Ask HN: What're the craziest hacks you've done to launch?

Had to launch our AI product next day else customer would jump off and this would've basically killed the company. But AI was far from perfect and did only work for very small amount of usecases. Exchanged the AI with a queue and UI so humans could do the task instead in realtime. Worked. Went live. Completly smashed competitors.

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Just at launchday our internal infrastructure was fucked pretty bad and we faced a severe outage on everything non-productive. Product failed at some place to do proper error handling and basically got stuck forever since it couldn't reach some monitoring endpoint we had still placed on our int infra. We couldn't build a fix, since basically CI/Signing was part of the outage. ETA to get infra back up was something like ~8h. Panic grew as it would've totally fucked our go live. Hacked together a dummy http server returning status code 200 and exchanged DNS entry to point to that instead of int infra. Worked. Went live.

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Had to do an audit before we could go live, due to deadlines and planned vacation of auditor it needed to be spot on, no time for touch ups and re-audit. During the audit, he asked for a thing we forgot to do (some security alerting on a 3rd party tool which didnt support it), told him something along "sure, love to show that, yadda yadda, lets have lunch first." went to the most chatty guy in the office to join us for lunch (so he wastes some time), faked a "oh, shit, forgot i have a sync call, will catch you up there". While they were having lunch, I checked out the 3rd party code, added the alerting, wasted 20 mins with their broken buildsys. Managed to build the one lib necessary for the alerts, but not the whole image. Overrode the lib in the original img instead and hoped shit would work. They were back too early, couldnt test, just fired up the deployment, wasted some more time babbling with the auditor till it went through. We live tested it together. Worked. Audit went through without any remarks and we hit launchday.

Not sure if already well-known or maybe actually not true but I had a few ex RIM engineers tell me that the BlackBerry radio stack would reboot itself all the time. Like 100+ time a day. Because apparently fixing the problem was not an option.

Does simple fraud now count as a hack? The bar should be higher than this.

Doesn't really count as a product launch, but my freshmen year of college in my first ever programming class we had to present an app we designed to the rest of the class.

I'd designed a small little casino game that had a few different games(roulette, poker, etc), and at some point in time a couple of nights before it was due I somehow managed to fuck something up and when it was displaying the results, the string somehow had the number repeated over and over and over with it running off the screen. Like "The wheel stopped on 66666666666666666666666". I had no idea what the fuck I had done and for the life of me couldn't chase the bug down, not that I put much effort into it because I didn't really have the time given the other 4 finals I had to be studying for.

So I changed the string generating function slightly to append the result + 200 spaces instead of just the result, so the repeating digits past the first one would all just get pushed off the edge of the screen and not be visible.

Got a 100% and a fun little email exchange with my professor when he saw the print statement, he thanked me for the laugh and wished me well hoping this would be the first of many last minute hacks in my career.

In my opinion, yes, they were trying to DDOS it and find a flaw and then renegotiate.

I saw this kind of behavior a lot those few years. A major university did the same.

In the case of the university, they weren't fulfilling on their end by providing us with raw video materials in time to process them. Then our software had bugs processing the files in time. We had to do it all within a few weeks. Who's fault is that, our bugs or their personnel issues.

Usually lawyers then come in to fight it out. And they will comb over those contracts to find one item that was not fulfilled and use that to the hilt.

And, lots of times, you sign a contract and THEN you figure out how to fulfill upon it. If you haven't done that, you've never really run a business, don't fool yourself.