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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?

#271
post #84

In a consumer app, I would say Snapchat's early camera hack on Android takes the cake. To be brief, their app ran the Android native camera app in the background and took a screenshot of the resulting feed for the image, bypassing actual integration with Android's camera apps. Having worked on an Android smartphone from the ground up, I can understand their reluctance to commit dev time to having to support so many A…

Aren't they still doing that? At least I have the impression.

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

#272

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,…

I try to do that as much as I can with every game I can get away with it on. Nothing worse than 2 minutes of animated logos every time you start the game, so sometimes you can delete them and sometimes you can replace them with shorter clips and really speed up the game's load time.

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

#273
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

The story keeps getting better.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)

I use AHK to remap CapsLock to double-click to reduce the strain on my mouse hand, but I can access the original CapsLock function via shift-CapsLock. Try it -- maybe that will help you.

That's a fantastic idea! Unfortunately, I use JetBrains IDEs, so I have lots of ctrl-shift keychords I couldn't live without.

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

#275

Just recently I had to put together a web-based UI for editing vector graphics (clothing tags) and export them to pdf for printing. In order to avoid writing and maintaining two separate codebases, I re-used the client side code as my rendering code. So I ended up with a server serving the editor frontend, as well as api endpoints that would use puppeteer and headless chrome to make a request (to itself) to load the…

Ha. My team implemented something very similar. We were writing a browser-based animation editor, and we needed to render a 'film strip' of frames. But we were targeting tablets, and loading a new canvas filled with heavyweight vector assets for each frame took forever. Since the animations were auto-saved to the server, it proved quicker just to spin up the app in a headless browser on the server, render all the frames, and have the client download them!

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

#276
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 have heard a similar story that existed in my company before it joined. It was a system that raised and dispatched jobs to engineers, and unless the space bar was held down on the master terminal, it stopped sending jobs out.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

there's also the memory-optimization variant of this, from the land of game dev. see "the programming anti-hero": https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132500/dirty_coding_t...

most of the other game dev dirty trick on gamasutra are good value -- the "(s)elf-exploitation" one from Jonathan Garrett, Insomniac Games is particularly awfully clever:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/194772/dirty_game_dev...

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

#278
post #172

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 pr…

That’s how most RIPs work.

The batch file was running on a Windows client -- i.e., on someone else's desktop machine, and the user of that machine was apparently unaware.

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

#279

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,…

Heh, nice. Reminds me of 13 y/o me and hacking a copy of a shareware CGA strip poker on a 5.25" floppy disk. What'd I do? The revealing images of the digital strippers were numbered 0.bmp up to 5.bmp. This was in DOS before we had windows. I renamed the files so their numbers were backwards 5 to 0 4 to 1 and so on. Instant reverse-strip poker and a viscerally satisfied teen :)

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

#280
We were located on Brazil, moving some applications to RHEL servers located on EUA. My junior-sysadmin, logged as root, accidentally removed some /lib libraries ( don´t remember which exactly ) and we would be locked out of the servers if we closed the ssh shell already opened. No scp, no ftp, no kind of file transfer was possible ( due the lack of the libraries on the destination server ). and we would have to call the admins on the remote site to clean the mess, but i decided to try something: I base64-hexdump'ed the proper binaries on a local server ( same distro ) and copy/paste via the terminal to the remote server. Luckly i had busybox compiled statically on the remote server, so the base64 tooling was available... and then we had our server accepting connections again, and the other admins never knew it ever happened.
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