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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?

#31

Post by akoncius »

0x706B wrote: post #11

Had to launch our AI product next day else customer would jump off and this would've basically killed the company. But AI was far from perfect and did only work for very small amount of usecases. Exchanged the AI with a queue and UI so humans could do the task instead in realtime. Worked. Went live. Completly smashed competitors. -- Just at launchday our internal infrastructure was fucked pretty bad and we faced a se…

third one is almost like in james bond movies when you barely make it but you succeed etc :D

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

#32

Post by blitz_skull »

xrd wrote: post #19
Waterluvian wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the reason for doing that vs. shipping something that met specifications? Were they testing in bad faith (ie trying to DDOS it to not pay)? Was the contract poorly specified so you couldn’t test it ahead of time with double the load? Etc.

In my opinion, yes, they were trying to DDOS it and find a flaw and then renegotiate. I saw this kind of behavior a lot those few years. A major university did the same. In the case of the university, they weren't fulfilling on their end by providing us with raw video materials in time to process them. Then our software had bugs processing the files in time. We had to do it all within a few weeks. Who's fault is that…

> If you haven’t done that, you’ve never really run a business, don’t fool yourself.

Whoa, okay Business gate-keeper. I didn’t realize you held the keys for bestowing “True Business Owner” status on us.

Some of us prefer to run our business in a sensible way that doesn’t include legal fees for signing contracts we know we can’t reasonably fulfill.

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

#33

Post by high_byte »

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…

what's good $40/hr if you get the job and 5 others in one hour? :)

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

#34

Post by leros »

0x706B wrote: post #11

Had to launch our AI product next day else customer would jump off and this would've basically killed the company. But AI was far from perfect and did only work for very small amount of usecases. Exchanged the AI with a queue and UI so humans could do the task instead in realtime. Worked. Went live. Completly smashed competitors. -- Just at launchday our internal infrastructure was fucked pretty bad and we faced a se…

Ah yes, the classic AI startup with a team full of humans actually pulling levers behind the scenes.

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

#35

Post by mikewarot »

Long ago I was doing software, but on the other side of the room they were discussing a process step in making halogen lightbulbs, and the problem was that the bulb needed to be "seasoned" but if you didn't do things just right, it would sag and blow through the envelope.

I turned and said "why don't you just levitate the filament?"

The next day I had a DC power supply, some magnets and a long thin stretch of wire, and demoed how Lorenz forces work, moving the wire up and down at will.

A week or so later, I had a hacked up transformer for an electromagnet and my Pioneer stereo supplying the AC power to heat the filament, and the DC supply to levitate it. It worked until my stereo popped.

We rebuilt it with real industrial equipment and it runs to this day as far as I know.

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

#36

Post by 0x706B »

leros wrote: post #34
0x706B wrote: post #11

Had to launch our AI product next day else customer would jump off and this would've basically killed the company. But AI was far from perfect and did only work for very small amount of usecases. Exchanged the AI with a queue and UI so humans could do the task instead in realtime. Worked. Went live. Completly smashed competitors. -- Just at launchday our internal infrastructure was fucked pretty bad and we faced a se…

Ah yes, the classic AI startup with a team full of humans actually pulling levers behind the scenes.

Fun fact: biggest learning was that this is perfectly fine. It's a $task startup solving $task for you.

$task means pulling 100 levers to the right level. Every lever has different precision requirements.

20 levers you can pull good enough with simple if/else and call it a day 20 more need a bit of statistics voodoo to reach the precision requirements 20 more can be pulled with AI to the approx. right position right away. 30 more could be pulled by AI in the future after going live when there's enough data on where the levers need to be pulled to. And the last 10 levers need such high precision that humans need to be involved (maybe for the moment, maybe for ever)

As long as solving $task is profitable enough and latency & error rate by humans low enough, there is nothing wrong with it.

Some competitors tried it with pure AI, but didn't hit the precision requirements and we could take over their customers. Others burned through all their funding trying to get the AI right before going live.

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

#37

Post by tester756 »

xrd wrote: post #20
tester756 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Were they testing in bad faith (ie trying to DDOS it to not pay)? Basing on "USA national league sports organization" it feels like they were reasonable

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying because they are a national sports organization they are probably honorable? I definitely didn't feel that way after working with them. They had no idea about how technology worked (granted, this was 20 years ago so they have probably fixed that deficit internally). They did have a clear understanding of how to use litigation, and they played to their strengths, w…

I meant that I think that they're operating at really big scale (big events?), so their requirements and testing them feels reasonable

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

#38

Post by leros »

0x706B wrote: post #36
leros wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the classic AI startup with a team full of humans actually pulling levers behind the scenes.

Fun fact: biggest learning was that this is perfectly fine. It's a $task startup solving $task for you. $task means pulling 100 levers to the right level. Every lever has different precision requirements. 20 levers you can pull good enough with simple if/else and call it a day 20 more need a bit of statistics voodoo to reach the precision requirements 20 more can be pulled with AI to the approx. right position right…

Oh yeah, nothing wrong with it at all. Plus, you need the human team to be creating the training data set.

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

#39

Post by TigerTeamX »

bitwize wrote: post #8
TigerTeamX wrote: post #3

Reminded me of game developer who explained an null pointer exception. There was a function that kept getting a null passed and that broke the whole system. They searched for months trying to figure out why, and they couldn't. so at the end they just did a if (foo == null) { return } worked like a charm.

That reminds me of how they added a trap on the hardware invalid memory access exception to Sonic 3D Blast on Genesis/Mega Drive to take you to a "secret stage select" screen to comply with Sega's requirement that the game never crash. If you jiggle the cartridge in the console, you will likely be taken to this screen.

I never ended up there even though I played a lot of Sonic, but interesting. Reminds me a bit of how when something goes wrong on some of the tech websites it shows a cute animal. Okay at least they made sure I see a cute cat, somehow makes it nicer.

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

#40

Post by mdwalters »

Zircom wrote: post #17

Doesn't really count as a product launch, but my freshmen year of college in my first ever programming class we had to present an app we designed to the rest of the class. I'd designed a small little casino game that had a few different games(roulette, poker, etc), and at some point in time a couple of nights before it was due I somehow managed to fuck something up and when it was displaying the results, the string s…

to be honest, that's a rather funny bug indeed
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