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Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

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

#81

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

ziotom78 wrote: post #23

I often create screen recordings for my classes, but it's very boring and time consuming. I'm a perfectionist, and if I mistype a command I prefer to re-record everything. Moreover, every time one of the tools used in the videos gets a significant update, I feel compelled to redo the video. I have started using xdotool [1] to create bash scripts that send mouse clicks and keystrokes to apps. Interleaving calls to xdo…

Love this one.

For the clicking sound you could add something like the below command on each click.

'aplay click.wav'

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

#82

Post by intelVISA »

Hacking Wc3 custom maps to unlock all the good stuff by modifying memory. (I was 9 but I still haven't recaptured the same pride of 'beating the system' even in such a trivial arena)

Unfortunately all downhill from there, even shipping market disrupting SaaS feels like a step back in problem solving.

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

#83

Post by tiffanyh »

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.

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

#85

Post by eCa »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #81
ziotom78 wrote: post #23

I often create screen recordings for my classes, but it's very boring and time consuming. I'm a perfectionist, and if I mistype a command I prefer to re-record everything. Moreover, every time one of the tools used in the videos gets a significant update, I feel compelled to redo the video. I have started using xdotool [1] to create bash scripts that send mouse clicks and keystrokes to apps. Interleaving calls to xdo…

Love this one. For the clicking sound you could add something like the below command on each click. 'aplay click.wav'

If adding mouse/keyboard sounds the main challenge is the variability in sounds, for instance how hard keys are pressed. Also, repetetive sounds, or sounds that are mis-timed to the corresponding action, are worse than no sound at all.

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

#86

Post by alhirzel »

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 writing it back to the disk and reinstalling a bootloader. Talk about a nervous reboot! I'm just glad the power didn't go out...

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

#87

Post by chronicler »

conductr wrote: post #61
actionfromafar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just cycle the money in the machine, or did the cycle somehow involve taking a bunch of cash, depositing it in your checkings account, getting new cache delivered by courier, put it through the money machine, repeat... or a tighter loop I can't grasp how it would work with your account?

It was a lot of logistics with physical cash. But yeah I tried to run it as close to "real" as possible in case I did hit legal issues (isolating the entities, not comingling funds). Also, had to make sure for taxes that the cycled cash wasn't possibly viewed as income to either entity. There were a few optimization steps I found that helped me streamline the logistics but I still was withdrawal-ing cash from the ATM…

Bro who the hell are you

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

#88

Post by smeagull »

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.

In WinXP You could also use the File->Open in notebook to download URLs.

It's also possible to have binary files that only consist of readable bytes that can be saved in notepad.

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

#89

Post by AlexSW »

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…

How did you get it out of RAM so cleanly?

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

#90

Post by jonah-archive »

solardev wrote: post #32

I 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_3c509#/media/File:3Com_3C...
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