versions of the same package to coexist - otherwise we're all stuck on the lowest common denominator of each configuration of packages
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.
...and keep in mind that our self-hosted Confluence instance is several years old and since someone finds a new Confluence vulnerability every three days the data you need may vector some malware to your machine so you probably should only look at the docs on a sandboxed VM. Atlassian has been bugging us to convert to cloud hosting for 5 years and management won't let us but that's another story.
... 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.
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.
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.
Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn. "When the kids go off to college" she says knowing full well that I know that 20 years without and getting on in my sixties will kill me instantly.
I tried a bike once, and that was enough. My brother had an R6, and since we were both idiots, he encouraged me to give it a try.
It was on that day that I discovered that their brakes are thankfully equally potent as their engines. I finished the ride and realized that if I ever got a bike, I would either be jailed or dead in short order, so decided to not get one.
I know there are plenty of more reasonable bikes out there, but the problem is I would gain skills on those, and then talk myself into getting something faster.
I don’t have a problem with fast/fun cars; I’ve had a Datsun 280Z with an LS1 swap (waaaay too much power for the tires and aero - if you launched hard, it would start to hook up in 3rd, and by 110-120 MPH it started getting floaty), and used to daily a Honda S2000 (favorite car I’ve ever owned - they’re like big go-karts). But bikes are on another level. The only thing I’ve experienced like that was an acquaintance’s MKIV Supra, where every upshift feels like the hand of god shoving you back, there’s a cacophony of intake shriek, blow-off puff, and exhaust roar, and you’re doing your best to keep focus.
Man, I love engines. EVs are definitely the future for a variety of reasons, but I’m still sad about it. The sheer number of mechanical pieces all working together in perfect symphony is mind-boggling and beautiful.
I used to know a guy who had a 45 minute commute who planned for ages to commute by autogyro - had spoken to farmers to get use of a field near his work to land etc.
Eventually his wife said "fine, commute by motorbike" - which was the original intention all along!
> Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn.
This seems to be how it goes. My own father used to ride a motorcycle back in the day - until it almost fell on me and my sister when we were screwing around on it.
Off that motorcycle went, never to be seen again after that.
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 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.
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 was born in 1980 and it seemed people would get stuck in quicksand on tv regularly when I was a kid, but it seems a kind of danger that has almost disappeared from the collective narrative.
Why was it popular before? Why isn't it anymore? This baffles me.
You still can very much die in quicksand but the problem is that you get like your foot stuck in a way that you just can't escape and then you just die out there like that. But the idea that you sink down and drowned is some kind of weird combination of a swamp and not really quicksand but is much more filmable.
You get your foot stuck in and then the tide comes in and you drown.
Most quicksand I'm aware of is in tidal flats [0] [1] and it really is dangerous to take a short cut over them. Come to think of it, most normal sand I encounter is in tidal flats, too.
TV Tropes suggests the idea whilst even existing in fiction for hundred of years before TV, is now "discredited".
---
Personally I prefer more interesting madcap cultural theories. Here's one from the top of my head:
Quicksand refers to anxiety about the natural world from an increasingly urbanised and ecologically disconnected population. Or maybe Quicksand represents an increasing urban populations attitude towards nature. It represents the opposite of a safe, technology, capitalist, consumerist industrial world of the post WW2 era. Nature was literally seen as hostile. Nature can make a person stuck, capture them, and kill them. It's allied with getting lost in the woods stories, a trope which emphasizes both physical and existential disorientation in the face of nature's indifference
Quicksand on TV existed throughout the early ecological hippy inspired new age of the late 20th century but the seeds were being sown. This changed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as we witnessed the convergence of environmental concerns (e.g. plastic bags, straws, global warming) with the logic of neoliberal capitalism, together with an increase in bureaucratic management on behalf of people. Nature is not scary but something to be protected from harm. Nature is reconfigured from a place of danger to a place of stewardship. Avatar, the movie represents the change the most.
Thus, the role of cities and technology as agents of death and destruction have changed. It is not nature that entraps or destroys, but rather the infrastructures of urbanization, capitalism, and technological progress. Ironically this valorisation of nature is happening at the same time as increasingly technological manipulation of the rural environment - mechanisation of farming, house building, terraforming, weather modification. Nature is no longer wild, is not even tame, it's another resource to be shaped and used.
Quicksand not only is discredited as being inaccurate, it's ideologically impossible for nature to be dangerous anymore.
