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

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

#21

Post by SeanAnderson »

Mmm, best I've got is when the big G was mad at my Chrome Extension for not showing YouTube visuals inside of the pop-up UI. It's not possible to host the entire inside of the extension's visible UI because the page is destroyed when closed which kills the audio. There is an invisible, permanent background page which can host the , but then there's no way to show the visuals.

They told me they'd pull the extension if I didn't find a way to show the UI and that I had ~1 day to ship a new version. So, I found a way. :) Managed to read through the minified YT source and split the video from the audio, pipe the video to a separate page, and run the two in-sync. This meant that destroying the foreground page didn't pause the audio.

They didn't really care for my technical solution and it didn't change anything long-term, but I felt super badass in the moment as I launched what I thought was a clever, technical solution to resolve their concern with little notice.

https://medium.com/@MeoMix/beautifully-buffered-bytes-ff798e... I wrote about it here.

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

#22

Post by satvikpendem »

Reminds me of Tinder, the founders went to sororities and convinced them to sign up, then went to the fraternities and said, hey, there are a bunch of girls from sororities on the app, why don't you try it out? It worked exactly how you'd expect it to.

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

#23

Post by zaphirplane »

themodelplumber wrote: post #2

This reminded me of a story. A friend of mine was once contacted to build an app for a respectable non-profit with a low-ish budget. The developer friend thought "this app as described would be WAY better as a website with some app-like features, not an app-store app. Tons of people will want it as a website but not as an app...it'll just sit in the app store unused. Give people a way to find the pages of the app via…

> organizational stakeholders tried to hold the non-profit responsible

What is an organisation stakeholder and why is the non profit as the owner beholden to then

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

#24

Post by mablopoule »

Not really 'product launch', since it's about delivering a school project for my engineering school a long time ago.

I don't remember the subject, but I had to implement an image processing algorithm of some kind, it was all Matlab, and there was a particular function that just wouldn't work. I would read the same lines over and over again, but still not figure out where was the issue. The deadline to send the report with the code was at this point just a few hours away.

So I asked a friend in my class for his report, tried with his implementation of that particular function, and everything ran smoothly, which allowed me to write and generate the report.

Once the report was done, with the proper data, graphs and comments, I still couldn't figure out where was the issue with my implementation, but I also couldn't send my friend's implementation. The deadline approached fast.

Hence, the hack: since we needed to send the project code as a zip file, and this specific function was in a separate Matlab file, I had the last minute idea of opening the .zip archive with a hex editor, search for that file name, and edit the data following it with random values.

And just as I hoped, if you tried to extract the archive, everything but this file would be extracted, with a warning message about a corrupted file.

That way, I was able to send my projects basically 5 minutes before the deadline, while having a excuse to fix my function later if the teacher complained about the corrupted file (which didn't happen in the end).

It think it's the only time I cheated for an exam or a project, and, while I abhor cheating, I'm still damn proud of that hack.

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

#25

Post by greazy »

mattpallissard wrote: post #6

Went to implement memory/CPU limits in the HPC batch scheduler we used. It turns out it had a fatal flaw, it counted cached memory as used. So servers would slowly become idle as cache was filled. I piggy backed some code on the job validation interface to attach the users requests to the job's environment variables. Then I wrote a daemon to run on the compute nodes that walked the jobs process group/tree, grabbed th…

What schedular? Super interesting hack

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

#26

Post by gargsms »

Back in my college days, we used to have YouTube blocked during the day by the IT department. This was a time when YouTube used flash for the main player. I figured out that YT embeds still worked because they used the HTML5 player instead. So I coded up a small extension which switched to HTML5 player all the time. Solved a real problem for tons of people. :)

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

#27

Post by risson »

pcdoodle wrote: post #9

Young and hungry to impress a chain of restaurants: Pandora just launched. I was installing a CCTV system at the first restaurant location. Wanted to show the owner something cool, launched pandora on the PC I just installed for him. "That's awesome, can we hear it in the restaurant?". The amp was about 50' from the office, I had pre made camera cables with BNC and found enough adapters to make it to the AMP. Now he…

You sir, are a legend.

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

#28

Post by devoutsalsa »

I used to work as a QA Engineer at Transmeta, a low power semiconductor CPU company, and Linus Torvalds also worked there developing mobile Linux. Our first product launch was a Sony Picturebook featuring a Transmeta processor. The only problem was it wouldn’t boot Linux, and so when Linus said “hey, this won’t boot Linux” shortly before it went on sale, everyone (dramatic embellishment) was freaking out.

While everyone was scrambling to figure out the problem, I went to Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s had the Intel version of the Sony laptop for sale, and it did some QA work on their display model. I confirmed that the Intel version also didn’t boot Linux, and that seemed to be good enough for everyone one to launch our product, which was optimized for Windows ME.

The Linux problem turned out to be a BIOS issue, but I don’t remember what it was exactly.

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

#29

Post by seanhunter »

I had been working for a company in the early dotcom boom for about 2 weeks when they did a small public offering on an off-market exchange. Just before the investor roadshow we discovered a bug in the system (not the one I was hired to develop, their existing product that they thought was good to GTM) whereby if two people tried to access the website at once the database would become corrupted and the CGI process (yes it was written as a perl cgi) would just spin consuming CPU and not return and the only way to fix it was to kill the the process, dump and reload the db and then restart the process again.[1] So during the roadshow I was tailing the logs and keeping an eye on the website and if the problem occurred I would text my colleague who was doing the actual pitch “keep talking” if they needed to suddenly stop the demo while I did the dump and reload in the background and “good now” if they could carry on. Roadshow was an entire day of me doing this every couple of minutes (probably 8 hours or so but it felt much longer).

Offering was successful and I immediately ported the code to mysql straight afterwards which fixed the problem.

[1] Database was msql (no mysql, msql). I have no idea why somebody thought that was a good idea.

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

#30

Post by iancmceachern »

One time we had to deliver 5 giant custom ultra bright digital signage enclosures (those news stands in times square) to NYC on Monday to avoid paying a large late fee Claus in our contract. We were done with the big boxes, but not the $20k custom monitors I designed. So we hired a "hot shot" semi truck to pick up the big enclosures on Thursday in order to get them to NYC by Friday. We then air freight-ed the monitors the next day to get them there in time, buying us about 12 hours to finish the displays, for $20k in air freight.
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