I help support 3rd party plug-ins in our apps. I was debugging an issue a customer found that involved a 3rd party plug-in. So I went to the plug-in vendor’s website and downloaded the demo of their plug-in and installed it. But I noticed that none of my debugger breakpoints were being hit. It turned out the plug-in was disabling the debugger using a system call. So I figured out how to trap the system call they were using and replace it with an immediate return so that patching out the debugger did nothing. I was then able to debug everything, including stepping into their code which would have allowed me to see how their copy protection worked if I had cared to.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
211–220 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#212Super minor compared to a lot of the stuff here, but when I was a young data scientist I had the job of creating a model to tell our call center sales agents when an ancillary product would be a good fit to upsell to customers, and when not to waste their time. The only problem: integrating it into the sales application was nearly impossible, IT said it was a huge effort, nobody wanted to do it.
So what I did was built a greasemonkey script to watch the DOM as they went through the sales flow and record the values as they were entered. I then built decision tree model of moderate size, exported it to a string, converted that into a big javascript function. Then, if the model said things were looking good, I modified the DOM to insert a little "alert" box on the top of the page. I handled all the state manually in case they navigated away or did things in a funny order. I knew zero JS or web development at the time, so this was SUPER hacky. But it worked! I then manually walked around to sales agent computers and installed the greasemonkey extension/script. I even got IT involved eventually to serve the script from an internal endpoint, allowing for easier updates.
The actual model ended up being just okay, and didn't have a huge impact on actual sales, but the exec team was SUPER impressed with the delivery mechanism. We had a parent company and they loved to brag to their superiors how we had deployed a machine learning model "for zero IT cost". They had me a do a writeup and everything in case someone wanted to copy my revolutionary idea. I'm sure some guy at the HQ took a look at my writeup and got a good laugh out of how incredibly obtuse, insecure, and hacky the whole thing was.
That said, I still think it was a clever solution and even wondered about turning it into some kind of product at one point.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#213Very low tech, but helps me communicate privately with friends and family over non-private channels (like email). Also use it to store critical password and keys, and have copies of my passport with me everywhere. https://github.com/mprimi/portable-secret
Looks like someone collected the btc bounty?
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#214Elementary 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.
Reminds me of a hack I discovered in school.
I discovered that I could use VBA from Word to shell out to cmd bypassing all of the security. This opened a world of possibilities...
This being the era of AOL punters I created a neat VBA utility in a Word doc to that used netsend to spam other computers in the school. Shared the file widely.
Then I used the technique to explore the network... eventually was able to use net use to connect to a remote drive in the school administrator's office where I found a text file of every student birthday, home address, and SSN... which I then could use to sign into anyone's account (password was derivative of name and SSN).
Culminated with pwning a school rival by putting all his files in a password protected zip on the desktop and dropping a batch file in his startup folder that printed a text file with the password to the printer when he logged in.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#215 dd if=linux.iso of=/dev/sdb
recovered all the images using Foremost [1], fresh out of image processing and machine learning class, end up writing a image clustering "software" [2] that help me separate the useful images from worthless thumbnails and images that chrome have cached.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#216One of the new ones: I started using chatGPT to write feedback for an annual review. I would have never be able to write such bullshit without feeling sick, but the model amazingly well - I apply only minuscule changed to the generated text.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#217I was looking for an apartment to rent (circa 2010-ish), on Craigslist and Kijiji. Neither had a map feature, and both suffered from a lot of reposts. If a nice place came up, you had to be extremely responsive (like, contact the poster within minutes of the ad going up) to stand any chance against competing renters. I wrote a pile of scripts that scraped both sites, parsed and cached the data, and displayed it on a…
Thanks! I found at least one place using padmapper back in the day that worked out really well! In 2022 craigslist still sucks at removing duped postings for apartments, cars, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#218After 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?
Weird that you think I conned my way in. I was always able to skill up and do the job. Theoretical before, then learn the rest on the job.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#219After 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…
Did this ever backfire when it came time for the interview or was the cramming always sufficient for you to pass as qualified?
A mix. I also learned really great interview skills. That goes a long way.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can’t say I remember exactly. No particular experience other than a general knack for spotting loopholes like this. If I remember correctly I had some vague knowledge that basically anyone can own an ATM and set the surcharge as they want. I probably looked into it as a passive income stream at some point (these things had a high growth phase some time ago). Then I think the first time I heard about ATM rebates was o…
This makes me wonder if there is a way to (legally) give ATM rebates as an ATM operator. Ex: User withdraws $50. Machine charges $5 fee, and gives a $2 in cashback as part of the withdrawal (cash or gift card?)
You can do that. It nets to an inflow of $3 for the operator. and the interchange depending on how they’re registered and what their transaction volume is.
You could just give them $55 in cash if you want. This is just a net to any profit you’d have left from the surcharge revenue. It was irreversible by practically all measures, so no real risk. The only issue I ever saw cause a reversal is a mechanical vend error.
I think the main thing is you have to properly notify the cardholder what shape their outflow will take and that the cash value is the same. At the end of the day, it’s just a vending machine.