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Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#181

Post by alasdair_ »

Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week.

I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very expensive Scottish smoked salmon was 4 pence more expensive than the price listed on the shelf. The supermarket (Tesco) also has a large sign stating that if the price was wrong on any item, they would both give you the item for free and the money it costs.

I promptly went and loaded up a cart with nothing but smoked salmon.

It took 42 minutes of arguing with different store managers and pointing to the sign, but I managed to eat for free that week and even had enough to pay my electricity bill.

The reason I don’t feel bad is that particular store very, very often charged the customers more than the listed price and no one ever seemed to catch them.

I went in three months later, and the same salmon still rang up at 4p more than it was listed at.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#182

Post by rakeshsingh1 »

akashshekara wrote: post #172

I moved back to Texas from college without any job prospects and found myself living in my car, relying on Walmart Wi-Fi for internet access. So, I resorted to a few low-quality hacks. The first was a QR Code parking app. It worked by just placing a qr code on public parking meters. I marked up the parking from like from 50 cents to a dollar. I kept 50 cents and payed for the parking through the official app with mit…

Wow, that's quite a story! It sounds like you got a bit of a wake-up call from your dad, but it's commendable that you took responsibility for your actions. It's also great that you reported the washing machine hack properly so that it could be fixed. It's unfortunate that no firmware patch was released, but at least you did the right thing.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#183

Post by BonoboIO »

sharadov wrote: post #133
bravoetch wrote: post #114

After 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 succ…

That's insane, what are some of the jobs that you conned your way into?

Please don’t tell me you were a doctor :D

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#184

Post by kjellsbells »

1999 or 2000 I think. Checkpoint was the big dog in firewalls and they were ludicrously expensive. I had been noodling around with OpenBSD and realized that you could make the image small enough to boot from floppy and run its firewall in a ramdisk (IIRC ipf- this predates the replacement with pf). So we replaced a commercial firewall with ipf running entirely in memory from an immutable floppy disk and it just blew Checkpoint out of the water.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#185

Post by sneusse »

My wife and I wanted to travel around Europe on a tight budget for a month. As we didn’t care for the order we’d visit each location I built a multi-stop-with-some-constraint flight optimizer based on scraped google flights data. I could enter the airport names and min/max days to stay there. Worked great, we payed like 200€ for all our travels!

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#186

Post by kevinmhickey »

I worked on a MIPS SOC that had a pair of registers that controlled DDR timing. The formula for calculating the correct timing was complicated and I am bad at math. Most of it was constant but 2 values were important. After failing to get it right a few times I wrote a firmware program (had to fit in 16k of I-Cache) to try every value, run a simple memory test, and print the number of errors to the serial console. This resulted in a grid where the number of errors would converge to 0 at the correct settings.

As it turned out, due to bugs in the hardware and the board, the "correct" answer by the manual would not work and this was the only way to get a working setting. My little hack became part of every boot of the system - it auto-generated the DDR timing. This was back in the early 2000's before DDR training at boot became standard practice.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#188

Post by chasd00 »

I can’t remember the details exactly but there was/is a script injection vulnerability in the Salesforce formula field parser. Years ago I used this to emit a touch event from a click event back when those were different to get a UI working on a tablet for a client. The guy I was working with was fairly impressed which was good because he went on to much bigger things and ended up hiring me 4 or 5 years later for a lot of money.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#189

Post by OJFord »

alasdair_ wrote: post #181

Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week. I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very expensive Scottish smoked salmon was 4 pence more expensive than the price listed on the shelf. The supermarket (Tesco) also has a large sign stating that if the price was wrong on any item, they would both give you the item for free and the money it costs. I pr…

That's just the right combination of brilliant and bizarre.

It used to (and might still be) the case that at Waitrose multibuy type offers are still honoured on reduced items, and applied by discount - based on the original price - meaning you could/can get a further reduction on yellow labels, or potentially be paid to take them.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#190

Post by BonoboIO »

Wanted to install Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 but lost the CDkey, this was pre Internet for me.

I was curious, maybe some random could work. Nope.

Then I had the genius idea, I also had Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and the CDkey worked.

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