When I applied for my first job at 18, I got really bored with sending CV's. Spent a few days developing a website that scanned job applications online for emails, then made a Python script that sent out pretty generic applications. It attached my CV to the email too. Pretty handy as a first-job type of deal, but would never use it for anything that requires discernment. I got three offers out of it, picked one of them.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
111–120 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#112An early Samsung phone had a small bug. When you tried to dial an invalid emergency number, the home screen was briefly visible.
I discoveted that, with a lot of tapping at exactly the right time, I could launch the marketplace.
With a lot of tapping at the right time I could trigger a voice search.
I then told it to install an app which disabled the lock screen.
With, again, a lot of tapping at just the right time and place I was able to launch the app and get into the phone.
Led to my first bug bounty (a new Samsung phone!) And my first million view YouTube video.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/03/new-bypass-samsung-lockscre...
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#113As Jenkins CI was gaining popularity, before they added native support for templating (which I think they have now. At least in their enterprise solution?)and a few other things. I hacked a plug-in together that implemented templates. You’d configure the “template job” like any normal job, except you’d use a variable syntax ($whatever or similar) for any values you wanted the template to use. Then you could create new jobs with only one step “implement template” which had some prompts for the variables used in the template job.
It would rewrite the implementation jobs whenever you saved either the template or the implementation. It wasn’t super fancy or even that difficult to be honest. Just would copy the xml and do a text replace then force Jenkins to reload it.
It was a pretty inelegant and somewhat fragile solution. But it worked for what I needed. It even was the top google result for “Jenkins templates” for a while. I eventually had someone else start contributing bug fixes and I made them the maintainer.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#114After reading an inspiring story in the mid 90s about someone that collected rejection letters for jobs they weren't qualified for (CEO of a national rail carrier etc), I turned to a life built on a similar idea. I applied for jobs I thought I could do, using mostly made-up resume information. If I was scheduled for an interview I would study like mad every waking hour until the interview. My career was absurdly successful by any measure and I retired rich 30 years early.
The resume is the dumbest blocker in our society. If you can do the job, just write that on your resume along with whatever else you think they want to see.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#115I used to play games for free at the local internet café. Not sure how the system locks work today, but back then there was some special software preventing you from using the computer unless you had paid for access. I read somewhere that there was a keyboard combination, I think it was Win + U, which brought up an accessibility screen. From there you could click on a "Read more" link and it would open up a browser and bypass the lock!
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#116My proudest hack was completing my bachelor in 2 years instead of the usual 3 (The Netherlands). I could just enroll into 3rd year courses. I told my study advisor this. He told me that it could not be done with a very stern face. I told him: I'll prioritize my second year courses over my third year courses, deal? He reluctantly agreed. He told me I'd burn out. He was wrong. Well, at one point I almost did but that was because I did 6 months in 2 months for fun (done that for a whole year, it'd be 1 year in 3 years). I realized that 2 academic years per actual year was my comfortable study rate.
He gave me a graduation speech where he expressed his surprise as no one had done it for a very long time.
Meanwhile while putting stuff like that on my CV (including stuff like cum laude, TA, teaching as a web development bootcamp instructor, some actual programming experience, hall of fame with computer graphics engine building). No one cared :')
Other than Facebook (3 years after graduation), no one interviewed me at a FAANG. No cared about my big achievement that I'm proud of. People don't get it. You think it's only possible in 3 as if it's a set in stone rule (people at my uni certainly believed it) and you defy that and succeed! The disbelief on people their faces. And I shared my exploits and other students were able to do it too! The sheer rebellion of it all! Yea, it was fun :)
For anyone in uni, you can most likely do it too.
The fact that no recruiter or hiring manager at any hip company I wanted to work at cared, it made me bitter for a few years. I really wanted to work for a big tech company for those few years. In truth, I wanted that because I wanted to earn some good money while being fully immersed in the tech world and just focus hardcore on tech. I never got that opportunity (other than FB, which I failed). Focusing hardcore on tech, I did get that by simply studying at VU
Instead, now I work 4 days per week and am mostly working remote living my life as a digital nomad. That's my hack to the question "how do you become rich right now?" If you're single, work 4 days per week and travel. I'm on a Western European salary, so it's doable but I'm not making any savings. Like I said, it's a hack.
And if you're like "we meant computer systems!" Well, it wasn't specified, so I could hack my answer ;-)
I played a lot of hackthebox.eu and I realized that: hacking is a spirit.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#117I was located in Sydney Australia, trying to fix a literally showstopper bug in the signal processing of the bank of Land Mobile Radio base stations that were being used to coordinate the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. Less than 24 hours to go before the final dress rehearsal, and the production company was preparing to spend megabucks to pull all the radios out and replace them with a different manufacturer's, unless the bug was fixed in the next few hours.
I ended up hacking the radio firmware to bypass the signal processing and stream the raw received samples from London to Sydney. I hacked a radio in Sydney to feed the London samples into its signal processing, then streamed the resulting samples back to the transmitter in London. I now had an LMR base station running in real-time over the Internet, with the radio hardware in London and the signal processing in Sydney. I was able to attach a JTAG hardware debugger to the DSP in the radio running the signal processing and find the bug. From there we did a firmware release and uploaded new firmware into the radios in London. Our radios stayed in and handled the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics.
Edit:
The customer must have been happy with the outcome, as they ended up using our radios for the Sochi Winter Olympics two years later.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#118I must have been about 12 years old. I wanted to rent a movie on DirectTV.
To rent a movie, a phone line had to be connected to the receiver box. The box would dial out to DirectTV and send over the information that "jrib purchased movie X".
I learned that I could connect two phones directly with a 9V battery and the right resistor in the middle. So I connected a phone line on one end to the DirectTV receiver and on the other end to random phone.
The receiver waited for a dial tone, so then I played a dial tone sound on repeat on my computer into the phone's microphone.
It worked and I got to see the movie!
I felt really guilty though so I told my parents a few days later and we let the satellite box connect to a real phone line to pay for the movie :)
This link explains how the phone circuit is setup: https://hackaday.com/2012/06/08/using-old-phones-as-an-inter...
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#119I reverse engineered a part of the firmware on the (then new) Vortex 150 racing quadcopter. There were 3 different SKUs as i recall, i had the EU version with 25mW VTX transmitter limit. The hardware was capable of much more and the US version had ~200mW i think.
There was a wand thing with an NFC writer some people could buy that could temporarily ignore the region check and put it in “race mode” which allowed any power level to be set. However those were restricted sales, the consumer version of the wand didn’t have the race director mode. Eventually i ended up with one of the race director wands too but not before i tried to hack the quad.
Anyway, i dumped the firmware. Figured out what the CPU was. Disassembled the firmware blob. I traced where the region check was performed then overwrote the instructions with noop’s. Assembled, flashed and then promptly flew it into a tree at 50mph.
It survived just fine. I still have it to this day, just with upgraded motors.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#120Elementary school, Windows 3.x era. School district thought they blocked access to the built-in OS games. Nope, from any program (Wordpad, etc) you could FILE -> OPEN to find/launch/play Minesweeper. Nothing makes an 8-year-old feel more like a "hacker" than subverting school controls to play video games, while also gaining cred with your friends. The good ol' days.
Ah, reminds me of the good ol' Windows 98 login bypass: https://epiclogon.ytmnd.com/