At a previous job we had a process on a server that was connecting to a third party system, but the third party system was speaking a version of SSL/TLS that our process couldn't connect to (I seem to recall there was an F5 load balancer between us somewhere?). Since we couldn't change our running system to support that SSL/TLS, we stood up another machine with mitmproxy and pointed our process to that. Took about 3 days of trouble shooting and 1 hour of resolution.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
121–130 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#122I built a software implementation of a half-QWERTY keyboard:
- in ObjC, with no prior knowledge of it or any lower level language than PHP or JS
- by dynamically switching the OS keyboard layout to a custom reverse-QWERTY one I somehow figured out how to hobble together
- and a daemon to restart it when it crashed because I presumably had horrific memory management issues I didn’t know how to debug at the time
- with one hand, because my left hand was unusable for a couple months after a serious bike accident
… all so I could keep working at a normalish pace, because at the time I couldn’t afford to take time off to recover, much less fairly expensive (to me at the time) and patent encumbered half-QWERTY keyboard hardware.
There are other use cases [not just those ;) but also those], but that little pile of hacks legitimately prevented my injury from being a life destroying catastrophe.
I’d share the pile of hacks but I probably need to run it by lawyers first.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#123I have a theory that some companies have a rage meter on customers on hold. I find that if I yell expletives at the hold music before getting connected to a rep initially, I get connected faster. Usually there’s a brief ring before getting connected to compose yourself :)
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#124Project was months behind schedule and had "six months to go" but the truth was nobody knew. The mpp calendar had all these 4 day blackout periods for loading data. I ended up getting that down to 2 hours but scheduled it between india/USA shifts so all the 4 day periods went away and (literally) months of project time got clawed back.
Vendors wouldn't share code so I broke it, looked at the error logs and wrote my own version of a indexed vector that reordered the operations using a knapsack algorithm and in a way that allowed us to run 50-100 parallel threads. Maybe 500 lines of code.
Knocked some heads together to get downstream systems to start importing data as soon as the first files arrived rather than wait until the end.
CTO (I'd never heard of him, it was a $30B company) didn't believe management about the months of time we'd saved, needed it all explained, was very happy.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#125An 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 a…
You sir have the patience of a saint. Cool hack!
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#126Most recently, it'd had to be how I added event generation upon completion of commands over ssh at https://nudgenotifier.com/ without installing Nudge on the server side.
I look for hostname@ in the streaming stdout of my ssh process and if I see one, in addition to other heuristics, I notify that a command completed over ssh.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#127Elementary 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.
In my school you had to rename the binaries to calc.exe and then they'd work.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#128I 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 wit…
Thanks for reminding that classic engineering is still alive.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#129I have a theory that some companies have a rage meter on customers on hold. I find that if I yell expletives at the hold music before getting connected to a rep initially, I get connected faster. Usually there’s a brief ring before getting connected to compose yourself :)
I had opposite experience with a health insurance company where it hung up on me. They have so many angry callers that they filter them out when the voice menu fails instead of giving you a person.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#130I mix [heavy cream powder] and powdered milk in equal portions to make half-and-half that I can keep at my desk without refrigeration. I keep it in [baby formula dispenser]s so I can shake it up for homogeneity and dispense it without digging in with a spoon. [heavy cream powder]: https://www.amazon.com/Anthonys-Fillers-Preservatives-Friend... [baby formula dispenser]: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-AVENT-Powder-Form…
I mix 5 parts of Walmart great value brand whitener, 1 partnestle choco powder, 3 parts granulated fine sugar (table sugar), 2 parts instant coffee (thumb pressed through a metal tea sieve to break all clumps). Part measurement is a scoop cradle. This gives me exact mixture as Nestle 3-in-1 coffee mix.