I like this theory, especially connected to how few shows deal with open nature anymore (stuff in the savana or jungle or old west with pumas everywhere etc). We seem to have become thoroughly urbanized even in imagination.
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.
I did it daily with a car I had bought for 50 bucks and that was not worth a new battery. Just make sure to park it on top of a hill. Push it off with a foot out the door, gain momentum and now you have one attempt.
I used to roll start my last stickshift car just for fun. 2001 Honda Civic. The inertia from just rolling down my 30ft gently sloping driveway was enough, have it in 3rd or so, pop the clutch briefly and it would start right up. A diehard stick shift colleague with a 2014-ish VW tells me this won't work on modern stickshift cars any more, don't know why.
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.
Funny you mention VW because the 914 is a VW. In fact, the name was originally VW-Porsche 914 from what I remember. A buddy’s dad bought one for $4K when they came out.
You should still be able to push start a newer manual transmission car. Put in the clutch, put the key to run, put it in 1st (or so), get it up to speed, let the clutch out, and now the engine is turning, which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine. If your electrical system is really bad, maybe the alternator can't get the voltage high enough to run everything; if your car is very modern maybe the engine control computer won't start up and control the engine before the engine stalls out because of lack of fuel and spark (or the fuel pump doesn't develop enough pressure in time); or maybe the computer just won't do it.
In a traditional automatic with a hydraulic torque converter between the engine and the gearing, you've got a problem: most transmissions use hydraulic pressure to actuate the gear selection, and hydraulic pressure is typically developed by turning of the input shaft. Some older automatics had a secondary pump to develop hydraulic pressure from turning of the output shaft. In those cars, you could select first gear, turn the ignition to run, and if you got it moving fast enough, it would develop pressure, actuate first gear, and then the transmission could turn the engine and off you were. Some references suggest pushing in neutral and selecting first when ready to start. References say you need to get up to about 15-25 mph for that; my VW Vanagon which shares the same engine type as the 914 (and is therefore a rear-engine sports car) can start the engine from a much slower roll; the speedometer rests at 10 mph, so who knows how fast I'm going, but probably walking speed.
...which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine.
Depends; what's lighting up the field coils in the alternator? A generator, which probably went out of cars in the '60s, sure. But something has to power the parts that create the magnetic field in an alternator, and if the battery's dead...
On top of the fact that the coils on top of the plugs these days are more finicky about the amount of power they receive. A battery with 11.5V probably isn't going to cut it. And as you point out, the ECM may want a healthy 12V, too.
I would hedge the original statement and say you could push start a newer manual transmission car, but don't count on it. Even as far back as 1999, I had a Honda VFR motorcycle that could not be push-started until its battery had some juice in it, for the reasons stated above.
If the battery is dead flat, you're pooched, but you can get way farther than you have any right to push starting a car with an only mostly dead battery because you don't have the (huge) load of the starter motor bringing the voltage down. I've had a couple alternators go and push started the cars they were in until I was able to replace the alternator.
On the basis of this experience, I'm not convinced the alternator actually comes into play in a typical push start. It's usually roll the car, clutch out, lurch and fire, clutch back in and let the engine get to a stable idle. At no point is the engine spinning fast enough to create much electricity with the alternator until after it's actually running. Provided the alternator is working in the first place, of course.
As an aside, in all of the vehicles where I've lost the alternator, the first warning sign has been the radio having a shit fit. I have never once seen the idiot light come on for a bad alternator, which really calls its utility into question.
The inability to do a rolling start in an automatic really bugs me after being used to manuals my whole life.
I switched to an auto a few years back for reasons (UK, still not super popular here), and once or twice I've had the car cut out on me at speed, in traffic; had it been a manual, I could have just restarted it while moving, but it forces you to be stopped, foot on the brake and in park before you can push the button to start it.
It's hard not to reply to this with a sarcastic joke, but yes, you're right, it's definitely a problem that needs fixed, and no, it has nothing to do with the transmission.
As of 2013, manual cars (at least Mazdas) can still be roll-started, as long as the engine computer has enough power to function.
My CX-5 even has a wireless-pushbutton start, not a physical-key-in-the-ignition start, but I've still been able to roll-start it when the battery is too dead to crank the starter motor but still has enough juice for the electronics (lowest I've seen is ~8v if I recall correctly, but don't quote me on that).
The process is pretty much the same: put the car's ignition into the "ON" position (in my case, press the pushbutton twice without touching the pedals -- once to ACC mode, then once to move from ACC to ON), then it's the same as normal: clutch-in, shift to your preferred gear, get rolling, and pop the clutch. Engine computer sees "oh, looks like the engine's spinning, let's add gas and spark" and you're good to go.
