I hacked the Doodle Jump high scores [1] in the back of Steve Bellovin's computer science class [2] in '09
[1] https://imgur.com/a/sN8om7u [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Bellovin
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
91–100 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#92In my first startup I built a cellular circuit with a Quectel UC20 using only basic/educational through hole components like transistors, LEDs and resistors. The company Field engineer assigned to me and all the official schematics suggested it was impossible. My circuit worked and was one of the first IoT devices tested successfully in Qualcomm Mexico city labs.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#93I worked for a client in the streaming music space. They were going through the technical testing phase of partnering with a high end audio manufacturer. One of their requirements was to retrieve the metadata of N songs within a fixed time limit, simulating their customer playing our streaming audio on their hardware.
The testing office was in LA. The audio and metadata was in Ireland. The lag across the public internet consistently failed their tests.
So I deployed a small read-only copy of the API in an LA data centre which tunnelled inside the cloud provider back to Ireland. I used DNS geo tools to ensure the tester transparently hit the local LA data centre.
We passed their tests with ease and landed a 6-figure contract.
The hardware customers probably had a terrible experience though...
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#94When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for years.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#95When Web Sockets were still not finalized, I was writing a C# program using them but there wasn't a functional library available. There was however a nice open-source Java implementation. I copied it into Visual Studio, changed all the file extensions, and spent half an hour hitting build then fixing syntax and import red squigglies. It eventually built successfully and happily sent data to a NodeJS front end for yea…
Nice. C# did start off life as Java with the serial numbers filed off…
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#96High school, ca. 1994. I had written a history paper in TeX (just plain TeX, not LaTeX) and somehow the PostScript file (we didn’t have PDF then) I had generated at home got slightly corrupted on the floppy and wouldn’t print correctly on the HP LaserJet in the school computer lab. Somehow, I opened the .ps file in EDIT on MS-DOS and was able to fix the file to the point where it printed.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#97During a hackathon, I used SadConsole + MonoGame and DSharpPlus to create a Discord bot that renders a PNG of colorful text. Since MonoGame isn't intended to be used like that, I had to find a few workarounds.
1. I created a static List of "jobs"
2. The Discord user sends a command to render some colored text
3. We create a SadConsole.Console instance; draw the text onto the Console; and push a job to the job list.
4. When the MonoGame instance enters the "Render" call, it runs each job in the job list.
5. The job we pushed then saves the Console to a PNG in a memory stream (file operations were substantially slower in thread for some reason), and then calls Discord API to send the response.
I'm personally proud of this because I used MonoGame in a way that it was not intended for.
The code worked at the time it was written. Unfortunately, it does not work anymore at this time (likely due to some API update).
The code is available here: https://github.com/INeedAUniqueUsername/Colorbot/blob/master...
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#98Saved my canoe building company by making 900,000 face shields. Or making an auto clicker with apple script in 2000 — to click on ads and make money. I let it free and made $70!
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#99I managed to use a boring machine as a screwdriver to build an standing desk.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#100One 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?
It wasn't clean, I had to manually parse it out of /proc and triple check the math before committing it with fdisk.