Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

I don't know if its my proudest, but certainly a recent one...I leveraged python and Bash/cli to automate content work... I'm proud of it because prior to that i had not coded any apps or even minor bash scripts in about 15 years.

In the midst of the pandemic (2020), i worked for a non-profit....and they published all manner of important economic research data on different strata of incomes, families who struggle putting food on the table, etc. All data that they sell to governments for policy work (its that great, valuable, and expertly published) and they also sell it to other research firms, NGOs, etc. (Side note: when i worked for them, they were severely under-pricing their data for way too low prices for how others used, referenced the data) Anyway, among the steps involved in reviewing the reports, I automated link checking of urls used within their reports. The report content lived in PDFs, so i automated grabbing all content from PDFs (not fun!), then picking out urls from the massive copy, then running link checker scans, finally producing a report of any links that were broken. The overall authoring of the reports encompassed many, many months of work - by top-notch research teams - and the design and production of said reports also (sadly) took months to perform. Well, when i automated even just the link checking portion, i reduced their work from many weeks (sometimes 1 or 2 months) down to 1 or 2 days. I left before i could extend my automation, so it still required a human to trigger some steps. But, if i still worked there, i planned to automate far more, and start moving upstream for other areas (like scaling out their report designs, etc.).

Was it some hacker-level thing or rocket science? No way. But, all in all, it was a neat use of python, python pdf modules, some minor bash/cli scripting, etc. I learned a bunch of fun stuff, and the non-profit saved tons of time. I still feel so good when i reflect on that little project!

Around the time that tap-to-pay apps were in their infancy, vendors were offering extremely generous bonuses... a combination of a couple of these ended with essentially free snacks for the entire time this promo existed (~6 month period).

This was back when the tap-to-pay app was called ISIS, for context.

I combined a couple offers:

Amex's Serve (prepay debit card thing) offered a $1 off any transaction over $1 (a fixed $1, not a percentage), up to 50 transactions a month.

The vending machine company near me that had machines in my office offered a buy-4-get-1-free promo using tap-to-pay that has a very weird implementation: The dollar limit for the buy-4 portion had no lower limit, and the get-1 had a fixed $4 worth of payout.

Essentially, every time I got up and went to the bathroom I'd stop by a vending machine, buy 4 items worth $1.25 (costing me, $1 total), and then use the get-1 portion to buy $4 worth of items.

I'd then turn around and sell said $1.25 items to folks in my department for well under ($0.75 for $1.25 items, etc). I told them exactly what I was doing, nobody wanted to deal with the hassle though. And the dollar amounts were so small. The real reason I sold them to coworkers was because I wanted quarters for the pool table at a nearby bar.

In addition to those two offers, the Amex Serve also just straight up gave you something like $60 for signing up for the account plus adding some small amount of money to the card. This basically funded this series of $0.25 purchases for the entire 6 months.

I basically got unlimited snacks for myself, and a freeish source of quarters to fund my pool games for that time period.

Getting a CATIAv4 plugin to install on AFS on AIX across Lockheed. That’s when I learn anything is possible with sh (yes, sh, not bash)

Years ago I worked in the VAX/VMS development group at Sybase where SQLServer originated. SQLServer was basically an SQL interpreter consisting of several layers of loops. The innermost loop was written in assembler for speed.

I was able to remove one (1) machine language instruction from that innermost loop. I no longer recall if this resulted in a measurable difference but I've always been proud of this.