Anecdotally, I've seen the described behavior of the engine computer ("detects spinning and adds gas/spark, even if the initial motion wasn't from the starter motor") on automatic transmission vehicles, too. On a 2008 Chevrolet, I found that if you revved the engine up a bit (for inertia), turned the key to OFF, then quickly turned the key back to ON (without turning all the way to START), the engine computer will catch it and keep it running.
I was really surprised when I couldn't push start my 1992 Miata. I had the thing rolling down a hill at like 15mph in first for at least 2 blocks, engine was spinning, but just refused to fire. Jump pack fired it right up. I know the battery was dead after I left the light on, but I figured for sure the alternator would make enough juice to fire up the injectors and ignition...
Some alternators ironically require electricity to make electricity. They don't have permanent magnets inside, but instead use electromagnets. So from a stone cold battery, if there's not enough power to get those electromagnets functional, you don't have a way of converting that rotational energy into electricity.
Use second gear. I have a '96NA, and first gear can't perform a roll-start, but it catches just fine in second. I have no idea why that is, but I remember I was just about of hill when I discovered it.
It's because the wheels can turn the engine more easily and for longer in higher gears. This isn't intuitive until you realize that you've flipped the inputs and outputs of the transmission, and this inverts the gearing relationship. _Higher_ gears are better at multiplying relatively little input (wheelspin) into a lot of output (engine rotation).
You learn the same lesson (2nd gear starts) with motorcycles, which have much smaller batteries and fragile charging systems so the need to push-start is unfortunately common.
Early date with the now-wife, we ride a little way out of town and watch the sunset.
Then I realise in my consideration for the lady to guide her off the bike, I hadn't actually turned the ignition key off and the headlight had drained the battery.
Now a 2006 GSXR1000 idles in first gear at about 20km/hr (~12-14mph?). And a 100m quick-waddle found 1st no good for bump starting due to compression lockup...
Thankfully we'd stopped on a ridgeline and only another 300m away was the descent which allowed me to get to 40kmhr for a second gear bump start.
If you can't push-start a car, it's because it has electronic fuel injection. If the battery is stone dead, there's no juice to run the FI and fuel pump, it will never start. It would work on stone cold carbureted cars because there'd be enough fuel left in the float bowls to bootstrap the whole operation.
Some old cars had mechanically powered fuel pumps so if the engine is moving the pump is going. Mine just had a little shaft buried behind the mounting bracket.
Probably safer not to introduce electricity to gasoline…
Probably safer not to introduce electricity to gasoline…
Ooookay. I've never even heard third-hand stories of an electric fuel pump lighting the gasoline on fire, if that's what you're getting at, and I was a professional mechanic at one point.
Starter motors can die and you can push start a car with electronic fuel injestion in that case. Also a weak starter is often a warning symptom of a dying battery so push starting can help heading to the next shop / service station selling car batteries.
No. The clutch must be in when you start to roll the car--the car won't budge otherwise. You get it rolling, turn the ignition to on, then let out the clutch.
I suppose that a 1980s Corolla was the last car I drift-started, though.
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.
When I was first dating my wife, I think it was our second date, she was driving a ratty old 82 SAAB 900 that her dad had handed down to her. While she was coming to a stop at a light, the brakes failed on her and she panicked. I reached over and pulled the emergency brake (luckily on the transmission tunnel and not by the driver's door in that car), and we stopped in time to just barely kiss the rear bumper of the car in front of us. The driver looked in his rear view mirror with a "WTF?" expression and I sheepishly mouthed "sorry". She made me drive the car back to her house on the emergency brake, as she was too scared. I then diagnosed it as the master cylinder, went to the auto parts store that afternoon and bought a new one, installed it and bled the brakes, and got her back on the road. She says now that was when she decided I might be worth marrying, but that she foolishly didn't realize that I came as a package deal with an unending string of "old ugly smelly sports cars".
Seems like he wasn't able to get it out of gear, and then didn't want to turn off the engine because he'd lose power steering. Losing power steering isn't ideal, but seems like it'd be better than traveling at 135 mph, power steering is most important at low speeds, and I'd think better to have a bit of trouble with the steering as you get it stopped than to end up crashing it.
