My side project is built around a major hack, overriding the pause action on your headphones. Pressing pause will shift from music to podcasts and vice versa. For reference: https://shiftfm.app I made this (with my friend) because we often shift between podcasts and music during workouts, and its just super nice to be able to do it without using your phone.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
311–320 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#312When my father suddenly passed away, he left a laptop protected with a BIOS password. I wanted to restore and use the laptop myself.
I bought a broken spare off Ebay, opened it up and found something that looked like an EEPROM (a 24cXX 8 pin chip) on the motherboard. With terrible SMT soldering skills, I swapped the chips and I was in. It's a pretty cool buzz when you're 19 years old. I guess the contact knowledge from my father, an electronic engineer specialized in Microchip microcontrollers, helped a lot.
Also, deeply antisocial follow-up: my father was working on a project for a company, and was deeply underpaid and died poor. I knew they wanted his hard drive to get the source code, so I made a backup, shredded it multiple times with random data and prepended the string "CrYpT" at the start. I gave it to them, said it was encrypted and I could do nothing about it. Last I heard (this was almost 20 years ago) they sent it off to an expensive data recover facility but they could not recover anything.
Sorry Dad, but fuck them. Pay your engineers.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#313When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for yea…
Cool. I did something similar with an old C program from the 80s by Peter Langston called Riffology, which was the algorithm used to generate the procedural music in Ballblazer.
I pasted the C files into Eclipse, deleted some `register` keywords, made a bunch of tweaks, and it ran fine as Java.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#314I once signed up to a service (privately run VPN thing) run by a university club that required confirming a real university student email address without having such an address. So, you needed to click a confirm link sent to "studentfoo@uni.tld".
Then, mostly as a goof, I tried signing up with an address like "studentfoo@uni.tld@example.com" where I controlled the second domain. Lo and behold, the confirmation email showed up in my catchall inbox on that domain.
Pretty sure the only check the site did was .contains("@uni.tld") and assumed it was good enough. (or whoever wrote it put it in as a backdoor) Really regret not reporting that bug to them.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#315Very carefully scheduling NMI and IRQ updates to achieve a virtual sound channel on an old NES, resulting in a sawtooth bassline with volume control. This steals about 13% of the CPU time. The biggest hack in the arrangement is the scheduling of OAM DMA to sneakily just barely fit between timed audio updates, since it pauses the CPU and would otherwise cause an audible glitch. Among other things, if NMI notices that…
Cool. Kind of unrelated, but is there anything stopping someone from just generating a sawtooth DPCM sample at runtime and using the channel as normal without having to use crazy timing stuff?
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#316When requesting pizza delivery from the Domino's site I captured and modified the http request to delete the `crust_type` field. Turns out most of the price was calculated from that so I was getting incredibly cheap pizzas for a while until they found out and invalidated requests without crust selection.
What crust did they ship it with? Sounds a little like None Pizza with Left Beef, also on Domino's: https://youtu.be/5yWTPtPYukg
Classic crust IIRC. The best thing is that even the paper receipt was lacking the crust selection, so it looks to me that every system in the pipeline looked at that `null` value, sighted, and passed it along to the next system, until it reached the cooking area where they will blame the IT guys and slap in the "default" crust. Also I waited for the day that I will receive a plastic cup with just salsa and floating ingredients, but sadly it never happened.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#317One time I accidentally overwrote my hard drive with dd while making an installation thumbdrive. While unfortunate, it was only the first 8GB or so. This nuked the partition table, bootloader, and start of the Windows partition, but fortunately my daily-driver, still-running Linux system partition was unaffected. I kept my cool and figured it was recoverable. I ended up recovering the partition table from RAM and wri…
Ah, this reminds me of the time a few years ago when I accidentally deleted `sudo`. A lot of stuff broke and it was interesting running around in a system where things would sort of work, but sort of not really.
I learned then that sudo was really just a binary, so I tried to get a copy and put it in the right place. I couldn't, though, because I didn't have write permissions to it without sudo!
In hindsight I guess I could've just run the binary itself to get access, or put it elsewhere on my $PATH, or use `su` instead. Not sure if I tried those things, it was a while ago and I was pretty new to Linux. Maybe I got the file from the internet and didn't know to make it executable.
Anyway, what I ended up doing was booting up from a live Ubuntu USB and copying the sudo from the live environment to my installation on disk. It worked, and my newbie self felt like a proper hacker, fixing the unfixable. For one day I was a heart transplant surgeon :)
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#318Nothing impressive, but when I was 12 my neighbor had an old C-band satellite dish and I'd hang out with their son watching movies.
The parents had put a parental block on some R-rated channels and we wanted to watch those movies.
We found 2 different ways to get around it. The first one was to use the built-in timer to go to that channel at a specific time. I wondered if it still blocked the channel and no, it didn't! So just set a timer for 1 min from now and "poof!" could watch that channel.
The other way was that with C-band dishes the satellite dish had to move along an arc to receive signals from specific satellites. The receiver would remember the positions and the satellite was "identified" by a certain position on the arc it traversed. Of course the parental block was just a combination of "satellite-channel" block. So you could manually move the dish via the remote a very small amount so that it was on a part of the arc the receiver didn't consider "the satellite" but you could still pick up the signal. Boom, no parental block and you didn't have to wait for the timer to change the channel.
Was pretty proud of myself for those two.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#319One time I accidentally overwrote my hard drive with dd while making an installation thumbdrive. While unfortunate, it was only the first 8GB or so. This nuked the partition table, bootloader, and start of the Windows partition, but fortunately my daily-driver, still-running Linux system partition was unaffected. I kept my cool and figured it was recoverable. I ended up recovering the partition table from RAM and wri…
Ah, this reminds me of the time a few years ago when I accidentally deleted `sudo`. A lot of stuff broke and it was interesting running around in a system where things would sort of work, but sort of not really. I learned then that sudo was really just a binary, so I tried to get a copy and put it in the right place. I couldn't, though, because I didn't have write permissions to it without sudo! In hindsight I guess…
Nice solution and good instincts! I bet you’re a pretty advanced user by now. I used to keep an Arch Linux bootable thumb drive around as sort of an insurance policy against things like this. Good reminder for me…
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#320My worst hack was a bug in a small network I wrote to interface to some barcode readers and displays. There was a buffer overflow in the interrupt routine of my 8088 assembler code, which would occasionally miss an outgoing character. The prompt should have read "Please scan card count", but unfortunately it missed the "o" out of the last word...
We had a similar but not quite as funny occurrence when our teletype would sometimes flip a bit. When users logged into our system via the Asynchronous Multi Line Controller we got a console message AMLC IN USE however the last char was changed to A. Made us giggle since we were in Auckland NZ at the time.