Ask HN: What's your proudest hack? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#361

Post by alhirzel » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

hanche wrote: post #360

alhirzel wrote: post #86

One 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 dif…

Sounds like another scary reboot. "Scariest reboot ever" might make an interesting Ask HN...

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#362

Post by tetsusaiga » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

Basically zero effort/intelligence compared to a lot of these, but the business wanted backup records from our CMS (of sorts), because they were gun shy of catastrophic losses after spending like 250 human hours on manual entry the last time. Thing was, the API provided zero means for export, either mass or individual.

Motivated to prove myself, I ended up writing a crawler with all kinds of contingencies for the crap UI, which would press the "Download" button that downloaded each record as a JSON file (couple thousand of these). Then my little node app would shoot the JSON files to an S3 bucket for safekeeping, parse them, and save each record in DynamoDB I believe it was.

Doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea to write a crawler, but no one else did, and the business was entering a state of frantic desperation re: this issue, so I felt pretty smart for a bit.

Then a few months later they abandoned the CMS and all it's corresponding data.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#363

Post by qot » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

mprime1 wrote: post #356

HanShotFirst wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like someone collected the btc bounty?

Damn! Well, great! Whoever you are, well done! (I'd love to know how!)

Did you use a brainwallet (ie, the hash of the password as the private key)?

It looks like the funds were drained within an hour of you loading the bounty. People have made giant lookup tables of brainwallet passwords and monitor the corresponding addresses for transactions. Reddit user u/btcrobinhood is known for doing this and returning the funds.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#364

Post by wellanyway » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

jansan wrote: post #289

bravoetch wrote: post #114

After 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…

> I retired rich 30 years early. Sounds better than working as a product manager for 25 years.

That sounds oddly specific.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#365

Post by drewzero1 » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

barbs wrote: post #295

13of40 wrote: post #105

When I was in highschool I wrote a Tetris game for the TRS-80. My clever hack was that I could make it twice as fast by keeping the state of the falling shapes in video memory instead of a separate object model. In an early version of this, I failed to completely draw the "cup" the objects were falling into, and one fell straight through the bottom into system memory and crashed the machine.

Reminds me of a similar story of someone creating a Tron lightcycle game on an Apple IIgs. They had created a bug so that the lightcycle could travel off-screen and into memory, causing all sorts of undefined behaviour. https://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-...

That sounds pretty immersive into the world of Tron!

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#366

Post by warrenm » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

My still-favorite was a little 10-liner bash script that checked for a 200 response from http://organization.tld (from the webserver itself, but running out to the internet and back to find it)

If it didn't get a 200, it bounced Apache

Ran every couple minutes for years

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#367

Post by defaultcompany » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

I have so many but the one I always look back proudly on was non-technical and fairly devious. I was a disaffected middle-schooler. I had lost my science book which I would have to pay for if I didn't find it. I had, however, "procured" someone else's science book. The problem was that all the books had been numbered on the edge by the teacher who kept a list of which student had been issued which book. I wanted to somehow make the number of this book match the number of the book I had lost but they looked nothing like each other. So ... I took a marker and crossed out the number on the book. Then I wrote the _same_ number right next to it. Then I took it to the teacher. I said "Hey someone stole my book and tried to pass it off as theirs!" The teacher took one look at it, said something like "what an idiot" and then proceeded to update the list with my name for that book instead of the original owner's. I don't know what happened to the other kid - it never came back to me. I felt bad later but believe me it was a deeply satisfying minor victory for me at a time when not much was going my way.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#368

Post by RomanPushkin » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

grose wrote: post #120

tiffanyh wrote: post #83

Elementary 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.

Ah, reminds me of the good ol' Windows 98 login bypass: https://epiclogon.ytmnd.com/

Well, s/he could just click OK

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#369

Post by hanche » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

alhirzel wrote: post #361

hanche wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

Sounds like another scary reboot. "Scariest reboot ever" might make an interesting Ask HN...

I never did proofread anything more carefully than that partition table before the reboot.

Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

#370

Post by sharadov » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

bravoetch wrote: post #218

sharadov wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You said so yourself

"write that on your resume along with whatever else you think they want to see."