Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#171

Post by odammit » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

hhmc wrote: post #168

etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

So what was the fix? Boosting the height?

Longer poles. It started out on I think 18”. Pretty much enough to clear the edge of the roof of the main building. We ended up putting it on a ten foot three pole stand.

That blew off during a hurricane the same year :)

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#172

Post by cs702 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

A long time ago (early 1990's, IIRC), I came across a Novell Netware LAN in which none of the Mac OS clients could print to a then-very-costly laser printer shared on the network if a particular a Windows 3.0 client elsewhere the LAN was powered off.

It turns out that when the costly printer was purchased, there wasn't a Mac OS driver available for it, so the people who installed the LAN created their own homemade print queue management system, relying on a batch file running permanently in that one Windows client. The batch file would take .eps files, saved on a shared folder by the Mac clients, and send them to the network printer using Windows printer drivers. Whenever that Windows client freezed, was reset, or was powered off, printing to that one printer would stop working for all the Macs at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#173

Post by odammit » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #159

etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

Sounds like a point-to-point directional wifi radio. They're far from a hack and have been used to great success upwards of 2miles away from each other with 1Gbps throughput, even for small ISPs.

Yeah I can’t remember what it was. Someone said laser link above, I feel like it was microwave - I do remember being concerned we’d cook birds.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#174

Post by ashleyn » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:00 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #29

The 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?

Reminds me how the Russian Buzzer UVB-76 works. Hams listening to the station determined it was literally just a microphone in front of some tone generator, because occasionally you'd hear conversations between soldiers in the background.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#175

Post by ashleyn » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #94

A function called dig(key) that iterated over a map to find the value. It even had a comment above it that complained about the slowness of the function, and that C version was available to improve the performance. Facepalm.

Couldn't they just....use the map as a map? They probably didn't know how to use it.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#176

Post by theyinwhy » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

Years ago, I was playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a lot. As the game was quite hard, I died often and every death resulted in huge loading times. After hours of game play I found out that every load was showing the exact same animation and took about the same time to load. I browsed the game folder and found a video file with the exact same animation. Replaced it with a 1 second video file and guess what, it worked. Never felt more like a hacker again.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#177

Post by twic » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #2

Finance needed to do end-of-year stuff a couple of days past end-of-year. The system couldn't handle this, bad things would happen and data would change once end-of-year passes. Solution? A bash script that does: while true: set date to 4pm end-of-year sleep 1

Great minds think alike: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6139477/116639

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#178

Post by errantspark » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

Aahahaha, I work for a company that does P2P internet links over RF. When I got to > "all of them would disconnect at the same time - every day." semi truck was my first thought!

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#179

Post by Cerium » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

After more than a year at a small company the lead developer decided to take some vacation. He revealed to me that at one point an important customer requested a daily summary feature for their account. I was horrified to find out that since there were some tricky bits he didn't actually implement the feature. Instead he signed on every night right at 9pm and hyped up the summary. I refused to take over and helped implement the actual automatic summary feature.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#180

Post by scandox » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

I installed 65 cash registers all over Ireland. Each one had only an RS232 serial port. I had to read and aggregate their daily reads between 5am and 10am (only time these outlets were not running).

It was not possible to read this particular cash register when it was in operation mode OR if it was in OFF mode. Also we did not have access to GSM sims and there was no WIFI at stores.

SO:

We installed 56K modems and plugged them into the regular PSTN lines.

BUT:

That would interfere with customers calling to order out.

SO:

We plugged them into analog plug timers and only had the modems switch on between 5AM and 10Am.

AND:

The store owners kept switching Off the tills. So we had to disable the off position for all the tills.

The backend was a VB6 app running a 56K modem that read each till in turn and then processed all the results.

Ran for 11 years with not much bother.