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Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

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

#371

Post by roryisok »

alasdair_ wrote: post #181

Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week. I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very expensive Scottish smoked salmon was 4 pence more expensive than the price listed on the shelf. The supermarket (Tesco) also has a large sign stating that if the price was wrong on any item, they would both give you the item for free and the money it costs. I pr…

was buying beer once for a party, and a crate of 12 pint bottles was ringing up for the price of a single bottle. so I bought 4 crates. we drank well that weekend

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

#372

Post by roryisok »

only just remembered this. going back about 20 years. a radio station was having a competition to win $5k. the game was, you had to identify all the song titles hidden in a block of text they read out only once. I worked in a net cafe at the time, so I used one of those digital radio services and recorded the blurb, played it back several times until I got all the answers and fired in the answer using webtext, where I had already pasted in my name and number.

I won the 5k and it bought me my first car.

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

#373

Post by roryisok »

another one, not much of a hack, more of automation

2001

I worked for a localisation company and we had to do this mind-numbing work that involved opening an image, selecting the picture, cropping it to a certain size, selecting the image, adding a feather to the selection and adding a faded border around the edge, in photoshop

I discovered photoshop actions, which let me record a macro and automate and chain together a bunch of actions.

For weeks, I always had my work done on time. like, a few hours of work done in the first few minutes of the day, and I could spend the rest of the time surfing the internet.

Then eventually I messed up - the format had changed slightly but I was using my old automation and made a record number of mistakes. they were on to me. my team lead made me show him the trick, and introduced it across the team. And for the rest of that month, we were the most productive team in the company, and all had our work done within half an hour of the start of the day, and the rest of the day to mess around on the internet and play games (I wanna say doom but that seems super old for the time - maybe they were just shitty PCs and couldnt handle anything else)

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

#374

Post by atribecalledqst »

I feel this barely qualifies but I still think back on it as a formative moment. My dad had parental controls installed on the family computer, and they were pretty strict (I remember at the time that, for example, IGN was blocked). One day either my sister or I discovered that he'd written his passwords down on a sticky note.

I'm not sure exactly how I figured out to do this, but I was able to log into my dad's account, open up the terminal, then kill the daemon program that controlled the firewall to disable it. My fading memory tells me that I was simply inspecting the list of running programs on top, saw one named 'integod' (Intego being the name of the company that produced the firewall program), and targeted it. Worked like a charm and you can probably imagine what I used my newfound freedom for (I was in middle school).

Pretty basic command-line stuff, but I do credit the early exposure for my ability to pick up more advanced concepts more quickly when I entered the workforce.

--------------------

One of my more proud work hacks was on a business trip where I couldn't deploy a source code change but could change the compiled binaries and libraries, so I changed some instruction to a NOP to get around a showstopper bug.

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

#375

Post by tidyhobo »

I have a couple:

1.-When i was like 14 i went to a school where they teach you how to use a computer, i picked up everything really fast and found out that they recorded student payments in a csv file, the file was in a shared folder in a windows 95 machine, editing the csv to add my name and amount paid was really exciting.

2.-There was a series of flash animations named HuevoCartoon you could see them in their website but if you saved the swf it would jump to the end so i used HIEW to open the swf and if i recall correctly it had a script that checked if you had the swf open in a browser and if the url in the address bar was a specific one, well so what i did is 090 the whole instruction and i could play it offline, i remember sharing them with my friends at school, eventually those guys decided to do that check every frame so i wrote a tool in C to look for it and 090 the instructions.

3.-One day i did not have too much to do at work and i was talking with a friend and he explained how bored he was with his job, what he did then, it was take a set of 3 pdf files and create an xml with the file names and put them in a zip file with a name structure like john_doe_12345678_xrftv and upload the file to a server , well i told him to install python and i wrote a script that would automate all that, it took like 5 minutes to generate the xml and the zip file for like 20,000 sets, so he spend almost all the time playing battlefield 3 and on Friday he would upload a little bit more than his boss was expecting, it was a contract for 6 months, he finished his job a couple of weeks ahead and got a bonus and a job offer, he is still working for that company and is a really good Python coder, he decided to learn after that experience.

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

#376

Post by lmm »

bheadmaster wrote: post #257
lmm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using dockerized services (which are a must for NVidia-based CV, since their CV libraries are a dependency hell), you must use some kind of networking solution to communicate. Eithen the two processes can share memory, in which case they don't need to communicate via network, much less RabbitMQ, or they can't, in which case the hack wouldn't have worked at all.

Good point. I suppose what I meant to say is you need to communicate between processes somehow. Shared memory is fast, but it's hard to communicate with it exclusively - message-based protocols are better suited for that, and most of them are implemented over TCP.

A lot of standard protocols can run over a unix domain socket, if you're not at the level of implementing a shared memory communication protocol but want to cut some overhead for more or less free.

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

#377

Post by mprime1 »

qot wrote: post #363
mprime1 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting! I suspected the attack vector was my poor use of BTC rather than someone cracking AES so quickly, I'll look into this.

I created the wallet using a popular opensource wallet app, and just moved some funds there. Don't know more than that...

Thank you for the pointers!

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

#378

Post by jonah-archive »

solardev wrote: post #354
jonah-archive wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretty much -- IIRC connecting the pad bypasses the internal EEPROM and loads a default configuration, and from there you can read/write the EEPROM as well.

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

#379

Post by jonah-archive »

jonah-archive wrote: post #378
solardev wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, that's really great! Does that mean they used that to switch it into a test mode during development?

Pretty much -- IIRC connecting the pad bypasses the internal EEPROM and loads a default configuration, and from there you can read/write the EEPROM as well.

ah, found it! Page 88 of this PDF: https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/3c5x9b_Technical_Reference.p...

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It is the user’s responsibility (with help from the configuration program) to avoid configuring the boot PROM on the adapter in such a way that the system is not able to boot. If this does occur, you can manually jump the Test Via using a #2 pencil. The Test Via forces the adapter into test mode, which disables the boot PROM so that the adapter configuration program can be run. You must cover the designated area thoroughly with the pencil mark.

Test mode forces the adapter not to perform the Automatic Initialization sequence, which means the EEPROM is not read and the adapter is left in the following configuration:

■ Address Configuration register = 0000h

■ Resource Configuration register = 0000h

■ Product ID register = 0000h

Test mode also shortens the ID sequence to 8 bytes (first is still FFh and last is 69h) and forces it to the active state (that is, the adapter is active and will respond to I/O cycles at base address 0200h even without going through the ID sequence).

After you are done, thoroughly erase the pencil mark.

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