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

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

#261

Post by lgl »

jakevoytko wrote: post #218
kieckerjan wrote: post #102

In the midnineties I was hired to improve the performance (and eventually rewrite) a custom in-house search engine. I dipped into the software and there were some quick wins, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to reply quicker than 100 ms. In desperation I just grepped for the number 100 and sure enough I found a 100 ms sleep in the routines handling the connections. Turned out the author had made a mess of his socket…

I once found a "sleep(1000);" in the middle of some hairy critical code -- something existentially important like payment processing. There was no obvious reason for it, it had been added without explanation, and the author was long gone from the company. I didn't have the guts to remove it.

Having an important endpoint delay every response by 1 second (assuming the 1000 are ms) is a relatively common and easy way to delay brute force attacks. E-mail servers call this tarpitting.

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

#262

Post by krylon »

jhanschoo wrote: post #260
krylon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An SAP consultant once told me that his preferred technique of averting long-winded and pointless discussions about irrelevant details was to insert random delays into his code. That way, instead of discussing irrelevant details, people would get upset about the performance. He would then sigh, dramatically, and say he would see what he could do, remove a few lines, spend the rest of the day reading the news, and - i…

I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, is it one of the BOFH stories?

I am too lazy to check right now. ;-)

Honestly, this story was told to me by an SAP consultant. I do not think he was an avid reader of BOFH. I might be wrong though.

Either way, I think this approach to avoiding bikeshedding has been invented independently numerous times. ;-)

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

#263

Post by codfrantic »

jhanschoo wrote: post #260
krylon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An SAP consultant once told me that his preferred technique of averting long-winded and pointless discussions about irrelevant details was to insert random delays into his code. That way, instead of discussing irrelevant details, people would get upset about the performance. He would then sigh, dramatically, and say he would see what he could do, remove a few lines, spend the rest of the day reading the news, and - i…

I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, is it one of the BOFH stories?

close:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

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

#264

Post by test7348 »

theyinwhy wrote: post #229
koonsolo wrote: post #194

CTO had to make a deadline for the next morning, so he decided to override the safety system of an Autonomous Guided Vehicle of a few tons. Just bridged over it electrically. Not only this, but he failed to inform the onsite crew that was going to put it in production. AGV went somewhere it wasn't supposed to go, first employee pushed the red safety stop. AGV kept on riding, and thank god there was another person at…

Now I am curios! What deadline needs you to override the safety system of an Autonomous Guided Vehicle?

I read this as "The CTO was late for a meeting, and needed to travel across campus really fast"

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

#265

Post by kayfox »

closeparen wrote: post #31

The lingua franca of theatrical lighting control is a physical-layer protocol designed for custom cabling called DMX. Light boards emit an array of 512 values in the range [0,255] and dimmers, or lighting instruments themselves, interpret these values as parameters like intensity. For various reasons it's useful to carry this signal over an IP network, and proprietary standards to do so have proliferated. Light board…

The Expression may be outdated, but LDs still cling to it.

This also reminded me of how when HES stopped supporting the DP2000 in Hog, DP2000 owners just swapped it over to ArtNet mode.

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

#266

Post by vermaden »

I know an ISP at Poland that used/uses 169.254.0.0/16 for their whole clients network. This way anytime the client does not get an IP address from DHCP (for example because DHCP server is down) the client after little longer periond of time would get a working IP address anyway :)

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

#267

Post by shakestheclown »

odammit wrote: post #173
dijit wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Faster communication and cooked birds to eat, what's the downside?

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

#268

Post by jotux »

neverminder wrote: post #73
Spooky23 wrote: post #8

I 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…

I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.

I remapped my caps key to control on every machine I use. I find it much more ergonomic than the standard left-control location.

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

#269

Post by kup0 »

n8rb_ wrote: post #116

I used to support a warehouse management system (RedPrairie) that our company had customized per business rules. At some point, a bug was introduced which locked up a very important table and brought multiple warehouses to a stand-still. The decision makers weren't interested in fixing the bug, so after months of waking up at 2am to kill these locks, my coworker and I wrote a script which monitored for locks on this…

Wow that name brings back memories. Worked for a company years ago that moved to RedPrairie from an older system and was not happy about the "upgrade". This was around the same time they changed their interface for customer service to enter orders and customer information (to BlueMartini- same company that owns RP maybe?), which was also painful (old-IE-only, bug-ridden, etc)

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

#270

Post by roflchoppa »

Odenwaelder wrote: post #74
neverminder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.

I do this, too. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to remove the caps lock key. I never used it in my 20 years of PC usages and I don't get why it's still there. Back in my CounterStrike gaming days I would also remove the Windows key because it would crash the game when accidentally pressed.

dude that windows key always messed me up, esp because my computer was a load of crap, and it took hella days to minimize/maximize the window again, usually I had to reboot the machine.
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