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

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

#411

Post by xcdzvyn » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

mprime1 wrote: post #381

mprime1 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Update: funds were not stolen. PortableSecret wasn't cracked (yet)! What happened is: the wallet app I'm using automatically performs CoinJoin[1] when funds are received (In fact, this is their business model! They take 0.3% of the amount to automatically anonymize all inbound coin). CoinJoin is a protocol that breaks up the sum received in tiny pieces and scatters them across a large number of "sub-wallets". So my w…

Why bother with BTC? Monero implements such protections (plus many stronger ones) with TX fees in the order of a single cent, and obviously without any fees for laundering your entire balance every time you're given money.

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

#412

Post by jcubic » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

I was reading Twitter and someone posted a tweet with a photo and that it was created in CSS. It turns out the post was a hoax, but I figured that you can actually create photos in CSS, using box-shadow hack (you create 1x1px div and each pixel is single box-shadow). I was using it few years ago to create pixel graphic editor demo. So I've created something quickly on CodePen that get all pixels and create one big box-shadow. When I opened Google Chrome Dev Tools to copy the code it frozen because it was few MB of box shadow data. I was able to copy the text eventually and create HTML file. Later I've added a way to download a HTML file with your image on CodePen.

Here is the demo: https://jcu.bi/css-image

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

#413

Post by jcubic » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

pedrovhb wrote: post #317

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…

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…

This reminds me my old Laptop with Linux installed that had Optical drive broken and no USB boot option, there was also no option to buy new Optical Drive. I was moving directories around to make some space on root directory. I've moved /var/ to /home directory and create symlink and it worked. But then later I wanted to do the same with /usr directory that had all shared libraries in /usr/lib/. In the process of moving files got some error I was not able to use any binary file like cd, ls or ln. Only applications that was running was working.

I was certain that the laptop was dead and I will not able to use it anymore since I will not be able to install new system. So the task was to copy somehow all my important data. Luckily I was using Firefox and I've had FireFTP installed, so I've borrow my mother Windows laptop and installed FTP server and was able to copy my data over WiFi. Later it turns out that you could buy used DVD burner for that laptop, so it was resurrected and after installing Windows XP I've given that laptop to my mother.

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

#414

Post by kmenon » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

sharadov wrote: post #370

bravoetch wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Basically the protagonist of the "Pretender" show.