tweak

Fork the code and tweak til your hearts content.

Let's see if we can tweak this in such a way as to pass some kind of compromise.

There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful.

When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80.

Now when I'm feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy, and then I feel better.

I'm willing to change just one thing, retest, tweak another, retest and onward until the problem starts to present itself.

The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies.

My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak.

When I do web development, I test in Opera at the very end after I have fixed all issues in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari and guess what?I never had to make one tweak for Opera.

I was thinking about "the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even when we were the only ones playing.

It also makes it harder to have one-off queries that can be tuned easily based on exactly what data is needed and tweaked to convince the database to generate the right query plan, and it makes it much harder to look at some DB stats, identify a poorly-performing query, and then map it back to the code that generated that query.

But if you decide that the change you need to make is to the SQL itself, the ORM layer suddenly gets in your way: you either have to bypass the ORM layer to drop into raw SQL, which at worst is hard to do and at best tends to massively reduce the value proposition of the ORM framework, or you have to try to tweak your code to get it to generate the query that you want, which is often frustrating and far more difficult than just writing the SQL yourself.