I was with a friend in a 5L V8 Mercedes, and we were doing a quick drive around the block after some sort of maintenance. He floored the accelerator - I can't remember why that was required, except I assume it wasn't. I assumed he was only going to do it momentarily, but the car rapidly reached, and passed, stupid speeds for that road. Just as I started to say something about preserving lives of us, and anyone else on the road, he suddenly shifted to neutral and brought the car to a stop with the engine screaming away at the redline. He then calmly reached down, unjammed the accelerator, and then continued driving back home.
That car was automatic, but he drove cars with manual transmissions a lot, so that would make it an obvious thing to do. I think in some of the famous unintended acceleration crashes, it has been unclear whether the person tried to change to neutral. A lot of newer cars have a much less intuitive method of doing so as well.
There's nothing as good in this regard as cars with manual transmissions though, in terms of having a dedicated pedal which disconnects the engine from the wheels, which you practice constantly during daily use.
This is what happened to quite a few people with the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. There was speculation that it was caused by bugs in the engine control unit. Officially the cause was found to be floor mats coming loose and holding the accelerator down. (I bought a new Toyota shortly after this and the dealer was very careful to show me how the floor mats worked and how to make sure they were properly attached.)
The brakes of a car in good working order should be able to overcome the engine and stop the car even if the engine is stuck at full power. But you have to do it decisively. Push the brake pedal to the floor and keep it there until you've stopped. What often happens is people are (very naturally) confused and not sure what to do, they'll brake but not hard enough, stop braking when it doesn't seem to work, try again, etc. This can heat up the brakes to the point where they're no longer effective enough to stop the car, and then you're really in for it.
I agree with what you said about brakes overcoming the engine. I've seen tests which show it works on even monstrously over-powered cars, but it can feel like it's not working and if the driver reacts wrongly to that, then it may no longer work.
I think stopping the power from going to the wheels needs to be an easy option. I wish there was more importance given to being able to easily do this.
I think the two options are shifting to neutral, or turning off the engine. I tested in a late-00s automatic BMW, and you had to hold the start/stop button for what felt like a very long time to turn the engine off if the car was in Drive. In an emergency, I think most people would give up long before it turned off. In that car, it was easy to change to neutral though, so I don't have a criticism about that design. What concerns me is cars with the same approach for the start/stop button, but where it is hard to get to neutral. I think in the Toyotas which had unintended acceleration issues, it wasn't easy/intuitive.
Edit: Another comment reminded me of something I forgot to mention above. You don't want turning off the engine to be the first resort because you lose power steering, and eventually, power assisted brakes.
Not only did this happen to me (caused by a hole in a brake line), it occurred the week after I happened to take the time to fix the emergency brake that hadn't worked in years. But yet I have no luck at the casino!
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.
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.
Less interested in interpretation, more interested in the fact that lots of people have the same nightmares (squishy brakes, class test and you haven't been to school in decades, etc.). Here's one - I desperately need to make a phone call or send a text or enter an address into Maps, but I just make typos over and over. Anyone else?
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!"
Thanks for asking. Kate developed severe asthma, to the point where she was taking prednisone every day and started carrying a portable breathing machine. Eventually she succumbed to her illness.
Her many friends, including myself, miss her dearly, but her memory lives on in all of us.
(Usually I would not share this kind of personal medical information in public, but Kate passed on nearly 50 years ago, and I didn't reveal her last name, so I think it's OK.)
Sorry to hear it, but at the same time those are great stories to remember her by. No matter one’s beliefs, we all live on in the memories of those who knew us.
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.
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.
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 used to work at a very large fruit company. I won't say the name because I don't want you to Think Different about them (and because I don't want as much correlation data about me on this account).
On the first day, one of the first things they had me do was set up email filters with an elaborate home-built email filtering system. The reason for this was because I would get thousands upon thousands of emails per day (not hyperbole), most of which were irrelevant to me, and if you didn't have fairly fine-grained and elaborate filtering your important emails would certainly be lost, often within minutes.
The solution to this problem, of course, would be to stop sending so many emails, or have better control over who was getting the emails, but instead the onus was put on everyone downstream to figure out which emails were spam (and to get yelled at if we didn't respond to an email because an important one got caught in the mix).
I complained about this a few times, and people's responses would always respond about how filters could solve this problem, and it always annoyed me. If someone is dumping a metric ton of trash in my backyard every day on top of my Amazon packages, the solution is not to figure out an optimal way to categorize and sort the trash to best differentiate it from my packages, the solution is to get that person to stop dumping garbage on me.
<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. :)
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…
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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… :-)
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