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Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
21–30 of 289 posts
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#22Email validation by inserting a record into database and rolling back from savepoint if succeeded - Salesforce does not publish their official code/regex and architects pushed it to match it perfectly with the platform. Project was done in 2017 btw.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#24I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
Seriously, that is pretty impressive. Unix police found you.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#25Had a server that was overheating badly and the numerous fans just weren’t working. Need to keep it running to transfer all the data to a newer machine. Went to Walmart and bought flexible dryer ducting and duct tape. Vented the AC directly into the case. Got everything transferred without having to pull the backup (which is slow). Never did figure out the fan thing but something must have gone wrong on the motherboard because all the fans were good.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#26I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
that's rich
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#27Using the Google Sheets API to store session history and metadata for a nightly backfill job instead of, you know, a database. The program broke after the creator left and no one could figure out how to bring it back up. The engineer assigned to fix it pulled their hair out looking for the database creds, local SQLite3 records, anything that would initialize the backfill. Finally realized it wasn't just printing out…
Using Google Sheets instead of a proper database brings me nightmares.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#28Right after WinXP came out, I was a sys/win admin at a manufacturing co. Their ERP system was an old VB app that sat on a share drive and everyone opened the same .exe from their respective workstations. The app required a ton of scheduled database and ERP tasks (it used a legacy flat-file db), so the vendor wrapped them all up in a secondary executable that was effectively a non-headless (headful?) daemon (this was…
Oh wow. Yeah, that sort of thing seems to have been so common in ERP software.
My first professional programming job was working on a bespoke ERP and industrial process control suite (written in PowerBuilder). The program had a huge number of sub programs (dynamically loaded modules, each an MDI window accessed using a “program name”, something like a SAP transaction code).
We had a number of background services that would have to run, however writing Windows services in PowerBuilder was anything but easy. And we were reluctant to use anything else - the whole benefit of using a 4GL was a well integrated ORM and report generating functionality.
So we’d implement our background services as regular modules (with their little MDI window) within the main thick client app. Clients would have a number of workstations dedicated to running a single one of these processes. Nothing headless, each outputting it’s status or logs to he connected display. If the power, network or database ever dropped, each of these machines would have to be restarted and have its allocated sub program reopened.
For example, despatch label printing program would monitor a database queue table for new rows, bring up a report associated with the specified despatch note, print the report to the label printer then delete the row.
It seems so hackish but it worked incredibly well. Our clients were all food or paper manufacturers, running 24/7. Operations were rarely disrupted. Have a single screen per function to monitor for status changes was something operators were accustomed to.
This was over a decade ago, but I’ve never worked with a more productive team since. The constraints of the system let us focus on solving business problems. I can’t imagine writing anything of this scale in a modern environment. I’d love to see 4GLs like this make a comeback. The first class GUI, ORM, report generation were a huge productivity boost. And the simple programming language (with a very simple object model) put the focus on problem solving and not API acrobatics.
Simpler times.
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#29The music for our call waiting at my first job, was an old Windows machine blasting music in our server room with a phone on speaker... You ever wonder why music on clal waiting sounds so fuzzy?
Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
#30I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
Dictionary Attack 1.0