I learned to "speak modem" in order to test a bank of modems. The calling station was roughly 100 feet from the modem bank. If a call got jammed up, I needed to know which modem was stuck, being it used a next-modem-up rule. If I simply left the call station and jogged to the rack, the problem modem usually had hung up already. I realized an actual modem call keeps the answering modem trying longer, but I wasn't allowed to hook one up there, being stuck with a voice phone. So I practiced sounding enough like a modem to keep the answering modem trying longer. It worked! The server room admins thought I was nuts, even after I explained it. They joked that I dated Daleks.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
351–360 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#352A bit younger here, but back in elementary school we got chromebooks when chromebooks were barely becoming a thing (replacing the rack of netbooks that was normally wheeled into our classroom). Two things I did that were very fun: 1. School blocked a lot of popular flash game websites. My friends and I downloaded a bunch of flash games and threw together a website that we hosted on our chromebooks using '200 OK - Web…
A lot of older techies bemoan the fact that phones and appliance-like computers lock everything down and obscure the inner workings, claiming it will stop kids from learning to hack. I think this is a great counterpoint... some kids are going to find ways around things no matter what!
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#353I spilled water on my favorite keyboard and broke it, then let it dry and fixed it by using a pencil to trace over the damaged circuits. It worked fine again after that! (Graphite in pencil lead is a weak conductor, enough to make the keyboard circuit work)
That phenomenon is the source of one of my all-time favorite man page entries: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421224904/https://nixdoc.ne... ep0: 3c509 in test mode. Erase pencil mark! This means that someone has scribbled with pencil in the test area on the card. Erase the pencil mark and reboot. (This is not a joke). It's the E1 pad between the barcode and the empty BIOS socket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com…
That's awesome! I have a handful of those 3Com cards kicking around at work. Will definitely have to check that out.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#354I spilled water on my favorite keyboard and broke it, then let it dry and fixed it by using a pencil to trace over the damaged circuits. It worked fine again after that! (Graphite in pencil lead is a weak conductor, enough to make the keyboard circuit work)
That phenomenon is the source of one of my all-time favorite man page entries: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421224904/https://nixdoc.ne... ep0: 3c509 in test mode. Erase pencil mark! This means that someone has scribbled with pencil in the test area on the card. Erase the pencil mark and reboot. (This is not a joke). It's the E1 pad between the barcode and the empty BIOS socket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com…
Hah, that's really great! Does that mean they used that to switch it into a test mode during development?
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#355One 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…
That’s great, I had the same problem but didn’t hack it like you did unfortunately. I overwrote the first 30 GB of my 6 TB HDD and am trying out GetDataBack Pro to get my files back, no luck so far. I had some tens of thousands of photos that I can’t replace.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#356Very 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?
Damn! Well, great!
Whoever you are, well done!
(I'd love to know how!)
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#357I don’t know if it was a hack, but found a query that would crash CockroachDB nodes on demand during a training.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#358One 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…
Oh yeah overwriting the partition table can be "fun". Once wrote the partition table of a floppy to my hard drive. That was when I was still running DOS. Used a disk hex editor (I think it was part of pctools) to change it back to the correct values.
That's gnarlier than what I faced, kudos to you.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
My uncle was in a similar situation: bought a granola bar, price was wrong, free granola bar. He went back a few days later and the price was still wrong. He’s a lawyer, and he sued the store and won (false advertising or something) to get them to fix the price. Pretty awkward because it’s the closest store to his family’s house. His son said it best one day, “dad, are you bored at work?”
"..He went back a few days later and the price was still wrong." I've occasionally wondered about this, as an entirely new class of crime. One where a motivated regional manager at a modern supermarket chain could get together with someone in the IT infrastructure and decide to tweak a number (a price) in a database, and carefully watch the uncontested sales vs requests for refunds ratio. These 'mistakes' could be ha…
I've half-suspected that Harbor Freight does this. Doing the analytics could be a good business opportunity. I'm sure once the metadata companies (Amazon, Facebook) meet real retail (not just the high-dollar retail like Whole Foods), there will be interest in this measure of consumer's price awareness.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#360One 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…
Oh, what fun! Our system administrator decided once to duplicate the boot partition of a server, so we had a spare should the usual one fail. He used dd of course. And the next day, he was off to a USENIX conference. What he had forgotten, though, was that the first partition on the disk actually contained the partition table! (This was on Solaris, or possibly SunOS.) Since the source disk and the target disk had different partition tables, things started falling apart. It did not happen all at once, probably due to caching. But we started getting more and more weird errors. It took me half the day to figure out what had happened. By great luck, I had actually saved a copy of all partition tables just a few days prior. They were in human readable form, but good enough for me to restore the damaged partition table to its original state. A reboot later, all problems were gone.