Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 363 posts

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#191

Post by Natanael_L »

near wrote: post #116
Rainymood wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(one user proved it was Turing complete and wrote a Brainfuck parser in it.) Okay. That is hilarious.

I couldn't find said example (sorry), but I did find one of his other examples of abusing the assembler: http://bin.smwcentral.net/u/1686/boredom.asm You won't believe me unless you try it for yourself, but ... download xkas v06 here: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/269/ Then download the above boredom.asm. And now run the following on the command-line: touch boredom.sfc xkas boredom.asm boredom.sfc Note again th…

They're abusing filetype ambiguity. One file can simultaneously be valid HTML, ZIP and PDF, opening correctly in readers for each file format. Mostly it is because of lax requirements on file headers and structuring of the data inside.

I guess they found a way to make it produce something your terminal can process.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#192

Post by david_p »

The French epidemic surveillance system I worked on as an intern in 2006.

We basically rewrote the whole system is PHP+MySQL (front end and back office). It was my first time writing PHP professionally and it still seems to be working :)

https://websenti.u707.jussieu.fr/sentiweb/?lang=en

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#194

Post by edem »

When I started to learn PHP in 2007 I've written a little accounting program for the guys at the company I was working for. I know they are still using it because I get a call every year: I need to manually switch the current year. They don't want me to implement this feature for some reason but they still keep calling me once a year. At least there are no other bugs I know of!

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#195

Post by jventura »

Not my oldest code but probably my currently most used code is this patch on Android Cyanogenmod (http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/26167/) to download automatically MMS without switching the mobile data on. I made it to ICS, ported to 2.3 and it has been ported at least to Jellybean.

I had to do it because my mobile operator used to send unsolicited mms that kept my old android phone (ZTE Blade) in a wake lock, draining battery. I still don't have mobile data connection to this day!

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#196

Post by wslh »

My oldest running code is from 1998 and is present in every printed and electronic invoice in Argentina.

It is an algorithm to produce non predictable numeric codes of variable length. A much improved version was used for marketing campaigns.

The algorithm uses a Feistel Network[1] operating over an arbitrary block size. It is basically a simmetric encription function of variable length.

[1] https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feistel_cipher

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#197

Post by susam »

In 2007, I wrote some code to make Apache Nutch capable of crawling web pages protected with NTLM, Diget or Basic authentication schemes as well as crawling web pages via a proxy server that requires NTLM, Digest or Basic authentication ( https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-559 ).

This became first available with Apache Nutch 1.0. Although it was my second contribution to an existing open source project, it was my first contribution that added a new feature. As far as I know, this feature is still in use for crawling intranet web pages.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#198

Post by jonathankoren »

My .tcshrc dates from 1994 or 1995. Ironically, the reason why I run tcsh as my primary shell went out of style about 1997, yet, here I am.

As far as actual programs, I have a perl script I use almost daily that I wrote from 1999. It's basically an easier to use `xargs` called `map`.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#200

Post by tyho »

Many of these examples are older than me, but I wrote a userscript which writes a bash script which rips lossless audio from a music streaming service which is no longer with us when I was 14. It tags the files appropriately, and makes a release suitable for upload to a well known private music tracker.

I released it to a private group of people, it has been kept a secret within that group mostly and has since been extended to include support for many different services and integrated into complex automated systems which automatically rip, package and release new music as it is released and also old music as it is added to the request feature of the site. I released a much better pure bash version when I was 15ish I think, but many people still use the abomination of a userscript which writes a bash script as far as I am aware.

Post reply on HN